Body

might be a word that represents something more miraculous than even the mind that can contemplate the body’s miraculousness...

Photo: © David Whyte

The mind untethered from the body always tries to confuse the body in turn; tries to set it against itself: the abstracted mind, trying to protect itself, trying to compensate for its distance, asks simultaneously, for far too much and far too little from the body.

BODY

might be a word that represents something more miraculous than even the mind that can contemplate the body’s miraculousness. Perhaps the central and unchanging difficulty for human beings in remaining healthy, physically and psychologically, is that the mind cannot fully contemplate, appreciate or understand the body’s thousands of interlocking inter-dependent connected systems, and the way those hidden systems connect with the world: the way the body’s never ceasing, beating, pumping, circulating, breathing in and out busyness, all combined with its inner restful autonomic guidance needs no act of will or effort or management on our part to keep it going. The mind unanchored in the body is always trying to be something or somebody, the mind is always attempting to control the body: the body exists in its own form of freedom, always under the gravitational influence of something far beyond the mind’s understanding. 

The body when healthy, makes the busy mind uncomfortable in its astonishing rested complexity, asking for no immediate solution or help in its need to create another heartbeat or the next breath. The only part of the mind that can truly understand the body is the part of the mind that is, through silence and rest, able to be welcomed back fully into the body’s equally rested and gifted sense of presence, creating as its culmination, the deep undergirding consciousness, and the marriage of real physical presence with a good thinking mind, a coming together that has always been revered in our ancient traditions.