Image: John Walker, in the ODT
December 12 – Body integration: this year, when did you feel the most integrated with your body? Did you have a moment where there wasn’t mind and body, but simply a cohesive YOU, alive and present?
I spend most of my time in my head: analysing, questioning, thinking, contemplating, anticipating, learning. I imagine the inside of my brain as an enormous book-lined room, with large sash windows letting in streams of natural light. A blazing wood fire, my favourite art and sculpture adorning the walls and tables, a desk housing an enormous computer and the superest, fastest broadband ever made. Occasionally, guests pop in and make themselves at home on the deep squishy sofas for lovely long chats: Simone de Beauvoir, Janet Frame, Douglas Adams, David Attenborough, Virginia Woolf, Picasso, Christopher Hitchens, Carl Sagan, Jeremy Paxman… I am most at home in this room (indeed, it is what I imagine my ‘heaven’ to be).
This year I have made a conscious and determined effort to leave this room. I can rationalise my way out of any physical endeavour, but to ‘just do it’, to lace up my shoes and move has been a revelation. Over skype a few months ago, Lisa explained that she ran with a mantra timed with her footfall: ‘right here, right now’. I love the meditative aspect of this: it keeps me present, aligned with my body and my brain, the physical exertion means I cannot think about anything but breathing, maintaining balance, keeping going.
I always thought runners were fucking mad. And as an occasional and unstructured jogger (at best), I hesitate to claim membership of this group. But I love that feeling when I have been ‘right here, right now’ for miles at a time and my brain, my body, my ‘me-ness’, the treadmill, the Housewife House music cease to exist as separate entities: it all merges into one with the universe, and all I can sense is my pounding heart.
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