Partaking in Our Human Potential

“To know the body is to know awareness. To know awareness in its pure state is to know the awakened state.”

-Reginald Ray

I think often about the western experience and how our culture defines success. I cannot help but place responsibility of our disembodiment on the corporate emphasis of our nation.
The skills previously needed for survival and honorable ranking are no longer valued. We no longer foster emotional sensitivity, cultivate intuition or value sensory awareness. Conceptual thinking, rationality and analysis are required for success today, and our environment increasingly contributes to a cognitively reliant state. We have our cars to tell us which direction we are heading, our crosswalks to tell us if it’s safe to cross or not, our education system ranks our children on memorization instead of creative problem solving. All of which separate us from our felt sense and fundamental awareness.

This holding of our rational mind as superior reinforces the depersonalization of modern culture. The more we retreat into our rational brain the more we disregard our body, the vessel of our experience. This depersonalization alienates us from our bodies, our experience and our world. It contributes to a culture that marginalizes women, disregards the feminine, depletes the land, objectifies children, and mechanizes health care. “I would suggest further that the more disembodied we are, the more mentally unbalanced we become.”

To partake in our full human potential we must step outside of our thinking mind and experience our life fully embodied. To be fully embodied involves full presence and full awareness, such that each and every situation is experienced in freshness. If we approach life from our rational mind, we objectify, dominate and react from past thoughts, a false sense of reality. When we shift our awareness from our head and into our body it is impossible to objectify our environment. The distinction can be felt as emotionally and perceptually rich. We discover we are not above or dominant at all. We are embedded within the tapestry of all living things, interdependent of natural life itself. Interdependence is a felt concept, not a cognitive concept.