I’ve been wanting to write about this for some time now but I kept stopping myself because it feels more like a book than a blog post. I finally decided it’s better to at least start getting these ideas down somewhere so here we are.
We’ve been seeing and saying the words “body, mind, and spirit” for so long, and we’re starting to wake up to the fact that that is the start of the problem: this idea that those three things are somehow separate.
Most western religions believe in some level of duality, as does most of what passes for “spirituality” and “wellness” today.
People speak of their meat suits as if they are somehow separate from them.
They are not. We are not.
Whatever you believe about what happens after you exist on this material plane, you don’t actually know. (Belief is not knowing no matter how much we want it to be.)
So starting there, we can assume that the body is us. This is the experience we are having, regardless of what — if anything — comes next.
And if anything does come next, I will still assert body’s primacy. Firstly, if we are somehow “other spirit,” there is something important about embodiment or why is it bothered with? Secondly, whatever comes next could simply be seen as evolutionary in nature and not separate from what came before. Again, it will be body that gets us wherever we are going.
All of that said…
“Mind” is the word we often use when we’re talking about some sort of higher/wiser knowing that we can feel (FEEL) does not come simply from brain — brain being an organ like any other.
But we are deceived by this language. Mind and body are not just one as in intertwined but they are one as in the same thing.
Here’s how it works:
Body is constantly receiving information and input from the world beyond your skin but also, of course, from everything within that skin.
Body is the antenna, if you will.
But then body also decides what to do with that information/input and to whom it might be delegated internally.
So body is simultaneously the processor of all the data.
After that, of course, body does what body does — it takes action; it remembers; it represses; it stores, and on and on.
All of this is happening to you all of the time in the background and in the foreground, depending on your awareness and your capacity for noticing (which can be increased consciously).
Every time you think you have “intuited” something, you have actually just received informative conclusions that have come from all of this receiving and processing that you are not aware of you. You can’t be. You would go insane.
(This also explains the difficulties that people with sensory processing disorders are living. They ARE aware of TOO MUCH and/or too little.)
Every time you think the “universe has granted you an answer/idea/etc.,” you have actually simply received that from yourself.
For example, you suddenly get a big new creative idea. You think suddenly because you’ve not been aware of all that data collecting that body has been up to and the storage it has assigned to brain and the background “thinking” that has been going on until you took that shower and yelled “AH-HA!”
You did that. It’s no Great Mystery but it is mysteriously beautiful in that we don’t totally understand the power and capabilities and wonder that these bodies and the wider ecology they exist in really have.
Another example: You know someone is an asshole the first time you meet them and you think that’s because you’re “empathic.”
Nope. Your body just happens to be extra damn amazing at collecting data like micro expressions, tone, etc. that other bodies may be missing.
What does this all mean?
It means that the more you are in your body, the more you practice listening to your body in its fullness, that the more your sense of self will grow. Your sense of agency in your life will expand the more you clear the static from your antenna. Your emotional health will increase as you defrag your processing.
It means that your body is the key to everything and that any kind of denial of that fact will only increase difficulty, challenge, and pain.
And no matter where you are in your body’s journey, its capacity for this clearing and defraging (the best metaphors I could come up with right now…) is always there but we must stop trying to “transcend.” That will happen quite naturally and eventually for all of us.