Discovering Inner Space: Open – Bodiedness (in touch by John J. Prendergast, PhD, p. 160-61)
For the next few days, I am going to randomly select words of wisdom from the 100s of books that I own. I have always been an avid reader and I also love to refer to books at random to receive the wisdom of the words that are present on the page. May you receive these words with the same joy that I discover in finding them.
“Identifying with our body – mistaking it for ourself – obscures the sense of inner space even more than identifying with our thoughts does. Just as open-mindedness allows for a greater sense of space, so, too, does an open-bodiedness – the feeling of openness in and around the body. I wonder if this unusual term might ever enter ordinary usage, such as, “Have you met Lucy? She has a wonderful, open-bodies approach to life”. Or perhaps the opposite: “Yes, I agree, Darren was not very open-bodied to the new change when we talked about it”. Although it sounds strange to the ear now, who knows a century from now?
While the term open-bodied is not important, the experience of feeling open space in and around the body is. Most of us don’t pay a lot of attention to the sensations inside our bodies unless we are hungry, injured, or ill. We tend to see our body as something very solid and dense. Yet, as we have learned from Dan Siegel’s description of interoception in Chapter 1 and Eugene Gendlin’s discovery of felt sensing, described in Chapter 2, our bodies have a tremendous native sensitivity and intelligence. As we discover the value of turning into the interior of our body, we also begin to realise that our body is not as solid as we imagine. It is in fact, filled with space.”