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What Is My Body? September 22 2009
- We each live in a body, but what surely do we live in?
Why is this question important?
Right now I suffer from terminal cancer, or at least one of my better doctors thinks I can get worse at any time and have to go into one of the hospitals.
Scary? Yes. For one thing Stefania and I went into City Hall today to finalize our paperwork and pay our 200 euro for being able to marry soon in the future. Their date was a month away, but when we mention that I have terminal cancer and that my doctor would testify to this the clerk responded with trying to move up the date sooner for Stefania and I to marry. Yet even here there are difficult rules and time limits. We can’t get to a specialist doctor who knows my case until Friday, and then we have to petition the Justice Ministry to forgo the 15 day waiting period.
One home doctor would have made the letter right away but he is home in an emergency. The other doctor who knows me refuses to sign anything and sends me to the busy specialist who examined me. He says by law only a specialist can sign a petition statement, and hands Stefania a piece of policy paper. Caution on the road to life or death!
- Yes, I feel my cancer symptoms with phlegm and a little chest pain. I am in a living body currently under severe attack.
Who better then here to speak of the body than this psychologist possibly dying of cancer, even sooner than later?
I hope for good enough health to last to the dates the government bureaucracies set for our marriage. Then Stefania has all the rights that marriage with me gives her, like staying in the new apartment she and so many of her friends at work helped make livable.
Of course if I suddenly start going into a real dying process, I suddenly do go and the ego’s attempts to have some control of the timeline just do not work out. It’s not the end of things for Stefania, but it would be a blow.
This description then is current happenings right now as I write this piece on The Body.
The Body
We are born into a body and begin experiencing what that is for us while still in the womb. How much do we know of ourselves in the womb? We certainly start experiencing both ourselves and our mother through being in her body.
That’s the way it is. Incarnation.
Nature incarnates another existence, another consciousness, right in the body of another human being, and it does this with sex, the bonding and uniting of sperm and egg in conception and growth in the womb until the baby is pushed out of the womb as too big now to live there longer.
Then we get nurtured by our parent or parents, sometimes well and sometimes not so well. That is fate. We are born almost helpless with maybe our biggest power to have an effect in an attempt to get our needs met is the baby scream or crying.
As tiny babies we must recognize how helpless and dependent on others we are. We have a give and take with parents and others as to how much they meet our needs or don’t, and we make our adjustments as we can.
Usually there is a battle over how parents let the child sleep. Does the child get to sleep with them, which it usually prefers? Does the child get held if it sleeps alone but wakes up crying?
Does the child get understood as it sees and understands itself?
Ah, so many issues! In my today world of 75 years does City Hall understand and respond to mine and Stefania’s need to get married as soon as possible?
So we become as we grow up more and more aware of ourselves as a body with needs, and then a developing personality with needs also.
What then is body?
Body is the vehicle within which we reside as aware persons or identities.
Most of us may not be aware of ourselves as a separate and built up identity. We know that I am called by a certain name, belong to a certain family and culture, have developed into performing efficient roles through developing a skills set, including job roles and personal roles like as a relator. Some opt in to being mothers and fathers but this is not dominant for most people it seems.
As I type this I feel some pain in my chest. My conscious ego notes this but hopes that it does not mean the cancer is threatening more my body than before. But the hope just can’t be a big hope now. So there is of course the strong picture that I may have to go at any time into a complete decline and die.
But I keep that thought and image back a bit to stay with the thought and image that this cancer thing can be reversed through this consciousness process, the strict change in diet, and the homeopathy as a positive intervention to boost my immune system, as well as some doctor’s drugs to keep me more or less comfortable so I don’t panic and can’t focus on anything else but the pain caused by the cancer.
Talking here about body then our issue is what does my conscious personality think of when it thinks body, my body?
One reason I realized emotionally a while back that I must not identify with being a cancer carrier is that then the cancer and its symptoms, and whatever else it evokes, then takes over my awareness and I act and think like someone being destroyed in the body by cancer.
- Thus while we live in our bodies, and I have an ‘old body’ now,’ we must not let our identity images and attitudes shift totally towards being a cancer victim, cancer body, pain body, scared body, dying body even.
If I am not a dying body, what then am I?
Some doctors have said, ‘You are not a statistic.’
This can mean to me that while it seems from the statistics that maybe all lung cancer victims die of lung cancer, and most sooner than later, that still psychologically I must not die from lung cancer by identifying totally with being a lung cancer victim, the medical diagnosis, except for the homeopathist, who maintains a different system of thought and healing or rebalancing remedies.
Thus the intervention of a Consciousness Process as I use it means: do not identify with archetypal images.
Do not identify with archetypal images means that while there is a strong experience called lung cancer happening to me, it is only one of the processes alive in me right now. If I identify totally with this cancer process happening in me then I sort of doom myself to being carried away by it.
Yes, in my blog I have realized this dynamic and fought it.
Identifying with my suffering and grief without getting myself out of it was showing me an emotional mood of feeling loss of my body and the relationship to life and to Stefania, my partner, in the coming death.
Yet the Coming Death is not the Current Death!
- Getting too much into grief and sadness evokes overwhelming emotions of sadness and loss. Why let this just happen? What’s the point?
Thus, again when we refer to our own existent bodies we can indeed have evoked through them all sorts of emotions also, such as the sadness and grief that I seem to deal a lot with lately.
- What good are these emotions anyway? What do they do for one? Purge oneself of loss emotions, release them, or is it more creating an incredible sadness to somehow justify our dying now.
A difficulty is the drive to recreate oneself as a patient, as a sick person, because this elicits serious relating to you by others, concern for you, giving you and your partner help, as people are doing in moving us to our new place, as well as putting in the new floors and painting anew the walls, as is the Dutch custom.
People gather around you and sometimes offer a lot of help, probably because some day they know that they will have to go through a dying process themselves and would also want supportive people around them.
- Psychologically relating and helping a sick and dying body-person naturally makes you feel more healthy in your body as well.
I remember one tennis couple I knew at the club and had played matches against, how serious were their faces when we encountered in the shopping mall. I had announced my cancer and quitting tennis in the club newsletter.
Yes, it was a bummer getting cancer, even though I told them I had lived 75 good years of being serious illness free. I had lived a good life so if this was the end of my life still I was thankful. It did not change the seriousness of their faces. As a couple with teenage children they saw themselves in their own bodies as healthy and fully functioning probably. To them I was a body in decline and that represented something horrifying.
Yes, a body in decline can be seen as horrifying but why?
- Do you have an answer to this whatever the age of your body now?
- What is so horrifying dying?
- Is not living hard enough?
- Is it the pain and suffering involved?
It is terrible feeling so much pain in this cancer thing, as I can testify to directly. I feel lucky to have modern medicine to help alleviate the worst of my suffering.
I am also pissed off that the medical doctors don’t seem to really cure cancer these days, but use strong treatments that somehow debilitate the body and the immune system, at least in most cases.
If you read the alternative treatment people, including their medical doctors, they say there are many possible cures for cancer but the dominant medical establishment gives high priced drugs because the pharmacological companies want it that way to keep making huge profits.
So thanks again, world, for not stopping doctors being influenced commercially by the drug companies and their own history of what they use to attack but not cure cancer.
It seems that I am a victim of society as well.
Our Attitudes Towards Our Bodies
How well do we take care of our own bodies?
How much time do we put into understanding our bodies, the food we eat and its effects, the extra stuff, like my eating probably too much chocolate bars of high quality?
To limit the compulsions we develop around our bodies so that we are not eating in ways that hurt the body.
- Of course with this diagnosis of cancer I have spent so much more time in understanding what a healthy body is as different from a body in which cancer grows.
- Of course this should have been done years ago.
- Of course I should never have lived with smokers in love relationships.
- Of course I was incredibly weak and not in reality over this.
I do point out things wrong that I did that would be enough to give me this cancer, according to certain health experts.
This then shows that I did not have a strong enough and positive enough approach to my own body, which I am certainly developing now.
I was too psychological, too mental, too inflated with all my creative ideas.
These are assessments that I think real and honest.
I am not confessing, hoping for reprieve. I hope for reprieve, for a change again to a healthy body. I don’t give that up. I work hard to keep up with the health issues as they come to me in my health reading and personal intuitions.
Yet if it is a losing fight by now, it is a losing fight.
The point now is that it is not a fight. I did not in the past do enough for my bodily health.
I had a weak image of being united with, married to my body, cherishing its daily existence, taking the best possible care of it.
I had a strong image of being a conscious and creative person who somehow could exist in all my conscious identity while neglecting vital aspects of bodily functioning.
I had a weak image of my body.
Interestingly, Ken Wilber, a fellow writer, though we don’t know each other, features pictures of himself with a magnificent body through weight lifting on his site. Yet in his thirties he got a serious chronic disease that affects his brain so that he would have seizures if he did not take medication.
Ken Wilber has a comprehensive mind and uses it to create income and influence in the world as a transpersonal psychology, though I would call him more a transpersonal philosopher since he does not seem to have clinical training or experience in working with people as a psychologist.
Ken has a Great Mind but then got this terrible bodily disease that despite his medications almost killed him more recently with Grand Mal seizers. Here is the link to his full description of how he experienced himself through this terrible time of bodily malfunctioning.
I take after him as a writer in giving full disclosure, as I can of what I directly experience in life and in my body, and the conscious awareness and values I bring to these bodily experiences.
Be prepared! Ken Wilber does not leave anything out. We already know him through his book about his wife, Treya, dying of breast cancer, but strangely in this 1991 publication book Ken Wilber does not mention he contracted his own serious and chronic disease.
Be that as it may, this just shows that we all develop images about our bodily experience, and attitudes also.
What is recommended to be in reality with oneself and others is to describe fairly freely to those you relate to what exactly is happening to you and with you in your own experience of being in your body.
I was suitably horrified at Ken Wilber’s Grand Mal seizers and what he went through. He was in good shape physically from his weight lifting and the doctors think that helped save his life.
For yourself and exploration of your own attitudes towards your body, we know as psychologists that every person has some strong and unusual attitudes towards their bodies.
I don’t go near the rail of a high up balcony because it feels to me I could easily jump off and float in he air to my death. It seems that my boundaries between inner images and fantasies and outer images and the concrete world are weak.
Maybe because I have worked with, and still work so much with, the collective unconscious, the direct realm of archetypes, that I am more vulnerable than others to not always discriminating between the two worlds of inner and outer.
I remember being assigned to a therapist-minister in training with my regular analyst when she went to Zurich to train with Carl Jung and others. I told this therapist in training about how I was wanting to sleep with someone else besides my wife. He said back, ‘Oh, I know that problem. Currently I am sleeping with five different women.’
Oh, my God! This was the only session I allowed myself to have with him. My real analyst must have been off herself to take this man on as someone who could deal with anyone’s unconscious.
In Jungian terms he was a sensation type. He believed he was having sex with five women. Yes, he might have been having sex with all its natural orgasmic functions but he was also the one in the training group who had no fantasies, as he said so himself. You don’t reach the unconscious through the body of woman, though it might seem like it.
You learn to work directly with your unconscious and spontaneous fantasies, rather than try to act out unconscious dynamics in the outer world.
Ask yourself next time you have sex with someone, what archetype is behind what you are doing?
This raises a new topic here of how we are in our bodies but not really in our bodies because we are identified more with an archetype than a body or a role.
Making love to a real person you know means that the sex does not come first but the knowing of each other in real and honest terms does.
Bodily functions, such as sex, defecation, eating, moving, singing, talking, reading, watching, and so on, have their real functionality as energy expressed through material form.
Bodily functions also have symbolic factors that may be dominant over the physical functions. Our task here as conscious beings is to analyze ourselves to see if we are living bodily functions symbolically or in their literal and natural functional states.
If we live too much in symbolic archetypal worlds based on the unconscious, then we gradually lose our direct living experience of our bodies as physical entities within which we exist.
This is highly dangerous.
I know of so many people now who have told me them have some disease they take medication for. I know these people as mostly brilliant mind people helping others become conscious, or at least aware, of themselves and their lives.
And thus it is I write this essay on important aspects regarding living in our bodies.
Whether I am a soon dying man or a living on man regaining my health, at least for awhile, I am at least conveying my experiences of current body here and what I feel is the awareness to go with them.
What about you?
What about you in your body?
—
Ken Wilber Description Of His Seizure
related post
- Strephon I Am Affirmations
- Strephon's Cancer Health Report August 1, 2009
- What Makes For A Strong Character Or Personality?
- $ 10 per year membership
- Strephon's Photos
Good reading. Thank you.
Rai
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