This is why body awareness, for me, has become an act-not of “self-indulgence,” as I always imagined-but of essential liberation. I believe that most of us have learned such lasting lessons in our bones and tissues, allowing them expression only in the form of shame or in the ravages of suppressed fear and anger. From a pederastic teacher, it learned that the awesome murky pleasure of genital touch was a guilty secret, requiring the protection of absolute silence. From taunting schoolmates at an all-boys’ school, it learned that to expose itself in all its puppy plumpness was to invite a burning sense of shame and to experience the futility of allowing anger to escape. From my mother, it learned the aching desirability of intimate loving touch-and the agony of its deprivation. Further:įrom my father, a man who lived in constant pain with stomach ulcers, my body also learned to steel itself unreasonably against the slightest suggestion of physical or emotional discomfort. Not all its lessons are necessarily truthful, then, but they can have a powerful and lasting hold on us. My own-because I know it best-learned as it entered the world nearly strangled by the umbilical cord that life and breath are a desperate struggle for survival. Yet because the body is a great learner, it is also a great teacher. We refuse to listen to it, still less to heed its inborn insistent wisdom.
We have difficulty even taking it to the doctor when we are sick. We do not trust it readily nor others with it. Our self-image is often burdened or embarrassed by our body and alarmed when it fails to meet our demands and expectations.
We men-I should say, many of us: I cannot speak for all-allow ourselves to be trapped too often in the attempt to separate the two. But I have only recently begun to fully understand, in the flesh and bones, the extent to which body and mind are integrally related to each other. Not that I haven’t been preoccupied with it before-with its strengths and weaknesses, with how it might appear to others, with its familiar aches and gripes. Approaching my middle 60s, I am only now beginning to appreciate what a rich and complex relationship I have with this body that has carried me around for so long.
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