Forgotten bodies in a headspace world
“Now that we frame our experiences through the lens of external presentation, it’s much harder to figure out what we actually want as opposed to how we’d like to appear … This puts us at risk of potentially fragmenting our identities. We lose sight of what we actually feel and instead start to view ourselves from an outside perspective.”
And now, in its own way, we can see how technological society ignores the wisdom of the body. In modern life the body becomes a machine for living, the subject of managed care, of steroids and plastic surgery. Our flesh is mortified in new forms as we sit in traffic jams, work in cramped cubicles and at school desks under artificial light, and dist
... See moreJack Kornfield • The Wise Heart: A Guide to the Universal Teachings of Buddhist Psychology
Most of modern life is designed to get you out of your deepest self and into your head, where you are more vulnerable to anxiety (the grease between the wheels of technocratic capitalism).
Catherine Shannon • On cultivating intuition
is so ingrained in the Story that we accept it as a given of human nature: thinking and feeling are separate. We come to believe that our thinking will be clearer if we disconnect from all the noise of the body’s sensations. This belief is instilled in us systematically in childhood. Of all the lessons we learn in the public school system, the prim
... See morePhilip Shepherd • Radical Wholeness: The Embodied Present and the Ordinary Grace of Being
She is, it turns out, thinking about the body. How we inhabit the architecture of the bodies we are given. How our bodies can be powerful and how they can be encumbrances. How they can feel inextricably linked to our identities yet how they can also misrepresent and betray us.
Christine Montross • Falling Into the Fire: A Psychiatrist's Encounters with the Mind in Crisis
Just as there's been a fear of the body and embodiment—something about being whatever else I am, if I'm a body, I'm subject to all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, I am vulnerable, I am going to die.