Why the term BodyMind?
I don’t have a separate body and mind, there are no parts. It is one system that takes care of my safety and has several functions. Just as well! When I burn myself on the stove my brain as an organ really does not participate in the retreating motion of my hand. That works completely automatically without the long way back and forth to my brain. And around me stomach and heart area are completely autonomous nerve systems that function without interference from my brain.
As a collaborative whole. Without barriers, without limitations, without learned preferences. Which allows me to authentically realign my actions with the situation I am in every moment. Without my past (or the future dreamed up from there) affecting that authenticity.
Nor is it about the balance between my thinking and feeling, the balance between body and mind, between heart and logic. It’s about activating the whole as one.
“To many people, the idea that ‘the body’ has its own history, might sound faintly ridiculous. The body and its experiences are usually seen as something that we share with people from the past. Like “human nature,” it represents the unchanging in a changing world. Bodies just are…
But the body does have a history. The way that it moves feels breathes, and engages with the world has been viewed very differently across times and cultures. For centuries, ‘we’ were believed to be composed of souls that were part of the body and inseparable from it. Now we exist in our heads, and our bodies have become the vessels for that uncertain and elusive thing we call our ‘true selves. “
Fay Bound Alberti
