I Am a Sum – Body

I am a body. I am a sum of all kinds of disparate, yet inter-dependent, parts, muscles, bones, organs. Cells, systems, movements swimming in a wholly fluid universe. I am a sum-body. I am illusively separate, yet profoundly connected, to all those around me- mother, father, brother, stretching out infinitely to include and encompass the world of all things living. Everything is part of me and I am part of everything.

Why, then, when it comes to issues of health, healing, family, and foreign policy are we, as a culture, obsessed with isolating the presenting problem so that we may eliminate it or fix it as fast as possible? We drug our anxiety and depression, pump steroids into our pain, and throw bombs on countries like Afghanistan and Iraq.

These days, it’s very likely that every third or fourth person you meet on the street, in the grocery store, or even in your yoga class, is treating some kind of presenting symptom with some kind of pharmaceutical. The logic is simple, tolerable, and straight-forward:
Identify the territory that seems to compromise the health of the organism at large, isolate it, and feed it a corrective. Prognosis says, in due time, the system will accept the newfound functionality of the treated part and return to normal health.

But this is all wrong.

Because the universe is fluid, everything is connected.

Through the study of yoga, I have learned that it is integration, not isolation, that actually works to create health in any system. People come in with terrible back pain. Most always, the problem itself does not reside in the actual back. The back body is simply telling a story about the dis-harmony of the entire system. The dysfunction pools in the lower back, the upper back, the neck and shoulders, wherever. People are living with all sorts of intolerable pain!

The legs do not support the core. The head and neck are out of alignment. The feet are all askew. Headaches, backaches, nervous system damage, addiction. Consider, for a moment, that the pain in your body—be it the actual physical body, the body of your family, or the body of our planet—does not emanate from the presenting part at all. The pain does not come from the knee, the neck, the mother, or the country of Iraq. Though we are looking for solid ground, a definite answer, the rock of ages, something upon which we may take a stand, we must begin to realize that we are not living in that kind of universe. The world is fluid and cannot be contained. Water waves, leaves lift, and musical notes float by in a song.

We are living in a fluid universe. A universe in which, to quote philosopher Alan Watts,

“ … the art of faith is not in taking one’s stand, but in learning to swim. You don’t cling to, you don’t try to stand on water. By breathing and by a certain kind of relaxation, you learn to trust the water to support you.”

Gliding, sailing, flying, surfing … there must be an adaptation to the fluid. And perhaps, this is the major thing that we have to learn if we want to survive as a species. Water, for example, flows with gravity. It wiggles, takes the path of least resistance, uses its weight, and has tremendous strength.

To heal any body, or sum-body, the dysfunctional system must be worked on as the whole that it is.