Beyond Conjecture

On Living In the Body

This is my final post in my series on craft and perception.

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Seven years of pain. The story of how it happened was well rehearsed and ready to be told — the sharp thing in my back that started years prior.

That’s too long to be in pain, the massage therapist said.

I’d had massage therapists and physiatrists and personal trainers. I’d done yoga and stretches. He offered something entirely different. He called it “body work.”

Incense burning. Spa music playing low. My face in the cradle, trying to surrender, but it hurt. His hands cupped and scraped along my left ribs. I thought about the intercostal nerves — veins, arteries, nerves, that VAN acronym from med school boards. I probably got that question right. But knowing the anatomy didn’t make it hurt less.

I did think it was normal. That we’re all just managing the muscle tensions and aches of everyday life. Maybe it started with a rollerblading fall trying to impress a date, or maybe it crystallized during grief when my shoulders were perpetually hunched. I thought I just had to be okay with that.

And he was the first one to physically interrupt the cognitive errors. As his hands worked the fascia, something shifted. An old sorrow came unburied through the physical pain. It eased with each pull.

He explained how my neck on the left side connected to everything else. The tension in my feet was linked to the pain in my scapula; the neck pain to the torque in my hip from my psoas. Maybe it got tight from all the running I did trying to feel like I was accomplishing something. Or from sitting while studying, trying to turn facts into success. Things I thought were separate turned out to be connected.

What I remember most clearly is thinking: This is how I’ll move through the world now, addressing the accumulated tension instead of allowing it to become part of me. I can’t keep rejecting this body, treating it like something separate from me, something to disregard or punish for existing.

In high school, my career surveys always suggested massage therapist. I was drawn to the tangible feedback of touch. I liked the body and understanding its function. But I never pursued it. I loved the mind instead. I studied theology and philosophy, English, psychology and eventually science. I learned to see the self through ideas and thoughts.

I carried that preference into medicine. I learned the body in the cadaver lab. I memorized the course of nerves through tissue. I dissected muscles and found their attachments.

But that preserved body couldn’t tell me how anyone actually lived in theirs. You couldn’t see how their life had been written into their muscles. You couldn’t find where they’d stored their stress, their grief, the way they braced against the world. You couldn’t see the sensation that reminded someone of a lover’s touch, or find the tension in the left shoulder that grew with every work deadline. The cadaver was an intricate body yet somehow it missed the weight of life.

We’re surrounded by practitioners trying to solve this disconnect. The yoga teacher, the personal trainer, the physical therapist—they’re all asking similar questions in different languages. How do we get you to feel your body again, as if you’ve somehow drifted apart from it?

Because maybe we have. And maybe that split started a long time ago.

The Western world has been priming us for this disconnect for centuries. Descartes argued we don’t really have bodies — or at least, that we can’t be sure we do. “I think, therefore I am,” he declared, carving the mind away from the flesh¹. And he was only continuing Plato’s question: is it the mind or is it the body? The body became a “probable conjecture,” a machine to be managed². It was a philosophy that built empires and modern medicine, spectacular achievements to be certain.

But it’s as if every body worker since has been answering him with their hands: I move, therefore I can be. Their practice is a response to what Descartes missed — that our internal representations of pleasure and pain and how we move through those are the self’s fundamental way of knowing itself. And with some kind of bodily intervention, those representations can be changed.

And there’s a growing body of work trying to explain how. Bessel van der Kolk argues the body keeps the score, that trauma is written into tissue. Lisa Feldman Barrett suggests the body doesn’t just store pain but actively interprets its signals to construct our emotional experience. And then there’s this other layer I keep thinking about—the idea that what we experience as pain might follow patterns. Vector fields, oscillations, the same mathematics that describe neural activity also describing how sensation moves through this three-dimensional body. I don’t know if that’s true, but I like the possibility. That embodiment could be understood through physics and consciousness studies. That there might be a language for this that I haven’t learned yet.

What all of these people are doing — the bodyworker, the trauma researcher, the physicist — is trying to find access points. Ways to get at something that feels both obvious and impossibly complex.

Years before I lay on that table, I read about a former Episcopalian priest who would lie naked in front of a mirror during her prayers to God. I wonder what it would be like if we all offered that kind of vulnerability to what we believe is the highest ideal. What looks like total surrender is somehow an invitation back to self.

Just before I started the bodywork, I was in a hot yoga session during a heavy period of emotional pain. Lying on my back in the final pose, drenched in sweat, eyes closed. I was trying to relax but my mind kept thinking about all the ways I was leaving an old life behind. When I felt hands on my shoulders, I flinched — I felt bad because I was gross and sweaty. The instructor said something soft as she pressed my shoulders back and adjusted my arms. “Breathe into your shoulders”, she said. “Let them relax.”

And for a moment, they did.

I’m searching for the people who practice from that place. Who use their work to bridge what never really needed to be separate.

1. Descartes, R. (1637). Discourse on the Method, Part IV. In The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, & D. Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), Vol. 1, p. 127.

2. Citation: Descartes, R. (1641). Meditations on First Philosophy, Meditation VI. In The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, & D. Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), Vol. 2, pg 55.