The story of my life has been one of discovering my own body.  That is a silly or inane thing to even say from the perspective of my background; for, “what is more apparent than our body?” I would have asked back then. But my life experiences and clinical practice, not to mention explorations of the gamut of human sciences, has led me to realize the wisdom of the quip by Fritz Perls in the 1960’s, “Let go of your mind and come to your senses.”  Perls realized just our disconnected Western culture teaches us to be from our “senses” and the affective or “feeling” dimension of life.  Carl Jung had a relevant point, noting two kinds of thinking…a)directed thinking which is designed have us fit in with the social milieu we are born into; b) and imaginative thinking which allows us to find a bit of “free-play” with this necessary “directed thinking” so that we can avoid being an ideologue.

This “dis-embodied” thinking is very much related to the Western attitude that we are separate and distinct from mother nature, this wonderful earth, and see it as something to satisfy our ravenous appetites.  But disembodied thought is dangerous.  I’m reminded of a line from the poet W. B. Yeats, “O God, guard me from those thoughts men think in the mind alone.  He who sings a lasting song thinks in the marrow bone.”

Just this morning I ran across a relevant thought from D.H. Lawrence about this alienation from our earthly or earthy roots:

Oh what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was made a personal, merely personal feeling, taken away from the rising and setting of the sun, and cut off from the magic connection of the solstice and equinox.  This is what is the matter with us.  We are bleeding at the roots, because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars, and love is a grinning mockery because, poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the tree of Life, and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilized vase on the table.  D.H. Lawrence