EMBODIMENT

............................ by Stanley


.....Descartes said: ‘I think, therefore I am’, seeking to reach the certainty of existence from the fact that he could think; he could doubt everything except the fact that he could doubt.
.....Let’s take on the great philosopher and try another tack. Let’s look for a basic certainty in:
......‘I am embodied, therefore I am’.
.......I know my existence from the fact that I have a body. It is possible to imagine, to dream or hallucinate myself without a body; but, in fact, I never concretely experience myself as myself without my body. What I call ‘myself’ is very much my physical existence. This is not a super-individualistic idea. Quite the reverse. As a physical being I am in constant interaction with other things and people; and in special moments, as in love-making, I experience myself as two bodies, not just one.
..... But essentially,
.....To be is to be embodied.
.....OK, so what?
.....So a great deal. It sounds simple enough, but it undermines many of our presuppositions about life that are based on the idea that ‘I am not my body; I am a mind, a thinker, a soul, an unconscious, a spirit. With our religious inheritance, we have imagined ourselves as any number of things – but not as essentially embodied.
.....Just think for a moment what this does to our whole idea of knowledge. Much of what we know, we know sensately without analytical thinking. The body doesn’t just know how to run the body-machine. Embodied knowledge means more than how to pump blood, make bones and babies and manage a system of defense against viruses. It means that the body also, in its own way, helps us in many areas of knowledge, including psychology, situational psychology particularly. We understand sensately and implicitly how to navigate difficult family and social situations, how to play tennis and chess and how to ride a bicycle. It also explains why mums are among the best therapist. This is because their knowledge comes from direct physical engagement, rather than from clinical text books. The physical act of mothering puts them in touch in a unique way. And this empathic ability stays with them.
.....What is now being discovered in brain research is not at all surprising – it does not contradict what we are saying here at all. A new neurological discovery is that we have what are called ‘mirror neurons’ that enable us to directly, physically mimic and have the feelings that we watch other people having – this is at a basic neurological level.
Our embodied self knows a whole host of things we are used to crediting to something called ‘unconscious intuition’, without knowing where or what it is, or how to cultivate and take care of it.
.....But we’ve always known how to destroy it, how to ruin a person’s bodily knowledge. For instance: the golf stroke – just make the golfer bring to mind how he does it. As he is about to play his stroke ask him to describe exactly how he holds his left leg and right elbow. We know, too, how to ruin a person’s natural ability to learn – simply make them apply their mind to learning. Or how ruin a person’s organic memory – just insist that they memorise. All these efforts separate something called ‘the mind’ from the body. The mind, by itself, has no idea how to function holistically. The so-called ‘mind’ without the body is a helpless cripple, like many highly trained clinical psychologists.
.....One of the greatest discoveries of late 20th century psychotherapy is the felt-sense – the direct access to the body’s implicit knowledge, moving us through the next best step in any situation or context. How to use this felt-sense is what we learn in the technique called ‘focusing’.
.....It reminds me of what it really means to be ‘sensible’.
.....In most plays about the time of Oscar Wilde some upper class mother is bound to say to her wayward son. ‘Oh, Francis do try to be more sensible.’ She is, in fact, telling the boy to be more mindful, not more sensible. He is wayward precisely because he is already too sensible in the delights of gambling, drinking and loose women – mostly as a reaction against his excessively mindful parents. This young man’s kind of abandonment to the senses is what our Christian culture is utterly terrified of.
.....So unless we are lucky the body becomes suspect and we live without sense or sensibility, unable to trust the body’s grasp of what is important – and to trust its ability to carry us forward; instead, we imperiously rule it like some out of touch despot. We over articulate and drown out what the body is feeling. Like bad therapists, we seldom ask and never listen to what the body would want us to know.
.....Psychology’s job is to show us how to be good therapists to ourselves.