Body Integrity

We are never more connected to the world than when our bodies are at the center of the experience. Just a good morning stretch, stooping to water the garden plants, or a more dramatic jump into a cool lake to open the senses, these awaken the mind to our surroundings as much as to our flesh and bone. The feats of a ballet dancer or gymnast, the athleticism of a rock drummer or baseball shortstop, the balance of a yoga practitioner or surfer, the dexterity of a seamstress or painter, the precision of a renaissance sculptor, an archer or a golfer--these are all examples of life being lived close to its aesthetic and earthly roots. A slow, struggling walk into the park for a person with low-mobility takes them into an intimate relationship with the world whose difference with the previous examples is only quantitative. 

Photo by Larry Johnson, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)

One of my most memorable yoga lessons was a thirty-minute practice on standing. Simply standing upright. I had not imagined before the number of considerations one could have about positioning the body in the act of standing well. There is the placement of the feet, set at shoulder width provides the best balance, and adjusted so that the body’s weight is evenly born from heel to toes. Then the leg muscles, from the calves to the thighs, with straightened knees, knowing that they are equally stressed and equally relaxed, reaching downward, connected through the feet to the earth. The hips, left and right balanced, not one or the other drifting down or outward. Attention to the critically important spine might have taken half the time alone to explore fully--how it can position the torso above the hips for a relaxed stance, releasing tension through an erect and not slouched arrangement, allowing the arms to hang freely and, like a tightrope walker’s pole, keeping one centered in space. At the top of the spine, the neck is a precarious extension, requiring special attention to relax yet ensure its direct alignment with the feet down below. And then the gaze, directed forward, into the world, full of visual and bodily awareness.

This sort of attention is possible only with practice. Unfortunately, it doesn’t come naturally. It is an art that requires significant effort, and I confess that due to inconsistent practice I have never been completely satisfied with my level of success. But the trying is half the reward—discovering new relationships between body and mind and world, which, in the end, are maybe not as separate as we might think and act.

Photo by Matt Madd, Creative Commons, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

In modern times, which arguably already began as the medieval world entered the Renaissance and then blossomed in the 18th century enlightenment with a predominant dualism, or mind-body separation, the body became increasingly marginalized, and this has deeply affected how we speak of, and therefore conceive of, ourselves. There is an even longer history of denouncing the body as impure and imperfect compared to the mind. Since classical Western philosophy, the body has been accused of being a distorting lens through which we are forced to view the true world with a chronic astigmatism, forever distanced from truth unless we subject ourselves to reason. Even many contemporary arguments about the importance of caring for the body are about its benefits for a well-functioning mind, not for the the body itself. When the body is considered “the temple of the soul,” as it is in Corinthians 6:19, it is being seen as a separate object, a temporary and corruptible container for a thing, the holy spirit, which does not belong to us, but to God.

Even those who see the mind as emerging from the body are prone to give it a special seat--the brain. Today, when we talk about the origin of emotions, decision making and learning, in commercial arenas like marketing as well as in psychology and teaching, we often focus on how the “brain” works, as if we would do well to vivisect these organs to analyze and manipulate their parts to achieve our goals. Scientists use electrodes and chemistry to affect or simulate feelings that would emerge more holistically from engagement with the world. But while chocolate is now known to stimulate the production of endorphins and create a mental state that might feel like love, it is not the same experience as being in love. The recent progress in the neurosciences to understand brain function and how it maps our bodies only fuels this marginalization of the rest of the body, the broader mind, and experience, which is only narrowly impersonated by the organ that resides in our head.

This continued separation of mind and body is belied by our renewed attention to health and physical well being. Art and aesthetics, as a branch of philosophy, have been particularly guilty of diverting attention away from our bodies. The irony of this is not lost on Shusterman (2000), who points out that while human bodies are a perennial subject matter of the visual arts, particularly nude bodies, we ignore the body as a source of aesthetic experience. While the body is central to art--its beauty and sensuality as sources of desire, or its limitations and fragility as sources of suffering--it is only rarely considered an aesthetic medium. Dance is an obvious exception, but most people experience dance as participatory entertainment, and not fine Art, closer to sport maybe. In fact, Art and sport are seen as in competition for our attention, as well as for funding.

Shusterman sees this new attention to the body as a reaction to the explosion of immersive technological media that threaten to leave us overstimulated, yet resting lazily on the couches of the world, wherever we find them--in train cars, park benches, office chairs, or our living rooms--where we can more readily focus on information screens. Despite the temptation to sit still and absorb what media have to offer, many instead feel the need to move, to enjoy the cascading benefits of a body in action.

It was good to see the physicality of the virtual world envisioned in the recent film, Ready Player One, where Oasis players run on multi-directional treadmills and thrust their arms wearing haptic gloves or full body suits in the real world, while their avatars run, swoop, glide, and fight in the virtual one. There is no denying that technology is continuing to combine with our bodies to change our experience. It always has been this way. As Marshall McLuhan pointed out, all media are extensions of us. But this is not in conflict with the point of this article. No one is born with skis or a bicycle beneath them, yet these become key to certain experiences.

Photo by Samuel Yoo, Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Despite living and working in a technology-dominated world, people now more readily take to bicycles for their commutes or evening exercise, and walking/running/hiking paths are often filled, as are gyms and yoga studios. In China, crowds of people gather outdoors in parks for their daily group exercise or dance activities, and the martial arts, both traditional and especially the newer mixed formats, continue to grow. People, in general, are paying closer attention to the health of their bodies and the resulting benefits to their lives. Abundant research shows that exercise has a positive effect on brain structure, on memory and other cognitive capabilities, and on mood and emotional well being. And the benefits of exercise are not just physical and mental, but metaphysical as well. Exercise contributes to an ability to engage with the world in deeper, more satisfying ways, as well as to affect more change as physical capabilities are improved. It helps us to get more things done. Exercise provides rewards in the form of improved appearance too, and this can be an initial driver. But here we are focused on exercise as a way to improve experience, even though appearance influences experience as well in our society.

People often speak of staying connected or re-connecting to their bodies (dualism raising its head) if they lead lives that keep them sedentary and constrained for long periods, cooped up in offices and meeting rooms, or in planes, behind counters, in store rooms and restaurants. Even those who get a lot of physical activity in their work may feel constrained due to its limited and repetitive nature. Perhaps those working jobs that include heavy manual labor, such as construction and farming, do not feel as large a drive to fulfill a missing aspect of their lives. Alternatively, they might be even more aware of the rewards of an active life. In my experience, those who exercise a lot on the job still seek outside exercise, maybe to balance their work-time exercise with other forms. Suffering workaday constraints, people seek outlets in hundreds of potential varieties. Some are considered extreme, like body building or marathon running, but many are appreciated by almost anyone, such as biking, jogging, or their health club surrogates. Sports like tennis, volleyball and football add a social dimension. While all these have an “inner game”, a recognition that mindset and mental focus affects performance, what is interesting is that many practices, particularly those that come from oriental cultures, have an explicitly mental or spiritual component along with a physical one. Yoga and Tai Chi are prominent examples in which meditation plays a key role.

Even more interesting for this discussion are practices that are primarily mental, yet grant physical rewards at the same time--the mirror of those listed above. Transcendental meditation (TM) is a good example. In TM, one calms an overactive mind by mentally repeating a multi-syllable mantra to take the place of ever-present thoughts about work and chores—leading to a relaxed state similar to the boundary between wakefulness and sleeping, a dreamy or, even better, empty, but semi-conscious state, resulting in deep physical and mental recuperation. Research shows (Rosenthal, 2016) that TM effects both alpha wave production in the brain and general EEG coherence, but also the secretion of prolactin and altered galvanic skin response in the broader body. All these work together to increase calmness and attention, leading to potentially increased effectiveness in many aspects of life.

Photo by wham! bam!, Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Body integrity means more than a well functioning body. It means having a mind well connected to the world through one’s body. Thinking and speaking of mind-body separation is merely a way to rationalize what seem like shortcomings of the body and the appearance of having a consciousness that can be separate from the world—one that dreams and comes up with new ideas, for example. There is a tradition, however, that has developed throughout 20th century philosophy and cognitive science of the embodied mind—one that places the mind and cognition as spread throughout the body and out into the world as well.

We have always used physical metaphors to describe both logical and emotion states—e.g. idioms like under control, falling behind, beside ourselves, warm relations, burning love—showing our reliance on the body in forming and understanding complex concepts. (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999) Emotions have been shown to have both physiological effects and origins (Damasio, 1999). We currently speak of learning organizations, distributed cognition, and activity systems to describe how worlds of people work and learn together. We speak of situated cognition to describe how people think in ways uniquely suited to their environment. Phenomenological philosophers, who study the nature of consciousness and experience, suggest that we should give up thinking about what an isolated, undomesticated mind might be like, insisting instead that we are born already in the world—in a family or even a village of people, with our bodies, and with our human minds and senses. We can never know what it is like not to be us, in the places we find ourselves.

Yet we constantly forget what it is like to be us, whether due to technology immersion, job constraints, or personal choices that ignore our nature. Through their work, artists help us to remember, to reposition us inside our bodies and inside our worlds, sometimes by asking us to step to one side to view it anew, and other times by rubbing our faces in it. We can also have integrity and do this work ourselves.

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Damasio, A. (1999) The feeling of what happens: Body and emotion in the making of consciousness. Harcourt Brace & Company: New York.

Lakoff, G., Johnson, M. (1999) Philosophy in the flesh: The embodied mind and its challenge to western thought. Basic Books: New York.

Rosenthal, N. (2016) Supermind: How to boost performance and live a richer and happier life through transcendental meditation. Tarcher Perigree: New York.

Shusterman, R. (2000) Performing live: Aesthetic alternatives for the ends of art. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.