We have mistaken our medicine for our wine.

(I am here addressing the participants in the upcoming 2023 Annual Meeting of the US Assn of Body Psychology. It is May 18-21 online and in San Francisco. A link and image is below. Please join us!)

The somatic revolution that we are here collaborating on is not limited to just a new generation. Neither is it limited even only to the larger field of somatics. Of course it is part of a larger revolution in many areas of medicine and science as well as culture. In a sense the revolution is the rediscovery of subjectivity. The response is richest in the global movement movement because the truth is contained within the existential bodily fact of movement rather than in the reasoning brain.

This embodied truth can be observed and described and envisioned by the thinking mind but we have to remember this is the special, limited work of healing. In other words, the way we have shaped ourselves culturally so far, what we mistake as normal, is not a state of health but a process of healing. A special and limited condition of healing is what we describe when we talk about the superiority of Reason and science. Reason, and in particular mathematics was supposed to help us to read the book of nature. It was not supposed to become a new book for us to rely on.

There is more to our knowledge, to our mental function, and to the great infinite mystery of nature, than has been described by mathematics. We have mistaken our medicine for our wine. The taste of wine requires some cultivation. The revolution is the restoration of our oldest and greatest friends, the body and the earth.

We can use our intellect to heal our bodies in the world, but we do not have the job of fixing them. They are self healing and self organizing, self reproducing, and self directed. It is more like we are learning humility and sensitivity. In order to perceive a higher order of biophysics. We are not healing the body, as much as we are healing ourselves and our own relationship with it.

But this is not predicated upon the assembly of knowledge into an abstract whole. It is predicated upon assembling the systems and sub systems of the body into a metastable whole. This is somatic self-awareness. This can be accomplished through the sensitivity, and the volition of the sensorymotor system, the musculoskeletal system, and in particular the deeper core postural system.