# 278: Bodyless
Story behind the Passage
No, this post is not about some overused diet, as you might guess now based on the title. Body and mind form a spiritual union but you might not believe in that anymore based on today’s world. Actually, even now that people are rediscovering cooking and healthy food again in/after the pandemic, to me, there is still a split between body and mind as I watch people talk about all this. It becomes a “science” again, meaning that supposedly smart people, who very often tend to be quite well off, talk about food as if they were all writing a Ph.D. about it.
But food is not even my topic today. I want to talk about the body and how much of a difference it makes if we really feel it. The weird thing is, you cannot simply say that spirituality and consciousness go along with complete body awareness. It is not like this, at least not in every phase. There are points when you seem to lose your body completely but not in the unconscious sense that most people do in daily life. What I mean is that many do not pay attention to their bodies because it bothers them or it has certain needs that they feel they cannot satisfy whenever the body calls for it. In other words, as we grow up and get “socialized,” as I would call it, we learn to suppress our bodily needs. In other words:
We literally lose touch with our body.
All this came up during a conversation today which was about a really intense experience someone described. And I could easily understand what he was talking about. Still, especially in the West, we do not do much with the body anymore in a natural way. Yes, we ‘know’ much about it now but then caring about the body takes the absurd and hyper-professional traces, e.g., people going to the gym every day and lifting weights like crazy or using body care products for hundreds of dollars. I am not saying that I have not done all this in the past to satisfy my ego. But the point is, if you look to the wisdom of the Ancients in any religion and any denomination, you will immediately see how central the body is to any kind of spiritual growth and, even more so, there is no clear-cut “logic” between body and mind.
The two need each other.
My Learnings
“This form of consciousness would include experience of the body in spontaneity and total exertion, such as in play (in pure games, sports, drama, or musical performance) and especially in dance.” I had totally forgotten about this book but it has pencil marks all over. So, I must have read it for my M.A. thesis on dance as well. In any case, back then, I definitely had no idea about the deeper meaning. Or maybe I did -–I do not recall. What I definitely know is that back then, my own body consciousness was not in a good state. Or rather, it was recovering again after I had lost sight of it altogether for a while.
What struck me a lot when reading this particular sentence and the ones that follow in this and the next paragraph is the aspect of being “with your body” while being somewhere else with your thoughts. In other words, you are not thinking of your body while at the same time being fully aware of it. That is because you are actively using your body — be it for sports or sex or any of the other activities mentioned. As with any activity that might sound really common, the impact this has on your health, well-being, and feeling of wholeness does not necessarily depend on the activity itself. It depends on your level of consciousness which in turn fully relies on your ability to let go.
Does that sound complicated?
It is not, actually, and I am not saying that it works every day the same way. After all, we live in a world where it is rather hard to fully escape into your own world of body and mind union — of awareness and consciousness. But I do wonder — maybe this is just naïve wishful thinking — if Covid has made people retreat a bit more into their own homes and into their own body- awareness. Even just the simple fact that sports clubs were closed for so long and dance events were not happening meant that people were forced to pursue physical practices by themselves, i.e., in their homes and without social crowds and public visibility.
Doing things by yourself usually heightens your level of awareness because you are not tempted to shift your attention away from yourself.
This raises the question of what “self” is and that is one that I do not want to go into now. What remains crucial is the ability to disassociate yourself from your body — become bodyless in a way — while at the same time being highly conscious of everything, including your body and its connection to the rest of you. No doubt, this is something that office-working Europeans and Americans will also have to re-learn in a way — if they decide so. While I am saying this, this might raise familiar accusations of essentialism on my part. Am I saying that “Indigenous” peoples do not have these problems? But you know what, it is a fact that in other cultures, this question of body-mind unity is far less of an issue than here. Of course, this, as anything in life, is only an “issue” because I turn it into one by shifting my attention to it — with my brain, not with my body.
And you know what?
Why not?
There are more useless things one could write about…!
Reflection Questions
1) How would you assess your level of body awareness?
2) Was there ever a situation in your life when you felt you were living too much in your head and too little in your body? How did you change this?
3) Which of the given methods of connecting with your body do you prefer? Why?