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Sam Turton: Healing the Mind-Body Split
 
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  October 8, 2001

Healing the Mind-Body Split

The words "Mind" and "Body" are just ideas. The fact that we can think of the mind and body as separate doesn't mean they are separate, any more than naming the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans makes them separate. The Atlantic and Pacific are just one body of water, as Mind and Body are just one being.

The location of the "Body" is commonly understood as the physical self, but the location of our "Mind" is not so evident. If our body is paralysed, but the brain is still fully functional, we feel we have our minds. Not so if we become "brain dead." So for this discussion, "mind" and "brain" are interchangable.

The brain-body split is very much the dogma of fundamentalist western science. Over the thousands of years of human experience and wisdom, science is a new kid on the block. The ancient and effective approaches of aboriginal and Eastern wisdom have always seen things as interconnected.

From my primal integration point of view, the imagery and feeling of absolute separateness only appears when a developing being is organically split off from itself by repressed trauma. Biologically, repression is a break in the connected flow of electrochemical information. This inner separateness affects a person's perception and thinking so that the imagery they see and the thoughts they have are of a world that appears separate.

This is not so far-fetched. Our perception is limited by the medium we "look" through, whether it be a dirty pane of glass or a pair of binoculars. As it turns out, we are the medium we perceive with, and our perceptions are affected by the state of our being, whether we are sick, moody, drugged - or internally split.

As repressed people, we tend to see everything as separate, in a universe of separate things - just like Newton did 300 years ago - and in spite of Einstein, many scientists still do. We appear to ourselves as a body full of separate organs, separate from our mind, existing separate from other people, in our separate boxes, in separate cities, on a separate planet that is spinning in an empty sea of nothing. This illusion appears real simply because we are blocked inside.

The fact is, there is no way to prove the existence of separateness. Where does the water of the Atlantic actually end and the Pacific begin? Where does the air we breath end and our "body" begin? As a mass of overlapping and moving cells, electromagnetic charges, chemical messengers, solid and fluid nutrients - where does the body end and the brain begin?

Once we release the repressed material, our system can reintegrate the mind-body split. Then we will see ourselves and the world as interconnected. We will feel as we are - whole.

Carrying body and embracing the One
Can you avoid separation?

      - Lao Tzu, 500 B.C.E.



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