From the Introduction | re-imagining

Extracts from the INTRODUCTION

EXTRACT ONE: If we want to change something for the better, we may well need to ‘work on’ it. We can ‘work on’ a wide variety of things, such as on our French, on our marriage, on our self-esteem, on our soufflés.... Among these many things, some involve relationships, either with others (as in working on our marriage) or with ourselves (as in working on our self-esteem).

In fact I’m not entirely comfortable with the slightly puritanical phrase “to work on,” but let that pass for the moment. Here I want to ask: among the relationships that you can usefully work on, is one your relationship to your body?

Not to work on your body, mind, but on your relationship to it. You can do the former in the gym. The latter can only happen in some sense ‘inside you’.

I’ll guess that this idea – that it may be a good idea to work on your relationship to your body – probably doesn’t strike you as odd. After all, you might be one of the many people who have a less than easygoing relationship with their bodies. But perhaps it should strike you as odd.

You see, you are your body – even if you don’t fully realize that fact. You don’t have a relationship to your body as you might have to another person (which is the trap poor Narcissus fell into when he fell in love with his own image). Nor do you have a relationship to your body as you might have to an object that you possess or own (which is a trap many others fall into). Nor do you even have a relationship to it as you might have to some specific aspect of yourself, such as your self-esteem. Since you are your body lock, stock and barrel, to work on your relationship to your body is to work on your relationship to yourself. That’s okay, it makes sense. But the key is this: once you realize – fully realize – that that’s what it means, a significant part of the need for you to work on your relationship to your body disappears!

It’s that simple – in theory, anyway. But at the same time it’s not so easy to realize, fully realize, in practice (in your everyday life, let’s say) that you are your body. I’ll outline the underlying reason why this isn’t easy a little later in this Introduction, since it’s too deep an issue to delve into right at the start. For the moment it’s enough to say that we can’t easily think of ourselves as being our bodies unless we first learn to experience ourselves this way, where this is made difficult by a complex of powerful and deep-rooted cultural influences that serve to alienate us from our bodies, to make our bodies seem somehow ‘other’ than ourselves.

Such experience is the practical goal of this book.

As you progressively achieve not so much the experience that you are your body as the many rich and varied experiences that this consists of, you will find not only that your self-contentment and self-confidence are increased, but also that you discover physical – or better, psychophysical – resources you never suspected. As you become more at one (literally) with your body, you will find your posture, your poise, your fluidity of movement, your energy level and your physical presence all enhanced (for all these are psychophysical, not merely physical). These are the ‘payoffs’. But as I said in the Preface, it’s the journey that matters – the encountering of and the deep learning from those many rich and varied experiences.

Re-Imagining Your Body is a book of exercises, along with some reflections upon them, which has the goal of transforming your relationship with your body. It’s more a course in self-discovery than in self-improvement. But that’s not the most important distinction here. In following this course, you’re not going to try to ‘improve’ your body through hard work – you’re going to extend your awareness of its reality and potential by re-imagining it through play. (This is why, a little earlier, I expressed reservations about the phrase “to work on”.) As you’ll discover, you will need the playful power of your imagination for this. It’s your imagination – which I like to think of as a ‘spiritual muscle’ – that will bring you fully in touch with the nature of your body-as-you and help you discover the riches of truly being your body.

EXTRACT TWO: Broadly, we can distinguish three types of, or ways of doing, physical exercise:

MINDLESS EXERCISE is where you can still perform the exercise adequately even if your mind isn’t ‘in it,’ in the sense that it’s free to go off wandering somewhere else. You might be on an exercise bike or a treadmill, or doing push-ups, working very hard, while thinking about what you’ve got to do later at work or what to wear for the next date. This is more likely where the exercise involves repeating the same movements over and over again.

Mindless exercise has its place. But you need to understand its limitation: the fact that it enhances only what we can call the mechanical functions of the body.

MINDFUL EXERCISE is where your mind must be ‘in it,’ in the sense of fully concentrated and focused on what you’re doing, for the exercise to be maximally effective. All stretching exercises are like this. So are martial arts. And weight lifting.

By definition, mindless exercise doesn’t become more effective when done more mindfully. But there’s an important exception to this: when you need to improve your technique (which can apply even to something as natural as walking), then you need to focus mentally on what exactly your body is doing.

Mindful exercise, of course, is good for the ‘mind’ as well as for the ‘body’. It is really a kind of meditation-in-movement.

PLAYFUL EXERCISE also requires your mind to be ‘in it’ in order to be effective. But whereas many properly mindful exercises can be done (badly) in a relatively mindless way, it’s simply not possible to carry out playful exercise without the full involvement of your mind. This involvement is not simply concentration and focus, nor even visualization; it’s the exercise of your creative imagination. A few examples will communicate the kind of thing this means. You might walk while imagining an elastic rope attached to the top of your head and to the sky, which is tending to lift you off the ground, so that your steps must include the effort to stay grounded. You might relax while standing upright by imagining that your body is a skeleton, which therefore cannot have any muscular tension and which stays standing purely because of way the bones are balanced on top of each other. (Feel the wind blow through you!) You might imagine playing in the sea, feeling the resistance of the water as you stir and swish it with different limbs until you feel that you have become the sea, that it’s not just all around you but actually flowing through and in you.

Only playful exercises can help you transform your relationship to your body and get much more fully back inside it.

Playful exercises can also have very beneficial effects on a wide variety of physiological functions: balance, flexibility, coordination, energy level, stamina.... But they are not a universal panacea. For all-round health and fitness it’s best to practice them alongside other exercises specifically designed to enhance aerobic capacity and muscle strength, as well as in combination with yoga or tai chi or qigong. This, by the way, will help you get more out of your playful exercises too. And you should find that you can enhance the effectiveness (and pleasure) of many ‘normal’ exercises by adding an element of imagination to them.