I jolted awake. 7:44am — one minute before my alarm was set to ring. Time and again throughout my life, this same thing has happened; my internal clock has known when to get up and shot some sort of signal behind my eyes and forced them open, just ahead of my alarm. Not every day. I still need alarms. But it’s happened enough times in enough varied instances that it is unlikely to be coincidental. Something else is going on.
Close your eyes. Move your mind out of your head. Live in your right arm. Now breathe into your gut. Stop thinking. Heal. At the front of the room, our teacher sits cross-legged, leading us through a Somatic Meditation practice that emphasizes “connecting with the inherent, self-existing wakefulness that is already present within the body itself.” He tells stories of people in distant, old cultures being able to sense incoming rains more accurately than technological systems, all from years of living outdoors, tuning their bodies’ sensing machinery subconsciously. He speaks of “embodied intuition,” a way of sensing phenomena outside of the mind. More advanced students are exorcising physical pains lodged deep in their bodies, caused by emotional traumas that they talk about gingerly during our post-class reflection. Color me intrigued.
Attendees at Steve Jobs’ funeral famously left with a copy of Autobiography of a Yogi, a book that sits on my shelf, half-read. During my various stops-and-starts with this book, one feature of the writing stood out: the number of seemingly miraculous events that occur. The pages are peppered with stories of yogis who never eat yet live for a long time; yogis who can teleport into other bodies; yogis who can control their “involuntary” biological systems. During earlier moments in life, I was highly skeptical of these accounts. Now, I’m willing to be more open. Maybe these are symbolic anecdotes that still connect to an unbelievable reality, or maybe our bodies and minds are capable of far more than I had suspected.
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Where do thoughts live? When I visualize an answer, I see them floating around in my head. In each of the stories above, however, thoughts — or maybe a different word, something like “conscious activity”– exist in the body, outside of the head. If our mental model for consciousness is a powerful computer in our brains, the model suggested by these anecdotes is that we have distributed computing power in far more parts of our body. That our limbs and organs are not just sensors feeding data to the head, but that they may have their own local processing units as well.
What if every time we have a negative experience, our muscles encode that negativity in the form of tension. And what if that network of tense muscles were able to self-correct after taking on too much tension? What if positive thoughts were encoded as well, perhaps by storing and/or releasing hormones that increase alertness. What if we could access those positive stores of hormones whenever we needed to?
We already do a version of this: we have immune responses to stress, physical responses to pain, etc. But perhaps the rest of us lies in building a deeper connection with our embodied intuition, our embodied consciousness.
The explosion of mindfulness practices in the West seems to be, at least in part, a response to the strain we are placing on our brains to process an ever-increasing amount of signal. While these practices are often marketed as cures to anxiety and stress or superchargers for mental focus and productivity, perhaps they are really a way of training ourselves to load-balance signal processing from the mind to the rest of the body — and in the process unlock wholly new human capabilities.
Beyond mindfulness training, it would be interesting to see whether we could measure what our bodies are doing when they bypass conscious thought to make autonomous decisions. Measuring tension, hormone production, and perhaps other biological markers when people are exposed to a variety of situations would allow us to refine our mental model of the mind/body connection– or at least start to sketch it in low resolution while our instruments of measurement catch up to our actions.