into the body

consciousness — that ultimate lens of being, which shapes our entire experience of life and makes blue appear blue and gives poems their air of wonder — is not a mental activity confined to the brain but a complex embodied phenomenon governed by the nervous-system activity we call feeling.

As soon as I began to study my perception, to look at my own experience, I found that there were different ways of perceiving and that the different ways provided me with different facts. There was a narrow focus which meant seeing life as if from blinkers and with the centre of awareness in my head; and there was a wide focus which meant knowing

There are hundreds of thousands of kilometers of nerve fibers in a human body. How many can you wake up before we’re done?

Growing with our bodies, all of us find ourselves at one time violated or wounded by this world in difficult ways, and still we live and breathe in this touchable, sensual world, and through trauma, through grief, through recovery, we heal in order to be touched again in the right way, as the physical consecration of a mutual, trusted invitation.

How to generate heat within your body, from your belly, in times of excruciating and unending cold? Or how to douse for water in the depths of an ongoing drought? [These] very practical, bodied practices, not just bodied, but they're always about the body and its relation to the larger body of the world, or of the Earth.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL : Well, the ancient myths were designed to put the minds, the mental system, into accord with this body system, with this inheritance of the body.

BILL MOYERS : A harmony?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL : To harmonize. The mind can ramble off in strange ways, and want things that the body does not want. And the myths and rites were means to put

But magic is just this very other logic, from the perspective of a creature from the perspective of a bodied being, like you, like me, down here, in the depths of this blooming, buzzing proliferation of colour and shape and texture and olfactory essences, riding past our noses, wherein some things are always hidden behind other things, because

Truth and knowledge lives in your body