Embodiment
mindandlife.org
Embodiment
We are not the isolated, conscious minds often assumed in our folk psychology. Rather, we are fundamentally embodied. Any spirituality that ignores how the body influences what we think and do will not be usefully transformative.
Life narrative inextricably links memory, subjectivity, and the materiality of the body. As Paul John Eakin argues in How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves, "our lives in and as bodies profoundly shape our sense of identity" (xi). The ability to recover memories, in fact, depends upon the material body. There must be a body that per
... See moreWhen you wake each morning, you not only become freshly aware of your thoughts, you also resituate yourself in your body. We don’t experience the world purely in our minds, but as ‘embodied agents’, says Roy Salomon, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Haifa in Israel. Your sense of self is as connected to your limbs and guts as to the
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