Having a Body vs. Being a Body

Owning, rather than being, a body is a Western cultural invention that prevents whole-person healing, living, and restoration. It means that there is no other way of being human except through our fundamental embodiment.

The idea of body ownership (as in, "I have a body") is a curious metaphor that goes along with the fictional “body-mind” metaphor, both of which developed in Western industrialized cultures. The Western notion of ownership, and the fact that people can own many physical possessions, make it seem natural for Westerners to talk about the body as a thing they possess.

In the societal domain of human rights, this ownership metaphor is an important ally for political movements advocating for the rights of women, non-whites, minority religions, people with disabilities, and LGBTQ individuals. For a woman, man, transgender person, Black or Hispanic person, or Jew or Muslim, it seems essential to say clearly that all individuals have personal rights to their own bodies that cannot be taken away by laws, patriarchal restrictions, hatred, endemic violence or discrimination. Body ownership language has an important place to defend one’s personal integrity.

In human rights discussions, however, people are talking not just about the body as a thing to which we own the rights, but about our right to our own personal thoughts and feelings, to our unique human identity and value regardless of external appearance, physical limitations, religion, style of dress, gender orientation, or skin color.

Generally speaking, however, the “mind-body” distinction puts the so-called “body” at a distance from the so-called “mind.”

Some of this kind of thinking comes out of centuries of Western cultural, religious, and philosophical distinctions in which thoughts are considered ethereal and non-corporeal and completely different from the actual flesh, pulsations, and sinews of the body[ii].

In spite of the gains achieved in the rights of women, LGBTQ individuals, and people of color, there still persists an endemic cultural bias that the body (and therefore the person living in that body) is a thing. The pervasiveness of how we look at bodies, and especially our gaze at girls' and women’s bodies, perpetuates “learning to experience the body as a thing outside the self, something a woman has rather than something she is.” (Carolyn Knapp, Appetites: Why Women Want. New York, NY: Counterpoint, 2003, p. 96). This objectifying gaze includes not only men looking at women but women looking at each other and at themselves.

Experiences of the body in non-Western cultures

The objectification of the body, while predominant in the Western world, is not the case in all cultures.

Research shows that West Africans and East Asians, for example, test higher on measures of interoceptive (body sensation) awareness compared to Europeans and North Americans. Most Africans have a cultural worldview that emphasizes the holistic connection between the head and the heart. Traditional Asian medical practices respect the shared contribution of body states and mental states for health and well-being.

It’s true that inhabitants of Western culture are too busy, too focused, too preoccupied, and too much in their heads to stop, slow down, and feel themselves. But the effects of fictional cultural dichotomies like “mind vs. body”—built into everyday language—are an unseen, pervasive, and perverse influence that keeps us away from feeling ourselves.

Pain and whole-person embodiment

People who experience migraines, for example, may refer to the headache as “it,” as in, “Why is it happening now?” Accepting the migraines as part of one’s whole self and learning via felt experience to pay attention to the muscle tension in the neck and shoulders that precedes the onset of an attack, on the other hand, can lead to a reduction of pain and stress. Migraine-savvy individuals do not have migraines; they are migraine people.

In the case of pregnancy, the language is more favorable to whole-person embodiment. People say “I am pregnant,” rather than “I have a pregnancy.” That changes, however, when it comes around to giving birth.

One research study compared a group of non-anesthetized women during childbirth who were instructed to just feel the sensations of each contraction as it came and went with a group who were given methods to distract themselves from the sensations. The latter group was being asked, essentially, to separate the “mind” from the “body.” The women who were asked to attend to the felt experience had significantly less self-reported pain than the women in the distraction group.

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You might think that if you pay direct and undivided attention to pain or discomfort, it would make it worse. Being with our felt experience, on the contrary, changes the experience: The pain begins to feel less intense when we actually feel it and accept that it is a part of our embodiment in the present moment. Feeling ourselves in this embodied way can also change our thoughts about that experience.

Choosing your framework

Which of these cultural frameworks best fits you? Are you more likely to say that you have a body? Or, do you tell yourself that “I am my body?” Are you more likely to say, “I have a virus” or “I am sick and contagious?”

Or, what about these statements?: “My body has gained a lot of weight recently,” vs. “I am getting fat.” Or, “I have diabetes,” vs. “I am a diabetic who requires a special diet and regular injections. I have special needs. It’s just part of who I am.”

Embracing and accepting what is actually happening in the whole body can often lead to relief, and sometimes, a profound change that contributes to healing. Denial of those experiences, pretending that they are not important, or acting like the “mind” is safe and sound even though the “body” is sick, is pretty much a guarantee that the symptoms—and the accompanying illness condition—will get worse.