It all began with Descartes, they say. The dude had every right to think what he wanted to, but oh, did things go wrong because what he thought became so popular. In the Western world, and then in the rest of the world that was colonized by it and/or influenced by it in other ways, how he viewed the world (specifically, mind-Body dualism) has been greatly limiting human well-being… in my opinion.
If the dark events from the past month have taught me anything, it’s that the body is the mind.
Often, the body speaks louder than the mind. What the mind can ignore, the body refuses to. But in the end, the body can heal through the mind, and the mind can heal through the body as well. They are connected. I have known this for a few years, vaguely. But the past month gave me an absolutely undeniable, clear first-hand experience.
Also around and before March, more and more, I encountered academic theories about the same conclusion: how the body is the mind. Emotions are the body. For example, trauma isn’t healed by making the decision to heal oneself, or by thinking oneself out of the traumatic memories, or some such thing. No, trauma is healed through body work.
These theories, because they’re academic, usually don’t say this, but I say: seems that thoughts are overrated.
Btw, when I say “mind,” I don’t necessarily mean “the thinking mind,” although oftentimes, that’s what people seem to think.
The definitions of mind, according to our beloved Google, which pulls the definitions from Oxford Languages, are:
the element of a person that enables them to be aware of the world and their experiences, to think, and to feel; the faculty of consciousness and thought.
a person’s intellect.
As in, “mind” can be something much broader than the intellect or thought. It is whatever “enables” a person “to be aware of the world and their experiences.” But maybe because of Mr. Descartes and his followers’ influence, the mainstream world defaults to the limited and limiting definition of mind as intellect/thought.
Anyway.
Dark things happened in March, and thinking about those events did absolutely nothing, because dark things happen and thinking about them, well, does absolutely nothing! It doesn’t change anything, doesn’t improve anything, doesn’t provide more “understanding.”
The best decision that my thinking faculties made, in March, was to let my body/mind (feeling mind) take the lead. Thus, what I did was exercising, meditating, and feeling.
Feeling is greatly underrated in the modern world, and that is unfortunate. It’s like this. People think feeling is bad or undesirable, compared to thinking, and thus they rely on devices that prevent them from paying attention to their feeling (a.k.a. the body). And then they sit there, smug in their logic and rationality, entirely clueless about what they don’t know—because you don’t know what you don’t know.
Clocks and other modern measurement devices have their advantages, sure. When you want to make an appointment with another human being, when you want to tell someone you’ve never met before how tall you are, or when you try to maintain a budget—numbers and thoughts and scientific measurements are very handy. But in the end, the human exists in the body, feeling things.
It is no wonder that more than a decade after “The Burnout Society” was written, mainstream culture obsesses so much about productivity hacks and hustle culture right at the same time as it moans about burnout, fatigue, and tiredness in general. People rely on a bunch of graphs on their productivity apps to see if they’ve lived a good life in the past week. How often do they stop and feel?
Thinking tactics have robbed us (well, robbed me, definitely) of the ability to pay attention to our body at the moment-to-moment level. My ability to perceive what is going on inside me, physically, psychologically, and spiritually, has been steadily decreasing in the past year. This coincides with the shift of focus toward the external world: increased Youtube use, distraction in general, reliance on alarm clocks and digital trackers, etc.
No wonder I couldn’t write fiction for so long. Fiction is written with the body. While I am writing, I am in the forest and do no thinking. Seriously. I type what comes. Only when I emerge do I leave some markers, in the form of jotted-down notes. Then it’s time to submerge again. Down underwater, it’s not thinking that does the writing, it’s feeling. And my feeling ability was steadily decreasing, so no wonder I couldn’t write fiction.
I have to relearn it, gradually. How? By nurturing of my body, which will, in a tangible way, bring my mind back to life—mind, in the broadest sense of the word. It’s all the usual stuff. Breathing, meditating, eating well, sleeping well, stretching, working out.
Also, it helps to surround oneself with people who know that emotional acknowledgment does not equate to agreement in opinions. (One can completely disagree and yet acknowledge the other party’s feelings.) Similarly, it helps to be around people who know that merely using a calm tone and neutral words won’t offset the utter lack of feeling behind such words. (A calm tone and neutral words probably work in academia… or when you’re talking to a robot without history, without people in its life, without any feeling of its own.)
Always, the truth isn’t complicated. It’s thinkers who make it seem more complicated, because apparently, they think they aren’t if they do not think. Only when they think, therefore they are. A million times, they can analyze and dissect what they said, what they should’ve said, what they shouldn’t have said. They can analyze what someone else said, what that someone should’ve said, what that someone shouldn’t have said. But the thinkers will never realize that the entire time, what was missing wasn’t lack of thought; it was lack of feeling—the utter lack of understanding for the broader implications of the seemingly calm and seemingly neutral words.
There is no such thing as “neutral” in the human world, once a word is uttered. Even in the calmest tones, you can tell from that very calm: this person is entirely clueless about reality; about people who actually make up not only the broader reality, but those who (one would think) form the thinker’s own specific, personal reality. In other words: how the thinker talks about people in the thinker’s life + how the thinker reacts to events happening to those people + how the thinker changes (or doesn’t change) speech patterns after said events—these things show the thinker’s level of awareness of the feelings involved in those elements. It seems that the more a person thinks, the more clueless they become about this reality. (Potentially, this happens because from excess thinking, one may come to the conclusion that human lives can be actually truly really dissected into neutral compartments.)
So, after March, I wholeheartedly disagree to the sentiment that one thinks and therefor one is. Being doesn’t require thinking. In fact, often it requires precisely the opposite.
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