Human Suffering and Cultural Ideas, part 1 - Mind/Body Dualism

In the introduction to this series of posts we talked about the way that received and persistent ideas can contribute to psychological suffering. In this post we’re going to dive into one of these long-standing ideas that is woven deeply into western culture, namely the idea of mind-body dualism. That’s a fancy phrase that just means that we think about mind and body as two separate things. You’re probably familiar with this, at least in a felt way. Most of us who grow up in western culture have a distinct sense that the world of our thoughts is separate and distinct from our bodies. Indeed, any suggestion that those two things are NOT separate might feel intuitively suspect.

This idea of a separation between mind and body has deep roots in western culture, going all the way back at least to the Greeks, but it was really given its modern formulation in the 17th century by the seminal French philosopher René Descartes. Descartes divided the world up into two types of substances - res extensa, which was the material world, and res cogitans, which was the world of the soul or mind. Thoughts and all mental activity, as well as one’s eternal soul, belonged to res cogitans, while our bodies and all material substance belonged to res extensa. And they were mostly not connected.

This division articulated by Descartes has largely persisted for centuries, informing not only how we think about ourselves, but also how we approach animals, medicine, spirituality, and our legal and economic systems, among many others. It’s a super influential idea!

In psychology, the prevalence of this model has created a systemic focus on thoughts and talking, at the expense of addressing the body. After all, if the realm of mental activity is separate from the body, then the fix for mental suffering is achieved by working with the contents of the mental space. So, historically psychology focused on thoughts, on memories (often repressed ones), on dreams, and very rarely on the body (which is ironic considering that Freud originally developed psychoanalysis largely as a way of dealing with inexplicable bodily symptoms!). Later the focus expanded to include emotions, but it has taken a long time for a broader focus on the body in psychology to emerge (to be fair, from the beginning there have been those who have tried to bring the body in, but until the last few decades they were relegated to the fringes).

But at this point there is an overwhelming amount of evidence that this model is simply wrong. First, when we back up from it, it just doesn’t add up - it essentially assumes that the mind somehow operates outside of the basic physical laws of our universe, as some supernatural force. Second, when we look at wisdom traditions it has been clear for millennia that this gulf between mind and body is false. Spend some time meditating and you will pretty quickly observe the ways that mind and body move together.

But perhaps most relevant psychologically, research has made it more and more clear that our minds and bodies are closely intertwined, with the state of our bodies shaping our thoughts and feelings in the moment, and vice versa. This effect has been the most pronounced in trauma work, where it is absolutely essential to be tracking and addressing what is happening in the body, but the same is true of all psychological work. In the practice of Hakomi, which I am trained in, the body is regarded as the royal road to the unconscious, and tracking and constructively using the experiences of your body is the single fastest way to access the deep core beliefs that shape our ways of being in the world (the reasons for this are complicated and might be fodder for a future post).

The long and short of all of this is that thinking of mind and body as separate blinds us to the true nature of our experience in the world. It cuts us off from our senses, tends to make us think of ourselves as somehow different from other animals, and thus limits how we perceive both ourselves and the world. And it can lead to a great deal of self-judgment that tends to melt away when we touch into the true reality. Which is that many of the things that seem so foreign and strange to us are artifacts of the basic truth that we are mammals, who move through life with mammalian bodies not so different from those of all other mammals.

Which leads us to reconsider this thing we call mind. Indeed, the conclusion becomes that this thing we call mind isn’t a thing at all, but rather an experience. Indeed, I’ve found that the best way to think about the mind is as the experience of being a body in the world. And the next time you find your mind doing something that seems irrational and inexplicable, you might try just checking in with your body. What kind of sensations are you having? Are you carrying tension anywhere? A sinking feeling in your gut, energy in your chest, tingling in your arms or legs, or other forms of restlessness? And what happens if you focus your attention on one of these sensations? Are there thoughts or feelings that come up? Memories, images, impulses, or nothing at all?

Also, if mind and body are intertwined, then your physical health affects your mental health. Studies have linked inflammation in the body to depression and anxiety, and physical exercise is one of the best interventions out there for helping with both of those conditions. And increasingly, connections between nutrition and mental health are being shown. None of this means you need to go out and run a marathon, but it does mean that tending to your body can be an extremely effective way of addressing mental suffering.

It may seem counter-intuitive, but the real change in therapy often starts when people start accessing their previously-ignored bodily experience (you will hear this referred to as somatic experience in therapy circles). Feel your body, make friends with your animal self, step away from the notion that YOU is just a brain floating in a body jar. Vitality, joy, pleasure in life, and deep connection lie on this side of mind-body dualism.

NOTE: One VERY important caveat to this exercise - if you start to feel into your body and find yourself starting to experience extremely heightened anxiety or any other intolerable sensations then stop this exercise immediately. That is a sign that there is something deeper going on, and you need support from a mental health professional around exploring and working with it.

And if you need help in this process, then please feel free to reach out to me or another mental health professional!