Physical Intelligence - Day 40
CityVP Manjit
It was a post by Andrea de la Rica that I read today called Mordiscos de realidad that made me realize that I do not have a 24/7 view of health, I have piecemeal view of health. I treat regular medicals as onerous as having my dentist check my teeth and I don't view this health check as a gift but as an interruption, one that is something invariably it is my family who have cajole me into following. Andrea's post translates to "Bitter Reality" and for a person that young and who celebrates her work with a Spanish football team, her buzz shows a totally different perspective.
Why have reluctance to go to a medical? The reality is that it is not that I assume I am healthy, but not having to discover something that I am not sure I can handle. I am not being physically intelligent if I am paranoid about health, but I am intelligent about health when I am actually intelligent about it, and Andrea's buzz proved to me that there are things that I treat as "out of sight is out of mind". Yet the time to take care is before in terms of prevention rather than later in terms of cure. That was Andrea's point as she wrote a heartfelt and highly personal buzz, in which she put the awareness of others ahead of the health battle she has revealed in her buzz.
I have come to view physical intelligence based more on the hour of the day I pay attention to physical fitness i.e. to go to the gym or exercise. Yet physical intelligence is a 24/7 thing and it is "always-on" - so I recognize that other than those who take a whole system view of health, the rest of us do not take an integrated view of it. It is not as if we should be obsessed with fitness or good health, but that we develop a mindfulness about that informs our waking hours and leads to greater quality of sleeping hours. If I am not mindful about a health-check then I am far from being physically intelligent.
The reality is that we do rise with a story that concerns us but fall away when other stories command our attention in the days and months that follow. That is why we don't take physical intelligence seriously enough, because there is always so much commanding our attention, that we cease to be mindful of our own health state, and then we gamble on that attention - assuming that the risk is minimal if we focus on things that matter to us. The irony of what matters to us is then interrupted by a buzz which brings us to a bitter and brutal reality - and I have read a couple of buzzes that fall into this category, even if they are rare compared to what normally commands our collective attention.
Maybe the word here is not actually mindfulness but bodyfulness - because it is more than what commands our attention or how we relax our minds and open our thinking to peace and flow. Bodyfulness sounds appropriate and maybe an even greater form of physical intelligence than mindfulness. Hearing our own body and being present to it does not have to be an effort, and there are ways of exercising as free as an animal rather than as complicated a human being. When I looked for what others have thought about "bodyfulness" they provide a different perspective but interesting nevertheless - though it is more cognitive than physical as thinking :
For me physical intelligence as a"bodyfulness" is treating life as an opportunity to breathe better, to find natural means of exercising without calling this exercise, simple as walking rather than taking a car - or engaged in physical movement in the form of play rather than a deliberate movement called exercise and of course to teach the senses to pay more attention to health in the environment, as well as listening to one's own body talk, which is more closer to what is treated as a progam like the video podcast above rather than a presence and natural flow of life choices that are bodyful and mindful. There is also yoga but for me bodyfulness seems more like a term that should be devoted to the senses being aligned with what our body is telling us and how we direct our body and the cause and effect of those choices. These simpler associations initially may be blocked by basic habits and rituals but they are most obvious to me as I now think about this.
Dissociation from our body is discussed in this video entitled "Embodied Presence", and this is a video I found today which may not actually be obvious if we are not aware of our own bodies. I recognize that I am not aware of mine because Andrea's buzz nudged at not taking the practice of a regular health-check seriously enough and becoming aware of how I am not engaged in prevention and simply paying dice with physical intelligence :
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