Mind Over Matter Is Bullshit

Embodied writing after a lifetime of learning your body is a disgusting meatsack you must dominate

Cramps woke me up early this morning. I tiptoed out of the bedroom and heated up water in the orange kettle, then poured it into the red hot water bottle my mom gave me for Christmas 2017. It was the last time I saw her and her last gift to me. In those five years since, the eight of us have worn out the water bottle during illnesses and period cramps and upset stomachs and feeling cold and needing comfort. I sat in the stillness of the quiet house, sipping from my sister’s mug, staring out at the snow, watching the steam rise from my coffee.

My mother and my sister, their hot water bottle and coffee mug, warming me from the outside in and inside out.

I recently heard a line in a breathing meditation that stopped me in my tracks: Our bodies can often keep going long after our mind collapses. I don’t understand this to mean our bodies are perfect, all-powerful, or eternal. Just that they are not the sinful, lazy, weak, corrupted meatsacks many people and ideologies want us to believe. Bodies are not the shameful receptacle for a pure soul, mind, or consciousness.

It struck me, because we usually hear it the other way around: “Mind over matter. If your body wants to quit, teach your brain to override your body and keep going.” I always hated that bullshit. The idea that torturing ourselves is somehow noble disgusts me. And also, it makes no fucking sense. Our brains ARE part of our bodies. Our mind or consciousness is a projection of our brains. No brain, no mind. No brain, no consciousness.

For so long, I lived in my head, intellectualizing everything and pretending my body was an annoying appendage to my brain. When I first started writing, I was writing from my head. Over the last two weeks of not writing, I’ve done other work, internal work, so I can write from my gut, too. It’s not a competition (the brain and gut are intimately connected anyway), but I have always skewed heavily toward my brain and ignored my gut. No more.

I’m working through the 12 Steps of Al-Anon right now as I’m writing my memoir Collateral Damage. I’m on step 3: “Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of god as we understood Him.” One of the reasons I was reluctant to go back to Al-Anon after not attending for twenty years, was all the god talk. In my first meeting back, I said I’m not here for the god stuff. I’m here for the people. It remains true.

I no longer believe in a religious god who chooses which football team’s game-day prayer to answer, or which people to condemn to eternal torture based on who they love. I don’t believe in spiritual forces or energies or higher powers or the universe as a caring entity / slot machine that spits out rewards if I ‘manifest’ hard enough. Even if I came up with the nicest of all gods, the Al-Anon program would still imply that entity created me and has a plan and will for my life that I have to subordinate myself to.

I will never again turn myself, my will, or my life over to anyone, human or made up.

I hear all the time that Al-Anon is a spiritual program and that “We’re not human beings having a spiritual experience. We’re spiritual beings having a human experience.” I don’t believe it. I’m a human being having a human experience. Every beautiful thing I’ve ever experienced was fully embodied. So was every horrible thing. It was visceral. I felt it, heard it, smelled it, tasted it, saw it. It is only when the beauty or the horror become too overwhelming that I leave my body and start living in my mind.

I’m learning to increase my capacity for fully being in my body, for following my pleasure and tending to my pain, but refusing to deny myself the beauty or abandon myself in the horror.

I believe in flesh and bones and blood.

I believe in slow dancing with the man who makes me laugh and come. I believe in listening to music that vibrates through my body and connects me to past versions of myself and people who are gone and places I have loved. I believe in beauty — a song, a painting, a dance, a story to crack open the hard part inside of me until my gut is swimming in liquid gold.

I believe in making an old recipe, both hands in the bowl, then watching the dough rise and brown and crisp and turn into something delicious I will feed to my people. I believe in getting steam facials when opening the dishwasher and wrapping myself in fresh towels straight out of the dryer, and letting my tears melt into a hot shower.

I believe in the deep exhale after a good cry and the heaviness of a sleeping baby on my chest and the lightness of driving with the windows open into a blushing summer evening. I believe in holding a scared child in the middle of the night, whispering I’m here while stroking their hair. I believe in screaming when sledding down a snowy hill with my teenager in the dark and kissing her cold cheek on the way back to the car.

I believe in loving and grieving and living and being in my body. And I believe in buying a new hot water bottle from Amazon to replace my mother’s because it’s no longer safe to use, and neither one of us would want me to scald my crotch with boiling water.

In all ways, I’m practicing being human, which doesn’t mean having a body but being a body.