"The Body Holds the Meaning First." Instead of blinking we'll think of the body holding the meaning first as a pre-verbal moment, it's an implicit understanding of a complexity, which might last seconds, hours, or years. If this implicit understanding is associated with a physical discomfort, a knot in the chest or belly, however it manifests, the physical discomfort isn't random physiology. It is what Pierre Bourdieu called habitus, your sense of place, your memories, the panoply that defines the scaffolding or your being experiencing a pre-verbal situational friction that's combined into a single, uncomfortable complex somatic state that's not happy.
Usually, what I am wary of calling the intellectual mind, doesn't know what precise meaning this sometimes delicate, complex somatic state is attempting to express. Is it hungry, does it need water, does it need a beer and a carton of cigarettes. Is it just tired?
Believe it or not, and you might have to climb into your "woke" pajama suit, but the Phenomenological observations of our man Eugene Gendlin, inspired by Husserl perhaps, suggest that by a process called "focusing" you might be able to discover what ails an agitated somatic state by shaving away at the possible causes of discomfort your somatic state is experiencing by asking it questions.
Gendlin made the observation that with us people there was a going forward, which in my view can be understood as a consciousness moving through time. For Gendlin a living organism isn't a static object, life is an on-going process which is subject to a Trinity of Stoppage, Social Conformity and Carrying Forward.
Go ahead, cuddle a Teddy Bear, life is a journey that sometimes stops. Conformity tells you to suppress the stoppage, take no notice of the pre-verbal meanings in the discomfort expressed by a complex somatic state, suck it in, join a gym, see a plastic surgeon, bandage it up, pay someone to listen, call the manager, get lost in first world luxury, don't even think about going anywhere new.
Worth remembering agriculture changed us physically, we people developed genes that enable us to digest lactose into adulthood. Hell! blame agriculture for real ice cream.
