September Aside
The limits of how we imagine and practice our bodyminds form the contours of our lived experience. This includes how we engage in communicating not only with one another but across all levels of being.
In the western world and beyond, those places impacted by western economic interests, the model is and has been for a few centuries one of stark individuation distinguishing mind from body, so that minds have bodies, which they are urged to dominate. Persons are also distinguished one from one another, with domination framing the shape of societal organization between persons, families and on to social structures such as governments and industry. While I am a proponent of personal discipline, getting mind as body on the same page begins not with domination but with finding a ground of agreement, feeling into the potentials for choice, and moving with conscious intelligence which includes wonder, and living engaged mutual care.
It’s an old story, which we all live; the skin is a powerful demarcation across which are shaped societal models of our separation with consequential reasons for these separations. The current lived model is vastly diminished and diminishing of what a human can be. Our current imaginary, based on how it is taught in school, practiced in sports, organized as industry, and trained in the arts is a result of ideas which are formative of what we now speak of as colonization, but not only.
Colonization may be closer than you think. Many of us are living in colonized bodyminds through defined embodied states (these articulate the ground of our experience), the model for which has been honed by beliefs initiated with Aristotle but continued with variations through the scientific revolution. There is a deep history here entangled in social and governmental politics, new discoveries and the consequences of how they were interpreted and the influence of these changes by and on the powers of the church. Copernicus’ realization that the sun is the center of the universe, not the earth (early to mid 1500s), rocked the western world and upset the notion of our relations to one another and God. There was no longer a divine mathematical order to things. Descartes’ philosophical positioning (1640s) made cuts between the material and the thinking/spiritual world, which diminished the world and most everything “in” it, including the "body," elevated the mind of man, and framed a logic that is alive and well today. The imagination of peoples from centuries back are still being lived as is the logic of those embodied states because they are formative of our experience.
It is outrageous that we still live this imagined human. Rather, I claim, it is our job to reinvent ourselves, and the sooner the better. And, while I know many of us have been doing this work (gratitude to you), it is not done until our industry is made anew and we learn to always open a door in a relational state. This work begins at home, within our entangled selves, although where that self begins may be open to interpretation and a future I can only dream. Yet it is clear, we can learn and go further by dancing. We are already imagining differently. And it will change us further if we dare. Oh yeah!
Excerpt from Nita Little’s Monthly Newsletter