Separate from body (Man’s Search for Himself)

The impersonal, separated attitude toward the body is shown also in the way most people, once they become physically ill, react to the sickness. They speak in the passive voice—“I got sick,” picturing their body as an object just as they would say “I got hit by a car.” Then they shrug their shoulders and regard their responsibility fulfilled if they go to bed and place themselves completely in the hands of the doctor and the new medical miracle drugs. Thus they use scientific progress as a rationalization for passivity: they know howgermsor virus or allergies attack the body, and they also know how penicillin or sulfa or some other drug cures them. The attitude toward disease is not that of the self-aware person who experiences his body as part of himself, but of the compartmentalized person who might express his passive attitude in a sentence like, “The pneumococcus made me sick, but penicillin made me well again.” Certainly it is only common sense to avail one’s self of all the help science can give, but that is no reason to surrender one’s own sovereignty over one’s body. When one does surrender autonomy one opens oneself to psychosomatic ills of all sorts. Many disturbances of bodily function, beginning in such simple things as incorrect walking or faulty posture or breathing, are due to the fact that people have all their lives walked, to take only one simple illustration, as though they were machines, and have never experienced any of the feelings in their feet or legs or rest of the body. The correcting of the malfunction of one’s legs, for example, often requires that one learn again to feel what is happening when one walks. In overcoming psychosomatic ills or chronic diseases like tuberculosis, it is essential to learn to “listen to the body” in deciding when to work and when to rest.

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Related posts:

1. Will It Fly Summary (7/10)
2. Modern Man in Search of a Soul Summary (8/10)
3. Part 2: Stir Up The Transgressive and Taboo (The Art of Seduction)
4. Chapter 19: And They Lived Happily Every After (Sapiens)