…it is a great sentence to add to your mental hygiene morning routine. The other day I was practicing it, when something strange happened: I felt a sudden impulse of hugging myself and, when I did so, I had a vision of my whole body as the 6*10 to the 13th power cells that compose it. I saw each of them, as in fact they are, as independent beings, and all of them were giving me the hug back. In my vision they were like blue, organic smileys.
I find interesting what sir Ken Robinson says about the way in which intellectual workers relate to their own body. It is true that most of us, severed from physical activity, are in a certain danger of thinking of our bodies as mere ‘brain carriers’.
I have forgotten of my own body more times than I would like to recognize, simply because there was ‘something more important’ I had to take care of. No wonder that then, one day, Herr Body has its say in the form of pain, its fool-proof way to get its message through.
And then, not used to pay attention to our bodies, we can start to feel fear. The brain, on its side, well versed in extrapolation, can start to figure out the gloomiest of futures, the darkest of -itis from a pang in the chest or a stupid wound in a thumb.
There is another factor involved, what I like to call ‘the machine fallacy’, a fruit of developed countries’ intense and quite obsessive way of facing matters. In short, it goes like that: because our bodies include mechanical parts (bone articulations are levers, for example), we tend to think of them as machines. A machine either fulfills its role silently or becomes clunky: a funny noise in the engine, a cartridge out of ink, etc…
But our body is not a machine, but an alive entity, composed (again) by 6*10 to the 13th power alive entities. By applying the machine paradigm to those alive creatures we are made of, the only possibility of expression we give them is through pain. Of course we don’t want pain, but we provoke it through our lack of balance.
How about using one’s body to express oneself? How about using it to enjoy? Even saying you ‘use’ your body is kind of a contamination from the machine-like stance, because in fact you ‘are’ (among other things) your body. I remember a funny way in which a Buddhist defined the body, as ‘the physical part of your mind’.
So love your body unconditionally, say hello to it every morning, give it things to make it happy (not to anesthetize it, which is very different); there is a lot it does for you every day.
(The machine fallacy presents another interesting branch: because a computer includes some of the features of a human brain, we tend to think our brain is a computer -when, again, we’re talking about an alive entity here; and we don’t exactly know what life is, btw. But that’s a different story…).
"...and we love you too, buddy!"
