Book Update

Introduction

It started with an ache—small at first, like the buzz of a low-frequency sound just beneath perception. I didn’t notice it while moving, only in stillness. I would try to ignore it, but that didn’t work. It wasn’t pain exactly, but a tension, a holding, as if my body were bracing for something unnamed.

Years later, I would come to understand that this was more than a physical sensation. The body stores experience. It maps itself through repetition—each movement, each restriction, each breath creating a pattern that lingers long after the moment has passed. We live the maps of our body unknowingly, in the set of our shoulders, in the way we distribute weight, in the ease or resistance of movement. The gestures of today are ghosts from our past. It is very popular today to talk about the body, or somatics, or embodiment. But in reality, people think very little of how we are who we are from a bodily perspective. We think this is just how I am. We think the body is just an external shell and that it operates because of the being on the inside. And we accept this old man-in-the-machine narrative generation after generation. We accept that some of us got a better machine because of genetics and that the machine wears out over time anyway. But the body is so much more than the external shell that carries us through our lives.

People also like to say the body is always in the present, which suggests that by being in the present, there is a sort of neutrality, which implies a kind of accuracy and objectivity. But the notion itself that the body is always in the present is inaccurate. That is another example of a mind-centered way of thinking applying itself to the body. Because, more accurately, the body is what it has been becoming. It is the ancient future. It is anything but neutral—gnarled and twisted like the deep roots of a tree. The body does not exist solely in the present moment; it is a crossroads where all that has happened meets all that has yet to come.