What is it to live in mind-body?

Beyond words

Dear friend,

Today’s post is a letter. I've been wanting to talk with you for weeks but everything I wrote hasn’t worked. Too vague. Too pedantic. Too trite.

The problem I'm having is that I have something I want to say but for now, I can’t find the words. My thoughts are just a scent in the air. I catch them for a moment and then lose them. I can’t hold them long enough to share what I want to say.

I want to talk about what it is to experience a body–really experience it. Of course, framed this way, I can only share my experiences of my body. And I’ve worked with enough people to know that my experience is definitively not universal.

And yet, experiencing your body could be useful to you. Over and over I meet people who live outside their bodies or inside their heads. Their entire sensory, emotional, and energetic experience of life seems thin and uncomfortable.

For whatever quirk of fate, this is not my experience. I feel the world kinesthetically. Every sound, every color, every texture on my skin–I feel them acutely. Something as simple as walking through the grocery store gives me a symphony of somatic experiences. 

I see the foods but don’t just see them, I can taste them. I wander from department to department, noticing how different each section smells, and how the rumble of the cart’s wheels changes on floor tiles. I see the products lined on the shelves from a behind-my-eyes viewpoint. I sense the people around me, feeling their pain by watching their gait, feeling their exhaustion as they talk with their kids.

Senses, emotions, intuition–this is how I process the world. This is how life speaks to me. I have a rich landscape of bodily experiences and as I age, slow, and practice, my groundedness in my body only grows deeper.

My mind-body is an old friend.

But how do I share this? What words express a non-conceptual experience in a way that is helpful to you? 

I dream of painting huge paintings where I roll in the paint and invite you to roll with me. I imagine dancing to the pulse of drumming music, inviting you to beat your feet on the earth beside me, our sweat spraying on each other. I want to stand beside you on a hot summer day and invite you to marvel at how the hot sun warms your skin while the cool breeze chills it.

Maybe then, we would share a language.

Over the last month, I’ve tried numerous attempts to express my thoughts.

First I thought that if I could find a movement practice that has a regime and vocabulary for experiencing the body, I could use that language. For many people, they would turn to Modern Postural Yoga (MPY) for this. But for me MPY is too swamped with preconceived ideas and capitalistic biases to be useful.

So instead, I looked to Trul khor (also called yantra yoga) for answers. Trul khor is a centuries-old system of exercises which comes from the Indo-Tibetan traditions. Instead of static postures, Trul khor uses movements to balance the body's energies.

Trul khor is lovely (and I want to learn more) but the sources I found don’t touch on what I want to say about the mind-body. They’re too yang. Too vigorous. Too mechanical.

Next, I revisited some old teachings from Native and Shamanic practices. These practices capture the connection with the natural world that I feel, and they hold a lovely yin quality. The connection between the seen and the unseen world is cherished–but not described. They didn’t help me articulate what I wanted to say.

I threw a wider net. I spoke with a somatic coach who had a modern view of somatics as a way to create the life you want. I spoke with people in the trauma field who work with unraveling the neuro and cellular impact that trauma has on our bodies. Several times I debated the question of whether the “flow state” is an example of being fully embodied, or simply a non-conceptual state of distraction.

And I went inward. I contemplated the body as part of my Mahamudra practices and asked, “How ‘real’ is my body anyway?” And finally, I spent several weeks defining the bodies I live in (physical, subtle, and energetic). I tried to categorize my experiences until it became ridiculous to continue.

All of these attempts, all of these queries circle around the essential experience of living in a body but don’t get to it. It’s like describing the facets of a crystal from one angle and then turning the crystal to find a totally different stone. How do we understand an object when we can only see the negative space around it? Does living in a body defy everyday human understanding? Is it so innate that we can’t see it, like a fish trying to see water?

With all of these quests, searching for answers, I’ve ended back at myself.

My experience of living in a body, so grounded and so intangible, is all I have. It’s bound by the laws of earth, physics, and anatomy, and at the same time, it’s beyond, energetic, and subtle.

Both. Neither. All.

After weeks of writing about this, starting over and over but never getting closer, I had a “Northern Lights” example of the oneness of mind-body, a beautiful, techni-color, magical example—real but hard to believe it’s real.

A month ago, I received news that touched some deep, sensitive trigger points. I was in pain. My heart was tender; my emotions inflamed. For two weeks, I ruminated on old wounds, some dating back to my childhood, some as familiar as lifelong weekly visitors.

Then two weeks later, physical symptoms began. Fatigue, nightmares, two ocular migraines, an eye infection, and digestive issues.

Emotions manifested as physical. Physical manifested as energetic. 

There was no separation between mind and body. My emotional pain and physical discomfort were different forms of the same energy and that energy is what I experience as living in a body.

I still can’t capture what I want to share about living in a body and how to describe the magnificence and the pain. But I know the power of relaxing, allowing, and being in your body cannot be matched. It’s soothing to find oneness.

That “soothing oneness”—that’s the closest description I can find.