Source: https://www.mindandlife.org/insight/embodiment/
Highlights
Rarely do we think of the body as something that knows things. Rarely do we ask the body for answers.
Does the body have answers? Does it have a subjectivity from which to speak? This narrative voice—the one unfolding in the language on the page right now—refers to the body as an “it.”
Again, personhood
Religion, too, has its versions of othering the body. In his famous essay “On Immortality,” William James argues that the soul is in, but not of, the body. The Buddhist Hevajra Tantra declares that great wisdom (mahājñāṇa) “lives in the body… but is not of it.” In many ways, across human history, the mind and body have stayed in their separate domains.
Mind, the knower of body, has the keys to intelligence and problem solving. Mind has the answers. To sequester the system for study has seemed sensible.
Neuroscience now recognizes that the brain and the body are so intimately intertwined that they cannot be thought of separately.
Cognitive science, which as recently as thirty years ago was a field intent on understanding cognition as a closed system, has begun—based on a broad swath of interdisciplinary research—to embrace the theory that cognition is embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive (the 4E cognition model1).
Geneticists recognize that many of the traits that we think of as “personality” are inherited from the bodies that provided our DNA.
We have created machines that make many of the bodily engagements we used to rely on to survive unnecessary.
A beloved Zen proverb says, “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.” One way to interpret this proverb is that enlightenment is not exotic. It does not get us off the hook. But there is also another interpretation: before enlightenment, move your body. After enlightenment, move your body.
body. Enlightenment is not a disembodied stasis away from quotidian activities.
The body’s involvement in our daily survival has become so minimal that our bodies suffer pervasively from a collective sedentariness that has come to impact our longevity, not to mention our physical and mental well-being.3
a cognition divorced from organic life.
The end result of this relationship with greater convenience and extended cognition is that we live in an age of disembodiment. We are a bit like James Joyce’s fictional character Mr. Duffy who lived “a short distance from his body.”
4 In simpler language, within psychology, disembodiment seems to be a generic word for experiences of losing track of somatic feeling, the body’s movements, or the relationship of one’s own body to other bodies.
What are practices and benefits of own body in relation to other bodies?
I notice the signs of disembodiment in myself as a sense of being “up in the head,” entangled in the trains of thinking that pass through the mind.
Thinking has a gravitational pull that draws us in. We not only believe almost everything we think, but we also react to our thoughts. This is not a reactivity to the outside world, but a reactivity to the picture show inside.
As a contemplative, I am drawn to define disembodiment as a way of being that filters out the signals received from the body in the present moment, in favor of attention focused on the discursive activities of cognition.
a state of disembodiment, rain might be pattering above on the roof while a bird sings outside our window. While our ears “hear” these sounds, our mind does not register the hearing or its significance; instead, the mind has been lost in thought, ruminating on a disagreement we had with a colleague at work, for example.
Disembodiment as a state of being “up in the head” has implications for how we perceive time.
When we lose track of the sense of being present, of being “here now,” we are simultaneously in a state in which body and mind become dis-integrated.
We realize that we lost track of the body, and that attention had wandered to the narrative time frame of mind. When we again feel present, body and mind then re-integrate. There is this distinct sense of again becoming embodied.
First, as our relationship to the felt body deteriorates and as we become less sensitive to the body’s signals, we are at risk to become more sedentary.
Body is here now, mind is a time traveler. Like running around our own virtually generated mind world all the time. Body can be right here fully and we can tune into the full beauty of this moment always available to us. Put the full power of the mind to what is really in front of us.
why meditate
sedentary
Recent studies on interoception (an innate capacity to sense the processes, feelings, and experiences of the interior body) have found a relationship between interoceptive awareness and emotional regulation. When interoceptive awareness is low, the ability to identify and regulate emotions is disrupted. Conversely, training in interoceptive awareness5 leads to an ability to identify emotional states when they arise, and then regulate the state.
The body has its own non-conceptual intelligence, so often overlooked or devalued in the face of the dominance of our conceptual engagement.
Disembodiment takes us away from our sense of interdependence with the planet as an organic whole, and its flora and fauna, our fellow winged, hoofed, pawed brethren. It takes us away from the truth of our animal nature.
As a theoretical exercise, we might begin by decentering the mind and reentering the body as a corrective, entertaining the possibility that the body, just like cognition, knows things and acts on what it knows.
Learning from alternate cultural models of embodiment might also shed light on and inspire new ways of framing our relationship to the body. Himalayan Buddhism provides a precedent for how we might theoretically reframe the body as a subject of reverence and dignity. The body, in tantric understanding, is often depicted as a mandala, a self-contained divine universe, with every substance (especially the ones to which we usually have aversion, such as blood, pus, feces) acting as consecrating nectars. The body, the Hevajra Tantra and later Buddhist commentators theorize, primordially expresses sacred rituals in its natural functions of gestation, digestion, and so forth.
But more important than theory is practice, because embodiment is not an idea. It is not a theory. It is a state of being. Embodiment is a malleable state of being in which you feel connected and attuned to your body and senses. It is a state of being that is meta-aware, which is to say attentive to the feeling body without deconstructing it. It is a state in which the mind listens to the body. Ultimately, it is a state of being in which the division between mind and body dissolves.
How can we improve and deepen embodiment? First, we must admit that while the mind knows things, it does not know everything. We then become curious: What does our body know that the mind does not? We can only discover what the body knows by an act of receptivity, by listening deeply.
I think of mindfulness ultimately as somatic attention, as a widening of awareness to the felt sense field. This widening of awareness is not a thinking process. It is an act of listening to the body. Listening to the body involves dropping our attention—even pouring our attention—down from the push and pull of the thinking mind into the field of feeling and perception that is happening right now. This is a profound redirection of attention, away from rumination and towards a relaxed but focused awareness.
For example, feeling your body’s weight on the earth can teach your mind that you are grounded. The mind does not necessarily believe that you are grounded. It might feel like you are swirling in a miasma of thought.
I have tried of late to be a close disciple of my body, to ask it what it wants and needs, to ask it to teach me. What has happened is this; it has shown me the way to awakening, at least the kind of awakening I need right now. It has shown me that meditation can be effortless.
When you come down into your body, you notice that feeling and sensation exist. You are breathing. You are sensing the air on your skin. You are seeing and smelling. All these sensations are happening in the present moment through the medium of your body.
Your body lives in the here and now. When the mind comes along for this ride, it discovers this truth: I can live in the here and now. If I do that, I will not miss my life.
You are intuitive. The body is like a radar that receives signals and encodes them. While the mind often lies to us, the body usually tells the truth. You are intuitive in the sense that your body knows how you truly feel about things, even when your mind is telling you a totally different story. The body is also intuitive about others, and can help us access deeper resources of empathy and compassion.
You are non-conceptual. We tend to believe that the most “real” part of the self is the thinker, the part of the self that is conceptual. We do not often notice that much of our experience is taking place in another realm: the realm where thoughts do not have the final say.
The body is not ruminating about the past. It is not worrying about the future. It is just feeling. It is open and expansive to its world. When you notice there is already a dimension of your life that is non-conceptual and therefore spacious, that can teach your mind how to let go of its own self-imposed boundaries.
We all exist on a continuum between being embodied and disembodied, and we can shift wherever we are.
embodiment is not only about living a happier and healthier life, but rather it is what calls me into relationship with what it really means to awaken, personally and collectively. It calls me into relationship with my deepest, most authentic awareness. It calls me into intimacy with the planet, with the earth under my feet, the plants and the animals. It calls me into community.