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It tells us about our desires and anxieties, indicates inner tension and fatigue. If you think about it, the body is perhaps the most sociable part of ourselves. You just need to learn to hear it. That is, listen to yourself.
“I felt dizzy and passed out,” says 37-year-old Polina. The doctors said it was from overwork. Indeed, lately I’ve been dizzy more than once, but I couldn’t even think that dizziness could be caused by fatigue, I didn’t slow down, and now it all ended in a faint.
Our body speaks to us constantly, from the very first day of our life, and we are free to listen to such messages or ignore them. Everything passes through the body – from physical sensations (hunger, thirst, warmth, pain) to a full range of emotions (joy, sadness, anger) and feelings (love, hate), that is, everything that makes us alive and feeling creatures.
Moreover, it is often the body that is the first, much earlier than the mind, to notice what attracts or repels us. It always reacts: it enters into resonance with some, it is clamped in the presence of others, it relaxes, enjoying something especially pleasant.
Being aware of our body, we remain confident that we live in the present and understand the limits of our capabilities.
Unlike consciousness, which is ready to hastily come up with an excuse or completely change some unpleasant situation for us, the body does not lie. If something in our life loses coherence and meaning, it is the first to warn us about it.
Hear and understand
“The habit of separating the soul and body became stronger in the Middle Ages,” says clinical psychologist, Doctor of Psychology Alexander Tkhostov. – In those days, the true essence of a person was seen in the soul, and the body was understood as the abode of sin, a burden that leads away from the main thing – the knowledge of the soul. Therefore, everything connected with him was considered from the evil one. There were even practices of mortification of the flesh in order to reduce its impact on the soul.”
And yet, despite the centuries of depreciation and suppression of the body in Western civilization, today we understand that it is the most valuable tool of knowledge. “Being aware of our own body, we remain confident that we live in the present, and understand the limits of our capabilities in time and space,” wrote the classic of French psychoanalysis Francoise Dolto1.
But it is important to be able to hear these proofs of our existence here and now. “Awareness of one’s body does not always happen spontaneously,” states the largest American existential therapist Rollo May.2. “More often, to hear it, you must consciously remain open to any of its signals.” This idea is especially clearly expressed in Eastern cultures, where there has always been an understanding of the unity of the soul and body, and any bodily practices have a spiritual content.
“Since I have been doing Zen meditation, I have understood the difference between two very different states – being in my body and hovering around it,” says 35-year-old Alexei. “Now I get much less tired and feel when my body asks me to stop and pause. Realizing the body and spirit as a whole, I stopped perceiving my body as a device that should simply perform biological functions.
Smart… and talkative
The body speaks to us in the present – in every second of our lives. But it also tells about the past, because it keeps the memory of our experiences. Experts in many psychotherapeutic areas recognize the special importance of the messages that the body addresses to us. Although they warn against reading them literally: if a person has joint problems, this does not necessarily mean that he lacks flexibility in dealing with people!
“The science of psychosomatics deals with the connection between the mental and the bodily,” says Alexander Tkhostov. “So, if a certain type of experience does not find a way out, they will be resolved through the body, because of which a person may have problems with the stomach, heart or skin …”
The habit of acting through “dislikes” takes away our vitality and we lose touch with ourselves.
There is another view: existential psychotherapy connects the appearance of bodily problems with the fact that a person ceases to feel, emotionally accompany his life, does not allow himself to think about what he likes and what not.
“The habit of acting through “dislikes” takes away our vitality, and we lose touch with ourselves, everything starts to hurt us,” explains existential psychotherapist Svetlana Krivtsova. – If we try to treat only the body, noticeable changes do not occur.
It is much more useful in this situation to feel sorry for yourself, perhaps to be sad, to treat yourself as if we had become our own mother … Such sadness restores a taste for life, we become closer to ourselves, feelings, emotions, experiences return, and we there is an opportunity to feel them.
One body for two
“Naturally, when a mother treats a newborn as an extension of herself and feels a merger with him,” says psychoanalyst Andrei Rossokhin. “But when the child comes out of infancy, their relationship must change. Psychoanalysts often find that adults, without being completely aware of it, at some points in their lives function like babies: they respond to emotional pain exclusively bodily. The reason for this is early relationships with mothers. Often the mother, due to her own unresolved internal conflicts, continues to treat the child as part of herself, and they have one body for two – this is exactly what the psychoanalyst Joyce McDougall called this phenomenon in her book Theaters of the Body (Cogito Center, 2007). And children feel the lack of living space, experience difficulties in forming an image of their own body and taking care of it. In the course of psychoanalysis, the hidden bodily drama begins to manifest itself in words, to be emotionally lived. The psyche then proceeds to change that script, and the body no longer has to deal with psychic pain on its own.”
Friend or biological machine?
Take a look at how you feel about your body, and it will become clear how you feel about yourself … The body, neglected or well-groomed, hidden or exposed, eloquently testifies to our view of ourselves. Depending on personal history and culture, we see him as a best friend, a heavy burden, a biological machine, or a wild animal that needs to be tamed.
“Today, many believe that the body is just an outer shell,” Alexander Tkhostov regrets. – That is why everything that allows you to bring this shell to perfection is so popular: weight loss programs, rejuvenation and appearance improvement services. And the body language remains mysterious and incomprehensible … “
To be a body or to have one? Finding the answer to this question is not easy for many. We demand that the body be always under our control, but we do not recognize the limits of its capabilities. We want it to allow us to enjoy, but we refuse to listen to it, especially since it has a bad habit of expressing itself and its needs through various failures, ailments and signs of aging.
So what is necessary for the body to remain a friend and adviser? Kindly, attentively and respectfully listen to him, and not try to remake, defeat or tame him. It is in such a just and conscious attitude towards oneself that, undoubtedly, lies the greatest of human freedoms.
“Everything is required of the body at once”
Our body is an ideal microscope for studying the peculiarities and paradoxes of modern society, says French philosopher, editor of Dictionary of the Body3 Mikela Marcano.
Psychologies: What is the place of the body in modern culture?
Mikela Marcano: For centuries, philosophers have seen the body as a hindrance to both knowledge and virtue. Plato, for example, believed that the body as a “felt” reality makes it difficult to access the “intelligible” world of ideas. Today we are witnessing the return of the body, but the body is perfect, ideal. As for the real body, which has weaknesses and shortcomings, it has not yet received recognition. The body that we are talking about today is under control: aesthetic and moral requirements are mixed, so the one who knows how to control his body is perceived as a more reliable person.
What does the body say about us?
The body is the perfect magnifying glass for reading our society. It speaks to both the suffering caused by overconsumption and our addictions. About addiction to work, food, entertainment, drugs… Today our body is torn apart by conflicting demands on us: “Consume, but curb yourself; remember your past, but erase the traces of time on your face; communicate, but virtually.
How to listen to your body?
It is important that everyone regain their own body, find their own way of being. This is the purpose of our dictionary. For example, looking into it and getting to the article “Makeup”, some begin to think that people have always tried to take care of the body, after which it occurs to them that makeup is also an attempt to hide … Then they have a desire to look into dictionary entries of the words “Mask”, “Face” or “Mirror”. And others can go from “Makeup” to “Femininity”, and then to “Attraction”, at the same time reading about “Sexy” and “Enjoyment” … Everyone has their own path.
About it
- Mikhail Epstein, Grigory Tulchinsky “Philosophy of the body. Body of Freedom” Aletheia, 2006.
- Alexander Tkhostov “Psychology of corporality” Meaning, 2002.
- Vladimir Zinchenko, Tatyana Levi “Psychology of corporality. Between soul and body” AST, 2007.
1 F. Dolto “The Feeling of self, at the sources of body image”. Gallimard, 1997
2 R. May “Love and Will”, Institute for General Humanitarian Studies, 2016
3 Michela Marzano “Dictionary of the body”. Phew, 2007.