One of the trickier problems to which I have committed hours of mental gymnastics is “dualism.” After first realizing it was not a philosophical commitment to fencing, and therefore the opposite of pacifism, my first tactic was to simply confess to peers, “Hi, I’m Gil: I’m a Dualist.” That at least got it off my chest and cleared my conscience of any sense of denial. And acceptance is not the moral equivalent of approval, after all. It is, however, a first step in personal transformation.

Without going into the history of philosophy, it is a somewhat misbegotten commonplace for folks to credit the Original Sin of dualism to Descartes (SATAN himself, to the politically correct Somatic Therapist). He was foolish enough to split the mind and the body, and we in the West have been falling through the cracks ever since. But despite the Serpent’s convincing arguments to partake of this odd fruit, there needed be some folks willing to compromise themselves and bite into it. I would be one of those. As previously noted, I spent a goodly amount of time in years past devoted to the belief that my body was sort of an annoying piece of luggage for my brain to carry itself around in: I think, therefore I am … stuck in this dang carry-on bag (one per customer) flying through the cosmos on spaceship. Earth.

The dualist believes that mind and body are discreet entities, and comes in at least two types, committed and uncommitted. The committed dualist is reconciled to this distinction being the true state of affairs, and either doesn’t care, or works feverishly to dissociate the good and honorable spirit from that yucky, fetid swamp of a body. The uncommitted dualist keeps trying to get mind and body together somehow, kind of like the child of divorced parents who dreams of mommy and daddy falling in love again. Being a dualist, however, the effort invariably fails in principle. Somewhere deep within junior knows they never belonged together. I tried each type, and neither was deeply satisfying. Imagine that! Something was amiss in the perspective of dualism and my experience of self concomitant to it, which left me wanting some unimaginable alternative.

Now when extremists have a crisis of conscience, they have a way of turning to the opposite extreme, usually because it bites them on the ass, having come full circle. Take Saint Paul. One day he’s chasing down Christians and having them stoned to death, the next day he’s standing on the Rock and preaching the Good News of Salvation in Christ Jesus. Go figure. But both he did with zeal. No half baked extremist was he. Nor I! So what’s the opposite of dualism? Why, of course, it’s the unswerving materialist conviction that, “I am my body.” I think I read that statement in some post-modern deconstructed feminist tract written by a guy, although I later heard it from even more reputable sources. Nonetheless, I grabbed it like a lifeline out of the riptide of dualism, and was grateful. Now I could love my body rather than hate it: self-love had always made sense to me. The dualist tends to have a lot of self loathing, as if the body is sort of a punishment for not having gotten something “right.” I finally had a philosophy of the body that could be reconciled with self-love.

“The dualist believes that mind and body are discreet entities, and comes in at least two types, committed and uncommitted.”

The thoroughgoing identification of self with the body, however, has a few major hitches of its own. For instance, since all bodies are not, created equal, it would seem that, if I am my body (and you are your body), than we can not be equal without some serious whitewashing going on. Furthermore, if I am my body, and I die, I rot, suffering the inevitable forces of entropy upon the chemicals which I be. Worms, behold the man. This all fits too tidily into the mechanist reductionism of the human person which I found incompatible with my own unabashed vitalism. (More on the mechanist/vitalist problem in a future column.) Furthermore, if there’s anything to beliefs such as reincarnation, afterlife, theosis, salvation, moksha, nirvana, or any and all manner of conflations of these notions, not to mention “out-of-body” travel, bi location, materialization, dematerialization, and a host of other “esoteric” phenomena, the identification of self with my body didn’t hold much water. Several gallons, but not more. Without necessarily subscribing to any particular one of these beliefs or phenomena, if one reads around, or better yet, if one actually experiences some thing, there is an awful lot of stuff that falls outside of our present paradigms. I do have good friends, however, who thought I was at last on the right track with the conviction that I am my body. In the rarefied environs of academics, since the whole discussion, even of identification of the body with self, is an abstract and disembodied matter, it’s not so troubling to also abstractly consider and become accustomed to the notion that you live, you die, you rot, and that’s that. So, Eat, Drink, be Merry (and Publish!), for to morrow you may die. I’d leapt from the frying pan into the fire, and the seductive applause gave me little cheer.

Sometime during my ROLFING® Brand Structural Integration Basic Training (am I legal?) one of my teachers not ROLF TM sagely noted: “One option is tyranny, two, a dilemma, but three options make choice possible.” Dualism was certainly tyrannical, and I found myself bouncing between the extremes. When I couldn’t abide by saying “I am my body” because of the inherent contradictions it implied, I’d be back to castigating myself for being a dualist (How dare I!). That was certainly a dilemma. So where hides choice? After having written several of these columns I have lulled you into a sense of complacency. You are primed for thinking I’m going to wrap up the problem tidily within two pages here, kind of like a sit-com after the last commercial break: resolution! Actually, at this difficult juncture, I refer you to my forthcoming book, entitled … just kidding. I think I can do it in a few paragraphs.

Straw Men, take note. The answer to the question, Must I be either a dupe of Descartes or a hopeless though self-affirmed materialist, is no. Some of my most important clues to another option came through my study of anatomy and physiology during Rolfing training and afterwards. In the first place, the evidence is clear that we slough off our gross material body on a regular basis. Just take a microscopic look at one of those dust bunnies snuggling underneath your Rolfing table if you’re wondering where your body ends up post-sloughing. Thanks to Robert Schleip and Deepak Chopra, I learned that radioisotope studies indicate that every year, 98% of the atoms in our body are replaced. On that count, I’ve shed at least 32 bodies so far on just this one trip around the wheel! How’s that for scientific proof of reincarnation!

So who’s doing all of that sloughing? Taking this information seriously, the notion that “I am my body” is laughable. It’s as if the author of a book were to say, “I am my book.” Now, we all recognize the different muscular and physiological signatures of the person who is elated or depressed, angry, sad or in love. And as surely as these more obvious emotional movements and dispositions take expressive form in bodily patternings or habits of action, so too do the most subtle and complex of expressions also move together to create the confluence of self expression which is my body. And while it is neither the exclusive signification of who I am, nor the greatest, my body at any moment is at least the present time-and-place expression of who I am.

From this perspective, the measure of truth as well as falsehood is revealed in both extreme positions posited above. Although the dualist thankfully never reduced the self to the body, wherein lies a measure of truth, the dualist imagines a split of mind and body so severe that it can not be overcome, and instead reduces the body in the process. The dualist’s body is demonized as an “other” to be dominated or lamented, and certainly not intrinsically valued. There is a misperception here which a few analogies can clarify: the speaker is neither separate from the speech, nor reducible to it. The dream expresses the mind of the dreamer, and for the conscious dreamer, the dream is not lost upon waking, nor does the dreamer lose anything for having dreamt and awakened. The dancer is one with the dance she dances, but she is more than the dance, and when the dance is done, she remains whole, and continues to be who she is. Yet she is 1 richer for having danced at all.

“…as surely as these more obvious emotional movements and dispositions take expressive form in bodily patternings or habits of action, so too do the most subtle and complex of expressions also move together to create the confluence of self expression which is my body. ”

Just so, my body is a live and moving expression of who I am and therefore in union with and not separate from who I am. There is a certain ephemeral quality to expression which distinguishes it in kind from the one expressing, yet the expression is not worthless on that account: rather it is through such expression that I qualify and evolve who I am in my human nature.

So our token dualist mistakenly reduces the body, and to the extent that the believer that “I am my body” corrects that reduction, we can be grateful. Such a position could even be imagined to imply the truth that, to use the earlier analogy, the dancer is one with the dance. I am not separate from the time and-place self expression which is my body. If taken as a koan, like “the Buddha is the dried dung stick,” it has truth potential as well. However, at face value, the thoroughgoing identification of self with body is both an overstatement of the nature of the body and an understatement of who I am. The dancer is not merely the dance. However many times I here the recording of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, I experience the thrill and charge of his charisma and intention which that powerful expression carries. The speech I carries the energy of the speaker: it is a dimension of his personality, necessary, but not sufficient, to identify him. Just so, my body identifies certain qualities of who I am as a present personality, yet I would be missing the big picture, tossing the baby with the bathwater, to identify exclusively with it. I express myself with my body.

So who cares? I do! I do! You may too. Philosophizing in order to clarify one’s ideas a bit about Who I am? and What is my body? gives leverage to the work of the Rolfer One’s perspectives on such matters influence both perception and outcome, much the way the physicist’s construal of the experiment is inseparable from what happens. The uncertainty principle is universally applicable! If I work from a dualist’s perspective, I may likely set up a practice that looks like an auto body workshop, attracting people who want the damn thing fixed, and make it snappy … and I’ll do my darnedest to pull out the dents and make it look like new. Or from the other extreme, where “I am my body,” I may find myself reducing clients to types-oops, here comes another conflicted external, or internal, or schizoid, psychopath, mesomorph, whatever, and never encounter the person at all. This is not to toss typologies, which are incredibly useful, but to note that the kind of use one makes of them hinges upon the perceptions of self and body one has adopted.

Taking up the perspective that my body is an expression of who I am, I am liable to inquire, “What is my client communicating via the vehicle of expression which is her body-how am I responding-and is this what we want to say?” The Rolfer can through touch assist clients to clarify their bodily self-expression: Rolfer as hired Editor! While verbally a client may say go right ahead, their tissue may say “back off!” and require caution and more attentive listening on the practitioner’s part. Whereas coming for the session may say “I want to be here,” a pale, flaccid or cool body may be the client’s way of expressing “I’m afraid to come in” and require further invitation and assurances of safety. Examples can be multiplied from your own experience.

The moral life, our way of being in the world, is severely conditioned by the metaphors we live by, regardless of what relationship our perceptions may have to Reality. Whether one is dueling dualism or otherwise, becoming cognizant of one’s operative viewpoint towards self and body is a powerful tool for understanding one’s experiences and serving neighbor as client or friend.

“The moral life, our way of being in the world, is severely conditioned by the metaphors we live by, regardless of what relationship our perceptions may have to Reality. “