Body Integration

This year, when did you feel the most integrated with your body? Did you have a moment where there wasn't mind and body, but simply a cohesive YOU, alive and present?

     These days I’m making a conscious effort to STOP thinking of myself as mind and body and START thinking of myself as my SELF, an integrated being.  I want to eliminate all Cartesian thinking from my way of dealing with my life, my choices, my world.    I don’t feel “most integrated with my body.”  My body is part of my very being.  I AM a cohesive ME. 

         Having said this declaimer to the question, I feel more ME when I can stay fully present in whatever I’m doing.  If I’m swimming and can be totally centered on the feeling of moving to a rhythm as I go through the water, I feel fully alive.  If I’m engaged in a conversation where I’m fully present, I feel fully alive.  If—and perhaps this is one of the places it’s easiest for me to be fully present these days—if I’m working shredding leaves or tending to plants or bringing in the vegetables or doing something else on our small postage stamp of land and I’m fully present, I feel very, very alive AND very grateful for being so.