becoming a bodymind

What obstacles hinder your comfort with being a “bodymind”? What’s one pleasurable thing about physical life that helps you feel more like you? How might you experience it today?

Psalm 131:2a 

But I have balanced out and stilled my soul…

Psalm 131 is a short poem with surprising depth. Verse 1 redirected our mental focus. Verse 2 takes us out of our heads and into our whole body.

In English, we often make “soul” synonymous with “spirit,” and consider both things distinct from our bodies.

Western culture primes us for this disjointed sense of “mind over matter”: trauma and bigotry against different types of bodies makes it easier to think of our bodies as “flesh prisons,” something we have or fight against rather than something we are.

In Hebrew, the word for “soul” is nefesh, and that means the whole self.

When the psalmist speaks of “balancing and stilling” their soul, they mean their whole being — an embodied spirit, an inspirited body.

We don't really have a word that conveys this interconnectedness of body/mind/spirit — but disability scholars sometimes use the term bodymind to get that idea across. The different parts that make us us are interdependent and inseparable.

What obstacles — internal and external — hinder your comfort with being a “bodymind”? What’s one pleasurable thing about physical life that helps you feel more like you? How might you experience that today? 

—Avery Arden