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Daily Somatic Essentials—“the catstretch” from Clinical Somatics Web site: http://somatics.org/shop/guides/catstretch.html

The School for Body-Mind Centering: www.bodymindcentering.com/About/

Nala Walla is a transdisciplinary artist, educator, and homesteader in Washington State. Nala holds a master’s degree in Integrative Arts and Ecology, and is a founding member and facilitator of the BCollective: an umbrella organization dedicated to creation of healthy and sustainable culture through the embodied arts. The Bcollective offers communitybuilding workshops, creates participatory educational performances for kids and adults, and hosts permaculture skill shares from ecosomatic building to creative mediation. Please visit www.bcollective.org for more information, or contact Nala directly: nala@bcollective.org.

Morality Is a Somatic Experience

TOM MYERS

When I was about seven, I captured a frog from a little pond in the woods behind David Rice’s house. I carried it home in my pocket, a dry and cramped space for a small amphibian, then I proceeded to torture it in other ways, culminating in hitting it on the head with the mace of a spiky horse chestnut casing. I know where the impetus to do this came from—in rural Maine in the 1950s, the older boys in the neighborhood were always chasing or shooting some animal, and I wanted to be one of the gang. The feelings of animals—feelings at all—were not high on anyone’s list. This time, though, I was alone: bringing the frog home and hurting it was my own project.

But where did the other voice come from? The voice that suddenly saw this for what it was: a pointless exercise of power, the infliction of useless pain, the epitome of unfair advantage. The voice could have issued from my parents, or from God, but I actually felt it from inside my own body. Somewhere in my chest, between my lungs and behind my heart, a light came on, and the thing that I call “me”—the perceiver—relocated.

Heavy with remorse, not even recognizing the boy who had blithely separated himself from feeling, I carefully carried that particular little green frog—one of hundreds in that pond, one of thousands of ponds in Maine—back into the pine wood to set it gently in the water, and I waited while it regained its equilibrium and suddenly shot away from me below the surface.

What kind of change are these “visceral” experiences, these times of an internal “wrench” that relocates the spiritual self within the body? This question turns on our view of what a body is.

Twenty-First-Century Monism: Bodymind

In Western culture, the body has been equated philosophically with our lower selves, especially since Descartes’ deal with the church that left the body in the realm of object (a “soft machine”) and the mind in the realm of the immortal soul, God, the cool rarified atmosphere of heaven. The body is animal: dirty, mortal, tricky, full of uncontrollable urges, messy in its needs for food and evacuation, venal in its need for sex, and, in a popular interpretation of Genesis, the source of sin.

In the great Chain of Being, we are poised above the animals but below the angels. The body is the lower, animal part, and the mind is the noble, celestial part. Virtue is defined as our ability to control and dominate these bodily urges (and by extension control and dominate nature to “civilize” it). We laugh now (or cry) at the nineteenth-century presumption of bringing “civilization” by clothing and Christianizing the “savages” of the Americas, Australia, and Africa, but that attitude remains even now between us and our bodies. This dualism is an extraordinarily strong cultural underpinning to our perception, thinking, feeling, and action.

In fact, your body is a source of wisdom and counsel, as well as a tool for deep spiritual communion. All spiritual practices are essentially tools for producing particular bodily states. This has always been around, in the soft darkness just outside the campfires of the Children of Abraham, in the form