Disclaimer: this one is a heady academic one, I couldn’t help it. And so, references are indicated in parentheses throughout and are listed at the end. -P.W.
Every once and awhile a familiar sensation rises from the deepest recesses of my stomach, a place that feels as deep as the core of the Earth—deeper than I can fathom—an iron core I didn’t know I could feel inside my body. It has the combined gravity of everything I could imagine imploding on itself so that I never existed. On the outside, I feel like Jabba the Hutt raging with PMS. I feel ugly and nauseous, with the inertia of 1008 grocery bags on a full bus during rush hour at the peak of an ever hot summer day. I used to say that being single is like baking myself an elegant fruit pie from scratch, pulling it hot out of the oven and delightfully cutting a single slice for me. In actuality being single felt more like lying to myself as I ate a stale apple pie from No Frills out of the box (if No Frills ever made apple pies).
Why do I feel so desperately lonely?
- “I think”, over “I am”
In the Samyutta-Nikāya, a monk likens “I am” to the smell of a flower—the smell is neither the petals, the color, nor the fibres of the plant, just the smell itself (1). My yoga philosophy teacher used to describe this as an am-ness: a primordial state that just is.
“I am”, my body.
My body just is.
My mind, however, is “I think”.
Maine de Biran described the transition from sleep to wakefulness as a state that is beyond cognitive reach, one that presents as a unique opportunity to reexperience our primordial state (2). At birth, our worlds begin as an “I am”: pure existence—a field of needs and present moments that we totally and utterly adhere to, if not completely merge with. This field has also been described as emotions and impulses void of subject-object distinction—vague forms, images, and reactions cocreated with external and internal stimuli (3). All is subject–subject. This field begins to organize itself: through a slow process (with our patient caregivers), we start to experience events as if one after the other, from which we establish a sense of time. Language develops shortly after as a tool for sense-making. We become fertile soil for the birth of “I think”: Ego and everything non-Ego is simultaneously born. “I think” presides over everything that does not belong to it (perhaps it incessantly consumes to accumulate more belongings, and we hence birth colonial capture and capitalistic modernity, but I need not digress here). In its ceaseless desire to distinguish itself, “I think” isolates from “I am”.
Why do I feel so desperately lonely?
Because “I am” is now invisible: it is ungraspable, uncertain, unstable, perpetually withheld from my reach. “I am” is always becoming and persists at the end of time. “I am” is inexhaustible movement, relationship, fluxing transition between states. But “I am” is breathing me when “I think” I am breathing it. It is an affirmation of my existence. It is Change. Always changing (thank God, always changing).
Octavia Butler writes, “all that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is change” (4). Perhaps God wanted to experience love—re-knowing, re-union, and re-turn—so s/he fragmented themself into illusory separations to will themself back to wholeness (5). Brahma birthed and then cut Maya (illusion) into an innumerable number of pieces in a game of each piece remembering Brahma (6).
“I think”, therefore I forgot that “I am”, perhaps.
- Mind over Body
In the 17th Century, “I think” as preconditional and superior to “I am” went viral thanks to Descartes (7). The context was a mechanical century: the body was framed as a complex machine that functions via material interactions and finally dissembles at death. Descartes considered thinking to be distinct from the body-machine: ”I think” could not be reduced to the material conditions of the rest of the body and was, instead, rescued from it on the seat in the pineal gland (8). To Descartes, “I think” came first. Mind became subject, body became object: Mind-over-Body.
Mind-over-Body is a double edged sword: Mind-over-Body beliefs can result in ignoring physical and/or psychological discomfort to achieve high performance, at the cost of health (9). The immune system, epigenetics, and microbiome-gut-brain axis all empirically denigrate the Mind-over-Body idea (10). Still, our tendency is to reduce our body to an automaton to preside over—to control, to keep in check.
But what if the body governed the mind instead, controlling and keeping in check what we could use to sense-make? In trauma, intense emotional reactions to events interfere with our ability to integrate those experiences into our memory. Our body bypasses our higher-order (neural) processing, reducing our memory to fragments (11) that may appear as visceral sensations (e.g., anxiety) and/or images (e.g., flashbacks; 12).
In Traditional Chinese Medicine, the Dai Mai is the horizontal meridian in our bodies that stores our trauma: what we cannot feel, process and/or integrate that would otherwise compromise the day-to-day functioning of our viscera. Dai Mai literally keeps things below our belt, creating dampness to stagnate movement when we are not ready for it. However, the understanding is that when we feel safe, we would restore flow; chronic stagnation manifests physical illness. When we are fragmented, we cannot discern “the big picture” within and without, particularly in new contexts that we would otherwise not consider harmful.
Audre Lorde writes, “the white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The black goddess within each of us—the poet—whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free” (13). Feeling is the longing of our forgotten self’s return.
Why do I feel so desperately lonely?
I am not a trauma specialist by any means, but I can say that when I am triggered, it feels as though my body is stuck in a time portal that my mind hasn’t caught up to yet. I rage at my partner for avoiding conflict after forgetting his half of the chores we agreed on this week. Meanwhile, my body is feeling the flashback of my parents who never apologized or repaired fractures with me because any semblance of an elder prostrating to a child was considered a defiance of culturally-endorsed social codes. Perhaps emotional neglect, then, felt like a risk to my life. Perhaps defying social codes, at another time, was a risk to theirs. My body is also flashing back as an inheritance from my grandparents; on both sides of my family they were abandoned by their partners during the Communist Revolution. After reuniting over 20 years later until their time of death, they never spoke about that fracture and what it did to their hearts. Perhaps speaking honestly about matters of the heart, during a time of social-political upheaval and surveillance, was a risk to life. My mind, however, cannot distinguish why my partner’s avoidance feels like life or death. I respond as if it were life-or-death. I rage so that I am too big to be forgotten.
But if I could source the courage to face what my body is trying to say, I realize that she is trying to protect me, as she always had, and that this particular response in this time and partnership would only create more distance, and sooner or later I would be looking for stale apple pies at No Frills.
- Self over Other
Embodiment is a praxis of re-posturing and -orientation that sees the body as the existential foundation of culture (14). Embodiment is an indeterminate commitment to presently engaging with the world—it has no end. Embodiment is healing the perception that what starts in the body ends in objects—no, our bodies are enmeshed and interdependent with a world of subject-subject. An “I am” kind of world.
The promises of modernity continue to convince us that we are master possessors of a mechanical world separate from us. We coexist with supposedly passive beings, that we rank according to their likeness to Self: animate over inanimate, human over nonhuman, binary over spectrums. Anything Other is lesser-than, manipulatable, and controllable; hence commodifiable, colonizable, dehumanizable; Self over Other.
What does commitment to engaging with a collective body that also produces AI, corporate greed, environmental destruction and global violence mean? It means radically accepting that I am a fractal microcosm of that whole. It means being honest to myself about using ChatGPT to render photos of my cats playing mahjong, when the query consumes more than 500mL of clean drinking water (15). It means I make Amazon Prime purchases because I dread weaving through traffic among Others to the closest superstore, where I have to push a shopping cart and stand in long lineups behind even more Others. I spend even more time making online supplement, herb, and book purchases to feel better about my body, while the plastic packaging produced along the way will outlive any body on the planet. It means choosing to invest in a relationship with my neighbor who just told my Chinese body that immigrants are what the real problem is in Toronto. It means the collective body needs healing, just as much as my body does, and my body is part of it. It means it is easier to sever myself from the people and beliefs that “I think” are the problem, rather than truly see who they are: because being able to truly see others requires us to first honestly see ourselves.
Why do I feel so desperately lonely?
Because this feeling is an opportunity to discern real from unreal. Because this feeling is an invitation to quiet “I think”/Mind/Self, and feel all of the moments I abandoned myself. Because this feeling is a love so unconditional it offers me the freedom to turn away. Because this feeling is a portal to the collective—to other bodies finding our way back to ourselves and through that, to each other. And If I have the courage to sit with this feeling long enough, I might experience a fleeting moment of “I am” as if a flower longing to know the scent of itself.
*****
References:
- Gragnani, C. 1975. Birth, life, and death of the Ego. Buddhist Publication Society. Available at: https://www.urbandharma.org/pdf1/birthofego.pdf
- Maine de Biran, FPG. 1954–1957. Journal. Edited by Henri Gouhier. Neuchâtel: Éd. de La Baconnière. 3 vols.
- Aloisi, A. 2024. Coenesthesia or the immediate feeling of existence: Maine de Biran and the problem of the unconscious between physiology and philosophy. Perspectives on Science 32: 47–69.
- Butler, O. 1993. Parable of the Sower. Four Walls Eight Windows.
- Walsch, ND. 1996. Conversations with God: an uncommon dialogue, Book 1. Deckle Edge. One of my favorite reads when I started my spiritual journey.
- This Hindu creation story is also described here: https://cynthiaoneillcpj.wordpress.com/2017/09/21/maya-and-brahman/
- Descartes, R. 1637. Discourse on the Method; origin of “I think therefore I am”.
- Mokrycke, S. and Li, H. 2015. Separation and reunion: a short history of mind-body dualism. History of Medicine 84. Available at: https://ojs.lib.uwo.ca/index.php/uwomj/article/download/4338/3504
- Schüler, et al. 2023. Mind-over-body beliefs in sport and exercise: a driving force for training volume and performance, but with risks for exercise addiction. Psychology of Sport and Exercise 68: 10262.
- Luas, G. 2017. All ‘in the mind’?: towards a new model of embodied mental health. Thesis (unpublished). Available at: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/40287/1/Fullversion-2017LucasGphdBBK.pdf
- Hovdestad, W.E. & Kristiansen, C.M. 1996. Mind meets body: on the nature of recovered memories of trauma. Women & Therapy 19: 31–45.
- Van der Kolk, B. 1994. The body keeps the score: memory and the evolving psychobiology of post traumatic stress. Harvard Review of Psychiatry 1: 253–265.
- Lorde, A. 1984. Sister Outsider. The Crossing Press.
- Csordas, T. 1993. Somatic modes of attention. Cultural Anthropology 8: 135–156.
- Ren, S. 2025. AI consumes a lot of water—but why?. TED Talk: https://news.ucr.edu/articles/2025/03/05/professors-ted-talk-warns-ais-hidden-water-costs