The Return

….forever spinning on the mind/body split—this idea that they’re separate entities; that the body is merely a vessel, a tool for the mind.

In the canon, it begins with Descartes, who writes ‘I think therefore I am’ in like 1637. As the idea sticks and spreads, it hardens into an ongoing meaning of Man, uprooted. An invitation to a way of thinking becomes an obligation to control the body and, so too, the body politic, as one’s relationship with self translates to that of his people.

Today we humble Descartes across the disciplines. One intuitive counterargument is that the Cartesian Split is manufactured, a technique of language—that, in fact, the self is one mind, body, spirit, as part of a collective mind, body, spirit, obviously: the reasons we should think of them as separate must be arbitrary. Yet still, they say, we see the split’s effect in bigotry, anxiety, addiction… in genocide, poverty, and climate change… those outcomes of dissonance wherein Man escapes himself, his environment.

I understood this disembodiment but not my own—the self, a carrier of culture. I likewise arbitrarily erased that arbitrary line in mind/body and so remained split; that is, by intellectualizing a concept instead of embodying a practice. This clicked in my week with ayahuasca.

Sitting in butterfly, fingers wrapped around my toes, Aya draws me into a grounding pose, forehead to the arches of my feet. I’m lost in thought when a pulse waves over me, and when I realized what was happening, I wept—for the first time in my life, I was home. After all my articulating, pontificating, I find that it was never about the words, the narrative, my brain in a vat. I’m reading Alan Watts later that day when he says something like, “you living life is rather life living you.” It’s like the Tao is the tale that can’t be told.

I know now what it’s like to love myself, fully. I’m thankful for the team at Lawayra for creating an intentional healing practice and for sharing the medicine ayahuasca.

P.s. The chakras are real! (if real is a thing)

[Watts, rather: “You soon won’t know whether your thoughts and feelings are your own, or whether life put them into you” (In ‘Become What You Are’ (1995)).]