Why is it so difficult to trust in my bodily information? If it is not related to the 5 traditional senses – we as humans are reluctant to trust our bodies.
Is it primarily due to habits – how human beings adapts and familiar with our bodies and at the same time we are so distant and unfamiliar with the information we receive from our somasensory system. We tend to ignore obvious sensoric information about the state of our bodily reality and dare not to believe them. Trusting your gutfeeling is somehow thought of as elusive and strange – usually going with your gutfeeling confirms your sense of the situation. So what is it actually – the gutfeeling – if you have a hightend sense – somehow a raised ability to sense the situation and emotions in a room – your gutfeeling could be a sort of additional sense. Since we perceive our world, surroundings other human beings through our somasensory system – we should trust in the information given. But often we do not – maybe because we as humans have not been taught how to decode the information. We have very little knowledge as to how the decoding should be done – this is an action that you have to seek to learn. It is only within yourself through your embodied experiences – you will be able to find the somasensoric information – this information you should seek to decode.
The bodily awareness For Maurice Merleau-Ponty
“The body is not one more among external objects” (MP, 1945, 92). Merleau-Ponty draws the distinction between the objective body made of muscles, bones and nerves and the lived body, that is, the body that we experience in pre-reflective awareness. He argues that the lived body is not an object that can be perceived from various perspectives, left aside or localized in objective space. More fundamentally, the lived body cannot be an object at all because it is what makes our awareness of objects possible.
The lived body is understood in terms of its practical engagement with the world. The bodily space is a space of actions endowed with existential meanings, of ways of existing towards objects. Your body has a direction – is directed towards objects. The body schema therefore consists in a sensorimotor function. The unity of the lived body derives from comprehensive bodily purposes. The action needs not be performed, but can remain virtual movements, what Siewert (2005) calls bodily know-how (i.e. practical knowledge of how to act with or towards a part of one’s body). Aiming to decode your bodily perceived information is in a way to practice to distance yourself from the reflective filter that is your thoughts and conscious handling of your perceptional experience. Investigating what actual perceptional experiences occur within you – without the usual consciousness reflection – doing this just once or twice will show you not only how challenging it can be – maybe also what you miss out on because of habits that you forgot you had.
Kaputte 