What does 're-imagining your body' mean?

Re-imagining your body means much more than just adopting a more positive attitude towards it. True, there’s a long history of ‘body negativity’ that we badly need to shake off, both as individuals and as a culture. But this negativity runs so deep that it’s not enough simply to exchange it for an opposite kind of ‘body positivity,’ as the body positive movement advocates. It’s great, of course, to reject the pressure to conform to a certain body ideal, a pressure which makes far too many people feel awful because they don’t and can't conform. And yes, it’s great to accept your body type for what it is. But this remains too much a reaction at the level of the body-as-object, the body you see in the mirror and the body you suppose that other people see. It’s also true, up to a point, that if you can just stop worrying about how your body is ‘wrong’ or ‘inadequate,’ you automatically become freer to live in your body in a more authentic and full way. But in order actually to do so, you need to go a big step further. You need to rediscover the body-as-subject. To do this, you need to ‘re-imagine your body’ not simply in the sense of getting a more positive image of it (which might be called ‘re-imaging’ it instead), but in the sense of using your imagination to explore and realize the extraordinary subjectivity – or sense of self – that suffuses your body and constitutes your embodiment as a living being. That’s the aim of the book Re-Imagining Your Body and of this site.

The deeper problem, which makes this relatively difficult, is that the ‘body negativity’ I referred to above isn’t just the social imposition of unrealistic, unnatural and even unhealthy body ideals. Such imposition couldn’t happen, in fact, without a deeper negativity towards the body on which it rests, one in which the body is thought of as separate from and very different from the self, even though the latter is tied (till death do it part... or destroy) to the former. The body positive movement does seem to recognize that there’s a problem here, for the first step in overcoming a negative body image is to realize that if you hate your body you necessarily hate yourself. But again we need to go further. We need to actively question, challenge and replace the long-standing Western dualism that has downgraded the body by separating it out from the soul or spirit or mind. Unless we do this, we’ll never fully understand that we are our bodies, where this understanding is so transformative that it takes us beyond problems such as negative body image.

My strong belief is that you can’t achieve this goal on the intellectual level alone. It needs the kind of ‘playful exercises’ that are described in Re-Imagining Your Body. You need to experience the extraordinary riches and potential of your subject-body, or your-body-as-you. For this, exercises that reveal the interpenetration of what we usually call mind or spirit or psyche on the one hand and the physical body on the other are extremely valuable. Such exercises do much more than make you physically fit, important though that is. They promote the kind of wellbeing implied by wholeness. And they’ll make you realize and appreciate much more of the true nature of your being. In fact they constitute a kind of ‘practical philosophy’ of being in your body!

Imagination is crucial here because your body isn’t simply what can be seen and described by anatomy. You also have a ‘phantom body’ or an ‘imaginary body’ which suffuses your ‘flesh and bone’ body. It’s a complex product of both neurological and socio-cultural factors, and it’s plastic, malleable and highly adaptable. The imagination-based exercises work on this imaginary body but in doing so they also transform your flesh and bone body, for in any living human being these are two sides of a coin. As I put it in Appendix 2 of the book, the ‘phantom body’ (or whatever, in the end, we decide to call it) is entirely enmeshed and interwoven with the ‘real body’ (the real subject-body, that is), such that without the ‘phantom body’ the ‘real body’ simply could not exist.