Most of us never think about the brain body connection unless something goes wrong. An ache or pain starts in a part of your body that you usually ignore - maybe your right elbow or that part of your ankle that juts out on the inside of your leg. When the pain starts, the ignored part suddenly doesn’t seem like it doesn’t belong to you anymore.
Writer Robin Abrams takes this sort of thing head on by asking What parts of your body feel the most like you?
The first thing to realize here is that an elbow isn’t just a hunk of bone and meat there in the middle of your arm. It’s connected to a part of your brain, the somatosensory cortex that draws maps of it along with all the other parts of you. It’s these maps that you experience, more so than the meaty parts directly. When you elbow moves, the map part representing it changes. And the changes ripple through the map of all of you. Abrams describes all this and works it into the question of what feels most like you.
But what I found most interesting about her post was the notion that formerly anonymous pieces of you can become more familiar when you pay attention to them. And that’s something I’ve observed deeply in my practice of the Feldenkrais Method.
So what parts of you feel most like you? I think a lot of “me” is in my upper torso. I have broad shoulders and a generous bust, which I find both attractive and strong-looking. I have slight scoliosis in my cervical vertebrae, and get neck pain when I’m stressed out, which serves as a warning system that I need to make some changes. I like the way I can affect the impression I make on others by how I adjust my shoulders—down or up, forward or back. I like the way I can affect the impression the world makes on me by breathing deep and slow. I like feeling the rising hum of my voice coming up my throat and the burn of hot tea or whiskey going down it. So the sensitivities and strengths and communicative potential of my neck-to-waist area just … feel like me.
It might be difficult to quickly identify which parts feel most like you and which ones don’t. Moving around and attending to the hundreds (or thousands) of things that capture your attention every day leaves you precious little time for such reflection. But like Abrams cervical verterbrae, sometimes a little piece of your being suddenly demands attention.
Why not try making friends with your body, letting your brain in on the body action? The best way to do this is to lie on a firm surface (the floor is best, but not suitable for everyone) and feel how the back half of you is making contact. For example:
- Is one foot turned out more than the other?
- Does one side of you press more into the surface?
- Is the space behind your knees the same for both legs?
- Which part of the back of your head makes more contact? The top? Middle? Bottom? Right side? left side?
- etc.
Taking a few quiet minutes to scan yourself on a regular basis might help you discover that every part is connected to every other part, and they all feel like you.
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body schema, brain, brain body