After each “lesson” in my Liberated Body online course I ask students to reflect on a few questions to help them process their experience.
Unintentionally, the answers have been inspiring material for my brain to nom and poop into blog posts.
For instance:
My question: What does having a “liberated body” mean to you?
Student answer: “Being able to move with ease and skill long term + feeling joy while defying societal expectations of body/movement acceptability”
Defying soceital expectation of body/movement acceptability.
Because I could not do this is exactly how things went wrong for me.
This soceital defiance in the name of our bodies is the embodied revolution we need (maybe that’s what I should call my workshop instead?? Don’t steal plz).
It got me thinking… Why do we need an embodied revolution? Have we been bullied? Coereced? Indoctrinated?
Have you been bullied?
I didn’t realize until recently how bullied I was, we all are, by societal expectations for how a body “should” be.
Have you been bullied into dismissing your body? Made to believe that how your body looks is more important than how it feels to inhabit? I have. Most women have. Men, too.
I have have been bullied by ballet teachers to care more about my appearance and the pretty shapes I can make my body do than for the relationship I have with it.
Have you been bullied into doing someone elses’ bidding at expense of the well being of your own body?
Most of us been reduced by society to think that the body is nothing but a piece of meat to manipulate. That the highest echelon of acheivement is to appear to fit in and toil away at the expense of ourselves being present as… Ourselves!
Well I got news. You. Are. Not. Steak.
The Meat-Body and the Feeling-Body
That we are reduced to a “meat-body” who has fogotten it can feel is at the root of so much suffering.
For me, the manifestation of my meat-body was an eating disorder. For others, addiction. For others, being sucked into a career path only to wake up one day to see how it’s not what they really wanted, but what their parents wanted for them.
Whatever your case may be, our CULTutral environment asks us to dismiss inhabiting a body that can feel.
At best, we are advised to exercise as a clever ruse to pretend we’re taking care of our bodies. But this advice is for the meat-body- Conform, fit in, look busy, but don’t feel.
Its no wonder its so tough to figure out for ourselves what is “best” for our bodies. And everybody’s got advice for the meat-body that sounds great.
Go for a run. Get an injection. Try these orthotics.
The only advice I feel is ethical to give is that nobody can know what’s best for your body but you, but as you are now, you’re probably asking the question to a piece of steak.
So, how do you know what’s best for your body?
Society knows best
For most of us, the pull of society’s standard is too strong and becomes “what’s best”. By this travesty, we gradually forget how to actually feel our bodies.
Not only are we steak, we are so well cooked we need to add globs of sugary BBQ sauce to make going there even palatable.
We need help from apps that tell us when to eat, when to sleep, when to move, if we’re breathing the right way.
We need all kinds of biofeedback technology just to tell us about how our body is feeling, because we can’t yet tell for ourselves.
If I’m being honest, I’m talking about myself here.
I’m still recovering my sense of true physical hunger. Most of the time I still have to intellectualize whether I should eat or not because I’ve lost the ability to hear a signal so fundamental for survival. Sometimes when I do feel real hunger it makes me feel nauseaus and I have to stop and tell myself I’m ok. I’m not perfect, I’ve got an over-cooked meat-body, too.
Why is it so easy to lose the ability to feel our bodies?
Because this need to fit in pervades all aspects of our weird societal structure.
And if we can stop feeling the subtle messages from our body, the ones that say, “Rest!” “Eat!”, “Don’t eat!”, and “Don’t trust that guy!”, we can ignore the uncomfortable sense that we’re going wrong.
If you could choose not to ever feel wrong again, wouldn’t you?
But in denying the feeling-body, all we can do is conform to an expectation that was never originally ours. If we could feel this bullying as it was happening, it would hurt! And who wants to feel hurt? Not me.
Better to pretend its not bullying at all. Better to stop feeling. Ignorance is bliss.
Hello meat-body.
And your meat-body is very good at getting shit done at your expense.
Your meat-body brings home the bacon
Most of us would rather not admit we willingly dismiss our bodies in order to focus harder on our work, make money, and survive. Especially right now, in COVID days.
Most careers rely on our minds to get shit done at the expense of our bodies.
The mind and the feeling-body can rarely coexist, not without deliberate training. It’s freakin’ hard. Just try it: Do some algebra or some other intellectual task, and pay attention to your breathing at the same time. Maybe you can do it… I can’t.
The benefit of using the mind from a meat-body state is that we can get sucked into it work-mode so intensely that it feels hella productive.
In fact, we feel pretty great! Great that is, until the feeling-body speaks up one day- Shit, you have a herniate disc and it hurts. How the heck did that happen? I didn’t feel it coming.
That’s because you’re steak. Steak doesn’t thave feelings.
Alas, even when the feeling-body starts to speak, we don’t want to hear it. We mean to do right by our body, but we instead we silence it with exercise to “fix”it so we can go back to being steak + mind.
But lack of exercise wasn’t the original problem for the meat-body. The source of the probelm was that we were not paying attention to our feeling-body.
Is the solution to not listening just to yell louder?
Tempting… But no.
Layering stretching and strengthening on top of a body that cannot feel is like shaking a crying baby. You get the result you wanted- silence, but then you have to deal with the devastating consequences.
Exercise is not the fix, because “doing” isn’t the solution for not being present.
Tenderizing an over-cooked steak doesn’t make it any less cooked. It just pummels it. But it feels productive to do something, doesn’t it?
Bringing feeling back to the meat-body
When we are stuck doing and attaining- exercise, career-focus, fitness goals, etc- instead of feeling, we are taken away from being in a body that can feel.
Feeling should be a natural state. Imagine a toddler just developing its senses. All feeling all the time.
But for most of us, feeling is something we have to train ourselves to do again. It becomes a “doing”, and we risk going wrong, yet again, by making “feeling” an output, instead of an input.
In my work with people, and in Liberated Body, this is where we begin: Using movement as input first, output second.
We were all born with the ability to feel our bodies, but somewhere along the way we were told there were more important things than our sensory experience.
We must remember the feeling-body. And only by this alchemical rememberance, overcooked steak can be transformed to its original, raw state.
Non-verbal communication requires a feeling body
So what’s the use of a feeling-body anyway if we can get more shit done by ignoring it?
Life has such sensory richness the meat-body cannot come close to knowing.
Do you know the depth to which the body can feel and communicate beyond the mind?
If you don’t know what I mean, you are probably steak.
What if just being was the ultimate attainment? So rich. Such a joy just to inhabit. What if that was enough?
This transformation from steak into a feeling body is the embodied revolution, and it’s better than chocolate cake (but try telling that to the mind).
Our pre-frontal cortex is great, but…
You are more than a steak with a PFC.
The rest of this blog post is locked for members of my Move With Monika online movement education platform…
If you’d like to read more, and Move With ME (Monika), you go here to join in the fun.
