To End a War, Be Unafraid to Fight

See With the Body Eye pt2

Pax Corporis

Your body is not an enemy to be subdued, it is not evil and does not need transcending.¹

You do not need to mortify the flesh, neither is it advisable to indulge it.² ³

It is not a peripheral matter that the intelligence beaming out of you at this moment, meeting my words in that ancient embrace of sense-making together, (like strangers clasping hands and forearms to make a new peace), is embodied.⁴

Embodiment is not an accident, a trap, a curse, a trick, an inconvenience. The Great Mystery is not mistaken, and neither is everyone who loves you.

Do not worry that you are a body for no reason. Your ability to reason depends upon your body, as everything you can conceive of is measured by a proportion you learned before you could speak, when you were quickest making sense.

You are not trapped in a body, you were not born in the wrong body. There are no wrong bodies.

If your body is in pain, even in chronic pain, is injured, exhausted, ill or dying, is damaged, is unwieldy, unwilling, unwanted, then remember you remain in good, ordinary company at the endlessly long feasting table of life. All of us will one day be most of these things, or already have been.⁵ Indeed, it is why we can have any compassion for anyone else.⁶

The Body in Danger

While it is not more holy (or wholesome) to starve yourself, whip yourself, hold your limb in the air until it withers, or to cut yourself with blades,⁷ I am not suggesting that only psychological illness causes extreme asceticism, as it can also spring from a desire for oneness with God, all things, the Great Mystery… It may be culturally approved, part of an ancient tradition or lineage, it can be an intense period of initiation, training or tempering. The modern view that everything can always be seen through a psychological window is not correct, as it leaves much of spiritual life out of the picture, which for most of human history was most of the picture.⁸

Mortification of the flesh for a lifetime however, seems to me, after 25 years working compassionately and beneficially with my own and other people’s bodies with T’ai Chi and Heartwork, to be a waste of the greatest gift we have been given, one equal and complementary to our mental intelligence. We can consider the hard lives of the ascetics of the past, in Christendom, Hinduism, Islam and elsewhere. They are important, but certainly in both India and Europe, these outliers took their place in a wider culture full of communal festivities, holy days, festivals and carnival, rituals by which the people were bound to each other and the place they grew from. Most people’s love, work and meaning arose in the family, community and with the land, which was not separate from nor antithetical to practice of religions.⁹

Overindulgence of the senses¹⁰ is equally unwise, leading to a kind of bondage to pleasurable states that cannot be satisfied and eventually drains our life energy away.¹¹

I would be lying if I said it was easy to write from my relatively safe and free physical life while reading daily reports of the imprisonment, attacks, torture and starvation being visited upon millions of people in the world at this moment. These are not abstractions, these are fellow embodied souls in danger. I am aware that all times are times of war but this time feels particularly barbaric. So, when I come to post clips of exercises you may like to try or recommend gentle practices that may loosen your joints and relax your mind, I am aware that if we have the time, space and energy to do this work, we are all already in a position of un-earned-blessing.¹²

It is worth asking ourselves, how on earth could we become strong enough to pick up the limbs of our child and prepare them for burial, when they have been blown apart by bombs? Closer to home, could we become fit enough to care for our parent as they spend 7 years walking into the valley of the shadow of death that is dementia or degenerative illness? What would it be to take care of the organisms we are, so that we can be ready, (as ready as we can be), to face everything life brings, even if that is our own death, and the death of all we hold dear? As I go deeper into my middle age, family and friends aging and dying is a greater part of the fabric of life, even in my country which does its best to never talk about these things and pretend it can fix everything.

To truly attend to the marvel of incarnation as a living body, let us first acknowledge our own personal limit in death. Many of us, religious or otherwise, do not believe death is the end of things. But before I can speak of nurturing life, I would say that life has meaning largely because it ends for us personally, and that this is neither a fault nor a shame. For any tech-optimists reading this, it is a feature, not a bug, and doesn’t need fixing.¹³

I return again and again to St Wite of Dorset, not because she died a martyr attempting to save her community, but because she had already spent a lifetime healing, counselling, and being part of her community, so her boldness in the face of probable death was a natural continuation and culmination of a way of life. It was no death wish¹⁴, it was ‘sacrifice and succession’. The culture we seed by our lives and deaths has a vast effect, unknown to us. Could she have known the tens of thousands of prayerful hours over ten centuries, the good wishes for others and meaningful meetings on pilgrimage to her bones that she caused by her actions?

Over the coming weeks I will write about movement, embodiment and the challenges of remaining fully human in a world that values machine-like qualities and rewards people for acting like robots. My hope is that this will be of interest to those of you who do not yet tend to your physical bodies with as much care as you would like, as you would rather be reading, writing or thinking! Many good writers on Substack and in the books on my shelves attend to the mind, the heart, the spirit, meaning and faith. What I hope to offer are ways of thinking about, working with and attending to the body that soften the dualistic thinking that it is almost impossible to avoid, certainly in English language and culture.

Love and Work

In Peco’s latest piece I was gladdened by his insistence that love is not a feeling but a series of actions embodying that love. Love can transform us, if we allow it. Love can and should return us to the body, not just the spirit. A path that is only philosophy, belief or prayer with no action (faith without deeds) is not something I personally esteem. When I now read the Taoist Classics or the New Testament and when I looked for wisdom in Buddhist and Sufi writings in my thirties or ancient myths in my forties, I was struck by how lessons were always located in physical action: Chuang-Tzu’s fishes swimming below the bridge, the workers in the fields¹⁵, Milarepa building, then being made to destroy, three towers one after another, Sheikh Nasreddin losing his keys¹⁶, The Handless Maiden. I am lucky enough to have so far spent half a lifetime teaching physical things to willing people, and to have learned much about the unparalleled human gift which is learning via the apprehension and appreciation of embodied metaphor.

As we hand most making, farming, music-making, art creation, craft, food preparation and production, clothing fabrication and more over to machines¹⁷, we do not just de-skill ourselves and become fragile. We break the precious vessels of living culture. We do not free ourselves from anything when we turn our bodies into processors only of language, outrage and opinion. So, rather than complain about this, I’ll offer some alternatives.

No story worth its salt is set in the mind. When an enjoyable television series or book says, ‘it was all just a dream’, we feel rightly cheated. I hope you will enjoy and find helpful the next weeks’ posts, which despite being on this screen, will attempt to welcome the whole of you, tired eyes and achy backs too. No more war between the body and mind, between the flesh and the spirit. No more war! They are siblings, like purpose and love.

Now I must record this piece and upload it for you, several hours late due to travelling to the dentist and then to Devon, to tan reindeer hides and then chef for a three day ‘Using the Whole Animal’ course. A body can do only so much at once. At last, I am at peace with that.

Photos this week are from recent encounters with remarkable flowers.

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This week’s good thing: Black Sea Dahu. Simply, I have discovered the most wonderful band thanks to my friend Giulia. Perhaps you will also love their soulful, harmonically and lyrically rich music. Seeing me through a lonesome few days, White Creatures has been an anchor and a reason to dance round my room.

1. It is the vessel for all your wisdom and difficulty, and the seat of your learning.

2. People who have a tendency to both of these approaches (extreme asceticism / unrestrained indulgence) have always existed and are well documented in most cultures and religions, they are also just as common in secular and modern life, although the culture now only encourages the latter.

3. I have at certain times either mortified or indulged my ‘flesh’. It turned out to be my soul that was ill (seeking balance in extremis), not my cells. However, by a gentle corrective way of the body, is was possible to begin to heal the soul. What Robert Anton Wilson called ‘being kind to the robot’.

4. The dis-embodied state the techno-utopians have us running towards is one of total, endless war and they do not even know, or perhaps admit, it. We already know the internet: imagine the beings construed from a mind that is at base, that. Outrage, rapid rebuttals, mirthless literalism, infiltration, annihilation, all digitally, of course, a never ending arms race of the psyche. Only, this time, with no actual bodies in and with which to escape.

5. “Inside the Great Mystery that is, we don’t really own anything. What is this competition we feel then, before we go, one at a time, through the same gate?” Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī.

6. An entity which cannot suffer the indignities, pains, limits and delights of embodiment cannot truly feel for another. We can already extrapolate this from the default tone of discourse online, still thankfully a contrast to the possibilities for real dialogue in person. Com - passion, ‘to suffer with’, is a design flaw to post-humanists, transhumanists and those who would shed their bodies. These are eugenicist tendencies engineered to the highest level. They will mine every rare earth metal from the good Earth to make sure the servers consistently serve their soon-to-be silicon synapses.

7. All of which I have witnessed in person.

8. This would put ‘the self’ at the centre of the universe, and this, whether provable or not, is a ridiculous state of affairs according to all cultures until the very, very recent era.

9. Until The Reformation, here in Europe.

10. The ‘Five Robbers’ in Taoism.

11. I learned that the hard way, and spent a few years prising myself out of the grip of an addiction to pleasurable states.

12. Social justice language calls this ‘privilege’. My fingers instead typed ‘un-earned-blessing’, surprising me. I prefer it.

13. If the self were truly the measure of life, all life would be a tragedy.

14. Nor Holy War, nor Jihad, but a sincere attempt at dialogue.

15. Matt 20 v1-16

16. Here number 48, amongst a treasure trove of stories about him.

17. Even our warfare, enabling totalising, distanced, efficient extermination.