Why the Body-Mind Connection Matters for the Path of Healing
People talk about the mind as if it were just ‘the brain’.
It’s not.
We know that it correlates with the brain in certain ways. They’re linked. But they’re not the same.
People also talk about the mind like they know what it is.
The truth is that we do not know what the mind is. We do not know how it is that it appears to us.
I mean, consider carefully the following question: what is a thought?
What is it made of? Where does it come from? Where does it disappear into?
Close your eyes now. Bring up a thought and ask yourself those questions.
Get anywhere?
We don’t know what thoughts are. We don’t know what mind is.
If you opened up your head, you would not find any thoughts. Yet, thoughts undeniably are.
It is a mystery that we do not like to acknowledge is a mystery. So we point to brain scans and such and pretend we know what’s going on.
I repeat: we do not know.
And in our haste to tell ourselves that we-know-exactly-what’s-going-on-here-move-along-please-nothing-to-see-here…we actually completely OVERLOOK the myriad ways in which our mind, on the one hand, deceives us, trips us up and hides thing from us in its efforts to play the innocent game of survival. And how, on the other hand, in playing its games, it’s desperately trying to show us so many secrets.
What we CAN know, however, is how the mind operates. How it flows. It’s rhythms and patterns. What it’s trying to achieve. It’s quirks and idiosyncrasies. These are accessible to us if we look closely (they are often very well-hidden at first).
The idea that the mind is limited to just ‘the brain’ is a hypothesis with no evidence to back it up.
Instead, consider that mind and body connected. No, not even that. They are one.
Your whole body is your mind. And your mind is your body.
Without the mind, you would not be conscious of your body. You would have no ability to conceive of a ‘me’ with a ‘body’. These concepts are all the stuff of thought.
And without a body, the mind would have no anchor or reference point. Nor would it have access to the powerful emotions and energies we feel in our bodies that press our body in various directions (e.g. the feeling of hunger plus the thought ‘lunch’ pushes the body in the direction of the fridge).
Plus, the mind would have nowhere to store the powerful mental impressions and imprints (memories, beliefs and so on) that we accumulate through life. These all live in the body and are explored through and with the body.
The mind is a portal to the body and the body is a portal to the mind.
And why should we care about this?
Well, what this means is that the path of healing is not a dry, technical dissection that aims to find the ‘broken’ cog in the system and to fix it.
You can’t divide yourself up into ‘mind’ and ‘body’ and their infinitesimal constituent parts as if they were a car with a weird rattle in the back that you can’t quite locate.
It’s not a screw you tighten or a part you replace. It’s not a cream you apply thoughtlessly or a mantra you chant mechanically. It doesn’t come from a manual you read, nor an expert you hire.
It’s a preternaturally kind, warm-eyed welcoming of your own body-mind into your experience. A luxurious attunement to its rhymes and rhythms. A sea-deep listening to its thousand native languages of symbol and energy and movement that, in their repetitive refrains, seek only to tell you over and over again where the family secrets are buried if only we would listen. So, listen!
Carve a light space in the density of time where the heart feels no pressure to be anything other than itself. In such a space, the only possibility is a slow relaxing and unraveling of the layers of spiky defense and dissociated distraction.
Hold these layers like they were the last children in the universe.
Caress your body-mind! Inside and outside.
When we grapple to ‘fix’ what we perceive as the disobedient malfunction of a problematic body-mind that is obstructing our conquering of life, we can make progress for a time but eventually get stuck in a loop of frustration and self-hatred.
This kind of language may seem cringe-worthy or terrifying to some people. That’s OK.
I encourage you to see for yourself what feels best when you apply it in practice: self-compassion and gentle warmth or an aggressive, utilitarian bending-into-shape to (pre)serve one’s own psychological self-image.
Body and mind are whole.
Treat them as such and they will divulge their secrets :).
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