Being a body 1
Let me just stretch my limbs
Part of what I am is a body—this body.
I’ve been paying more attention to my body lately, for a number of reasons. One is that Twin B’s body hasn’t been working well, and (among other things) we’ve been working on grounding exercises and meditations, all of which ask us to pay attention to the present moment and the things we can sense here and now. Much of this connects to touch, which I (with Aristotle)1 think is the most fundamental of our senses. It’s the least mediated by thought, the least abstract, the most connected to its object. Most humans (including me) are very visual, but vision is removed from its object. Touch is not. Touch is immediate, here. Embodied.
Related to the “here and now” theme, another thing that has brought my attention to my body is yoga. Since The Girls were born, I’ve been doing yoga as a way to be both active and calm, to make space for myself in what is sometimes overwhelming domestic or professional life. Lately this has become the space just to be for a bit, using and stretching my muscles, breathing. It feels good to exercise my physical powers. (Just writing about this makes me want to stretch!)
And—in the interests of thoroughness but hopefully avoiding TMI—I also enjoy sex, which is of course very dependent on embodiment. After spending a lot of my teenage and adult life insisting on being seen first and foremost for my brains and personality, trying to ward off harassment and objectification, I realized much later than I like to admit that (important caveat!) in the context of a relationship with a trusted partner, I actually enjoy having my body admired as a body.
The other thing that has me thinking about embodied existence is aging—both for myself, and listening to my parents and in-laws comment on their experiences with increasingly frail bodies. While I’m only in my forties, I’ve started to notice that my body doesn’t function in some of the ways it used to. Sitting on the floor for long stretches is uncomfortable. My knees are creaky (though that’s been true for a long time). I’ve gained weight without changing habits, a sign of gradually slowing metabolism. I tease The Girls that they ruined my belly, but I learned recently that it’s just a fact of life that where we carry our weight shifts as we get older, so while twins are not exactly a body shape improver, it’s less their fault than I’ve let on. (I’m not going to stop teasing them, though.)
Still, a friend’s observation on her birthday last year that she’s finally comfortable in her body resonated with me. I’m lucky that I’ve never felt uncomfortable in my body (well, aside from the twin pregnancy)2, but I don’t know that I’ve ever really been comfortable either. I am now, though.
And so I say: Part of what I am is this body.
This is a bit of a transgressive way to think. For one thing, it’s easy for currently able-bodied folk to forget that we’re bodies, for a number of reasons. One is that when our bodies are functioning properly, we don’t notice them. They just do what we want, in the ways we’re used to. But people with physical disabilities are likely to be much more aware of their bodies in a world that isn’t made for them.
Another is that there’s a long, heavy tradition in Western thought of considering the mind to be what’s really important, what’s really you. At least as far back as Plato, bodies have been depicted as messy, imperfect drags on the would-be enlightened mind. After all, they require maintenance in the form of food, sleep, exercise, and so on that distract us from our “true” purpose, which is, of course, philosophy.
I’m poking fun of Plato a bit (though he really did think that philosophy was the ultimate human endeavor), but ideas like his have shaped the way Westerners tend to think about the (false) mind-body dichotomy. It’s a pretty common intuition that you’d still be you if your consciousness were transplanted to another body or uploaded to a computer. There’s also the notion of a soul, your essence, which is detachable from your body, and therefore who you “really” are. There’s also the animality of bodies, which we’re constantly trying to ditch.
Partly due to Plato, Christianity made bodies into base things, often a source of sin. (Consider how many of the “seven deadly sins”—gluttony, pride, lust, greed, sloth, wrath, and envy—are entangled with our physical existence.) We thus have a cultural tradition of denigrating bodies in favor of elevating the mental and spiritual.3
We also say that beauty is only skin deep (there’s that tendency to emphasize the mind again), thereby downplaying the role our physical appearance plays in our understanding of ourselves. Despite this saying, we have (somewhat ironically) a cultural obsession with bodies. It’s a negative obsession, though: we’re surrounded by messages about what our bodies should look like and how they should function, most of which tell us we need to fix something, though there are pockets of people promoting body positivity and self-acceptance. But I think the more common and negative messaging does our bodies and our sense of ourselves a disservice.
My identity is bound up with my physical existence. I wouldn’t be the specific person I am if it weren’t for the particular body I have. I’ll venture that this is more true for all of us than we tend to think. Our physical existence mediates everything about our day-to-day experience, both inputs and outputs: the way we experience the world, and the way other people see and treat us.
Really, a body is the extension of the brain, the tool it uses to be in the world. The whole field of embodied cognition seeks to illuminate these connections and understand how they shape our experiences. (Lucretius makes some lovely arguments about this in a passage from On the Nature of Things.) We use our bodies to send messages about ourselves through dress and hairstyle, the way we carry ourselves, and so on. What we have most direct access to about another person is their appearance, which we read (correctly and incorrectly) without even knowing it. And why is it personal to comment on someone’s body unless they are that body? Not to mention touching—that’s a thing you can’t do to other people except under certain pretty circumscribed conditions, because touch is by its nature quite intimate. Bodies are thus both public and importantly private. And this is, I contend, because they are us.
Down with the traditional mind-body dichotomy, then! This is easier said than done, I know, because that dichotomy has been woven into Western thought for millennia. But at the very least we can give our bodies the TLC that’s their due.
Which is coming up a lot as I write this, though I didn’t plan it. I suppose it’s not surprising, since building small humans is a very physical thing to do. And this is one of many reasons women have long been associated more with bodies than minds.
This particularly makes me appreciate some of the things Hildegard von Bingen says about the relationship between body and soul. She’s much softer on bodies than tradition dictates, and even concedes at one point that although the body’s job is to serve the soul and do good works, it deserves a break once in a while and the soul can afford to treat the body to some physical pleasure (within reason, of course.)