Mind. Body. Spirit. And the winner is...
the body.
During the week my wife and I signed up to attend the Sydney MindBodySpirit festival. A cursory glance at the exhibitors reveals a treasure trove of alternative delights: psychics and readers (tarot, astrological, auric) mix it with vendors of crystals, oils, candles and beeswax, along with a plethora of advisors on meditation, mindfulness and general health and wellbeing.
Mind. Body. Spirit. What are these? Are they the same or separate? Is one of them better than the other? What do our exhibitors and their wares say, or imply, about this?
Also during the week, a seemingly unrelated event. I had the pleasure of my first teaching experience at the university where I work. I don’t have an academic job but since earning my PhD I have wanted to get in amongst it with my academic colleagues - and so I did. I am helping out with some tutoring, the course is on the philosophy of human nature, and the first week was on … (drum roll) … the Mind-Body problem.
Again. Mind versus Body. I pursued some questions with these undergraduate students: What is the mind? Is it different to the brain? Or the body more generally? And so on. I think they only rolled their eyes once - when I wondered out loud whether rectangles really exist.
The more I talk to people about these things, whether they are undergraduate students or somatic bodyworkers, the more I see a particularly troubling - but almost ubiquitous - judgement about the body in contrast to the spirit or the mind.
It goes something like this: if human beings are made up of different parts - mind, body, spirit, soul, subtle body, or whatever else - we generally feel impelled to rank them. It’s not entirely clear what this ranking scale is - but it has something to do with meaning, purpose, morality/ethics and so on. Something to do with how we might come to know that the life that we are leading has substance to it. It’s not just all fluff and bubbles, it’s not superficial. It matters.
And when we rank these component parts of the human being, the body is usually at one end of the scale, and things like mind and spirit are at the other end. The body tends to be spoken about as a container, or a vehicle, and even sometimes as an enabler. But in these systems we almost always move from our bodies upwards towards the soul, the mind, and/or the spirit. And then back down again - from the loftier aspects of human life back into the base reality of the body.
