I saw a meme the other day that said something along the line of “Anxiety is not of the mind. Anxiety is of the body”.
It’s always a curiosity to me when we seek to separate out the body and mind in this way. If you think of it in far too simplistic terms we started by considering anxiety to be a function of the mind. And now, as our understandings of the nervous system progresses and we have become more familiar with body-based or somatic therapies, we have flipped to understanding something like anxiety as a function of the body.
Regardless of whether we consider an experience to be “of the mind or of the body”, any decision we arrive at that considers the mind-body connection in these terms is still very binary; it’s still “one or the other”, even if we think it to be more heavily weighted to one side.
Functionally and physiologically speaking, the mind and body exist as a complex, interwoven, multidimensional, and highly intelligent integrated system. Any attempt to understand one as separate from the other exists only for the purposes of our understanding, perhaps because we find it hard to comprehend the extraordinary universe that our beings represent.
Every thought that I have, every emotion that I experience, every sensation I feel comes alive in the motor patterns and responses of my body. In this way, emotion cannot exist without its representative physicality.
And conversely, the expression of my body- of your body- the way that my skin, fascia, muscles, organs, bones take shape is dependent on the presence of my senses, on my ability to communicate my aliveness in response to my environment.
Mind is the air to my balloon. My body encases my mind that provides the invisible form that I take shape around.
The geometry of aliveness.
Onwards.
❤️ Jane
