What a Body Knows

Finding wisdom in desire.

by Kimerer LaMothe, Ph.D.

Will Enlightenment Bring Me Instant Bliss?

As I began to read "Enlightenment Ain't What It's Cracked Up to Be," I realized that the author, Robert K.C. Forman, and I have a lot in common. As I continued to read, however, that thought shifted, and shifted again. Read More

The Real "Fat Trap"

In her Sunday Magazine article, Tara Parker Pope offers the latest scientific evidence for a "fat trap." People who become overweight, Pope concludes, are likely to stay that way for reasons that are largely biological and genetic. She calls it the fat trap. The real fat trap, however, is not biological or genetic. The real fat trap is the idea that diets work. Read More

Part Two: To Dance Is (More than Just) a Radical Act

To dance is more than just a radical act. It is generative. Dancing offers more than just a critical purchase on our mind over body, individual first, word-webbed, sedentary ways of living (as described in my previous post). Dancing is a primary resource for generating alternatives. One who dances knows otherwise. Read More

To Dance Is a Radical Act

To dance is a radical act. To think about dance, to study dance, or to practice dance in this 21st century is a radical act. Why? Because if dancing matters—if dancing makes a difference to how we humans think and feel and act—then dancing challenges the values that fund modern western cultures. How so? Read More

Addicted to Self-Denial: Can We Recover?

“There is no complete recovery from a fundamentalist childhood” (82). So writes Margaret Miles in her latest book, Augustine and the Fundamentalist’s Daughter. Miles was the first woman to receive tenure at Harvard Divinity School, the president of Graduate Theological Union, and… a fundamentalist? Read More

Can Running Make Us Better Humans?

I used to run—2, 3, 5 miles a day. I ran often. I loved it. Reading Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superatheletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen by Christopher McDougall, I remember. Read More

The Nature of Nature: For Us or Against Us?

I went on a walk this morning to survey the damage wrought to our land by the winds and rains of Hurricane Irene. I was also interested in exploring the impact on my imagination of a book that I recently read by Darryl Caterine called "Haunted Ground: Journeys through Paranormal America." Read More

What Love Can Be

If we are relational, bodily selves, responsible for creating and becoming our highest ideals, then how do we learn to love? The question, for me, is not abstract. It is one that I live daily. It is one that I was living, exploring, and pursuing intensely as I wrote Family Planting. Read More

Do You Want to Break Up with God?

My friend and former student at Harvard, Sarah Sentilles, just wrote a book about her experience of Breaking up with God. Most of the book is about the relationship that precedes the breakup and how intimate it is. Sentilles tells a story that lets you know how hard the rupture will be. Read More

What Is Mental Health?

What is mental health? I take my cue from the philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche. “Great health” is an ability to digest our experiences. Read More

When an Infant Is Dying

In January, at age nine months, Ronan was diagnosed with Tay Sachs disease, a progressive, genetic disease with no cure. Over the next couple of years, Ronan will slowly die. How are we to respond to such devastating news? How can we live in a world where such things happen? Read More

Spinoza and the Steers

I decided to spend some time with the philosopher, Benedict de Spinoza (1632-77), after coming upon his name, yet again, in another work of environmental philosophy. Contemporary writers are appealing to Spinoza for help in anchoring concepts of the natural world that will encourage human compassion for the earth as a whole. But is Spinoza helpful? Read More

Eat Less? Pass the Chips!

The government's recently released report on healthy eating is typical of our culture's responses to the obesity epidemic: it reinforces a way of thinking about a human self that is itself a contributing factor to the problems it purports to address. Read More

Tales of a Moose Mother

The fire storm unleashed by Amy Chua’s Wall Street Journal op-ed piece, "Why Chinese Mothers are Superior," swirls around a hot-button question that has dominated discussions of parenting and education since the 1960s: how do you help kids develop a strong self-esteem? Read More

Arguing for Peace

At this time of year, many citizens of the western world celebrate the winter solstice, with its returning light, as the coming of peace. The prince of peace is born.

Tell that to my five year old. He loves to argue. Why?

Give Thanks for Pain? You're Kidding

A question often arises in response to my book, What a Body Knows: what if my body is wrong? It isn't doing what I want it to do--it hurts! Where is the wisdom in that? Read More

Hit by a Hammer

On Saturday, a hammer hit me. In the face. Read More

Movement = Play = Love

Movement matters. Moving our bodily selves is not just about strengthening our muscles so that we can hold up our heads. How we move is about how we play. How we play is about how we learn. And what we are born to learn is how to love. Read More

When the Dish Breaks: An Internet Time Out

I think of myself as a technomoderate. While I sit at a computer for some time nearly every day, I do so selectively. I email regularly, blog periodically, and update my website from time to time. I surf the New York Times daily, and Facebook weekly. While writing, I invariably call upon google or amazon to help me find a source or research an idea. In all, I use the web in moderation, to get the job done, while living most of my life in the real world—or so I thought. Then we spent two weeks at the end of the summer without an internet connection. Two weeks? Read More

Hanging a Clothesline and Other New Moves

It has been three weeks since I did it: I hung a clothesline.

In the end, it was easy. I took the cotton cord Geoff bought at the local hardware store, walked into the backyard, and strung the line between two obliging birch trees. Five minutes later, the deed was done.

Why had I waited so long?

Sometimes, what our bodily selves know is not obvious. So it was with the case of the flu I contracted two weeks ago. It was a Monday evening. The symptoms began as soon as I pressed “publish” on my last blog entry. My skin felt hot and prickly. It hurt to move. I felt generally strange, askew in myself. I wondered: Does my bodily self know anything? My mind was blank. Read More

Radical Homemaking: A revolution in progress?

At the heart of Shannon Hayes's new book are a set of home visits Hayes made to twenty families and individuals whom she describes as radical homemakers. These people, she claims, are transforming home from a place of consumption to a place where women, men, and children work together to grow, make, and create what is vital to their living. What do we make of her claims? Is she promoting a nostalgic escape to a romanticized home life that never existed? Advocating a life of poverty and deprivation? Or perpetuating gender stereotypes that have trapped women in domestic drudgery, denying them the opportunity to share their talents with a larger public? Read More

When Social Brains Meet Screen Media

In her thoughtful and lively book, How Fantasy Becomes Reality, social psychologist Karen Dill deftly moves beyond the question of whether or not our use of screen media affects us. That debate, she confirms, is essentially over: it does. The more interesting question she asks is why we are so quick to deny such influence. Why are we so vulnerable to media effects? Read More

Why We Believe What We Believe

When surfing for answers to the questions of life’s meaning and purpose, the options dazzle and overwhelm. Every worldview tells a story about what is real and true. Every human tells a story about what a given religion or philosophy means and why it is right. Amidst a weave of stories, personal and communal, shapes of culture emerge, a religion, a philosophy, a way of life. How do we ever decide what to believe? Read More

Giving the Gift of Yourself

Lifelong passion may be about learning to love, yet it is not about learning to love in general, as honorable an activity as that may be. It is about learning to love and be loved by a particular person and doing it well. How do we do it? Read More

The Pleasures of Eating

We are biologically hardwired, aren’t we, to want more food, always more? The failures of our massive efforts in dieting away the pounds are proof. Aren’t they? Look again. If anything, the human digestive system is designed to maximize ourability to move, not our ability to take in food. Read More

A Walk: Finding Wisdom in Desire

A simple walk, but as I write it down, as I know I must, I find it has all the elements of the experience shift that enables us to find wisdom in our desires for food, sex, and spirit. If we can name such an experience shift, recognize it in ourselves, and cultivate it in our thinking and feeling and acting, then we can develop a powerful resource for participating consciously in becoming the people we are and want to be. Read More

Do What You Can--For the Earth

Biologist James Lovelock, author of the Gaia hypothesis, now 90, is not so sure we humans can slow our destruction of the natural world. As he says: “I don't think we're yet evolved to the point where we're clever enough to handle a complex a situation as climate change.” We have too much inertia. Our patterns are too entrenched. Is he right? Read More

Obesity Is Inevitable: Or Is It?

When it comes to obesity, our solutions are perpetuating the problem. Despite the apparent range of responses, all points on the spectrum share a common value that both drives modern western culture and renders obesity an inevitable component of contemporary life. What is that value? Read More

It's Not (Just) About Food: Moving Beyond the Religion of Thinness

I just read a book by a colleague of mine, and fellow PT blogger, Michelle Lelwica. Her book, Religion of Thinness, is brimming with insights on the sources and supports of eating disorders, including one I want to highlight here. You can’t (just) think your way out of an eating disorder.
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Kimerer L. LaMothe, Ph.D., is a philosopher, dancer, and mother of five. Her latest books are What a Body Knows: Finding Wisdom in Desire and Family Planting: A farm-fed philosophy of human relations.

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