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.
Maria Popova • I Feel, Therefore I Am: Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio on Consciousness and How the Feeling-Tone of the Body Underscores the Symphony of the Mind
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
... See moreMaria Popova • A Life of One’s Own: A Penetrating Century-Old Field Guide to Self-Possession, Mindful Perception, and the Art of Knowing What You Really Want
There are hundreds of thousands of kilometers of nerve fibers in a human body. How many can you wake up before we’re done?
Rosalind James • Just Say Christmas
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.
David Whyte • Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words
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.
Sophie Strand • Magic as Radical Embedding in Our Web of Relations
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
... See moreBillMoyers.com • Ep. 3: Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth — ‘The First Storytellers’
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
... See moreSophie Strand • Magic as Radical Embedding in Our Web of Relations
Truth and knowledge lives in your body