EMBODIED VS. DISEMBODIED DECISION-MAKING
CONTEXT
I believe it may be true to say that I have had some version of the following conversation nearly every single day for over a year now. It is probably the most important foundational understanding that I have learned set, in conversation as in life.
The transcript below comes from a recent Mirror Session. But the insights delivered are like a garden, tended carefully over years of conscious living + observing. I hope that, when you read it, you can pick flower or a fruit along the way.
I hope that this post serves you, that it opens + expands you. I hope that it reminds you of an underlying truth worth living into. I hope that you enjoy it.
TRANSCRIPT
If any of this is true, then it is going to require a complete reorientation of your personal relationship to yourself. It’s going to take surrendering to those aspects of your being that make no sense to anyone, least of all to you. And it’s going to take a great deal of faith in some narrative so far beyond what you can see through the filter of your logic.
Really what you need - what you need most of all - is to learn how to follow the guidance system that is built into the very structure of your being. And this guidance system is not mental. It really isn’t. This brings us back to the important distinction between mind + body.
CONTINUED…
You + I, we are very smart people. We’ve been trained to be smart, and we’ve been very good students of that training. Even though in our guts we’ve known that this ‘smartness’ is not the whole story on intelligence, we’ve done a very good job of accommodating all of these strategies all the same. And we’ve seen them work, too, so it’s become rather hard to argue with that, right? “Results speak!” Yet still, here we are - wandering about in our individual wildernesses, saying, “Gosh… There’s got to be another way…”
So the mind is that part of ourselves that is going to continuously (at least at first) argue with us. It’s going to say, “No, these strategies are in place for a reason; they’ve been proven.” Logic, intellect - these things can get right in the way of who + how we really need to be.
CONTINUED…
Unfortunately, we’ve been told that this is exactly how we’re supposed to navigate experience - we’ve been convinced from the very beginning that this is how we’re supposed to make decisions. “It’s easy,” Logic says. “Just copy-and-paste whatever has worked for that guy over there.” You want to build a business? No problem. There’s a strategy for that. You wanna live in a certain place, get married, go to a certain school, take a course? We know to make these sorts of decisions from our minds.
But Human Design reminds us that the mind is not in fact an appropriate resource for confident decision-making. To put a finer point on this, it reminds us that the mind is strictly never the appropriate faculty for decision-making. And that kind of turns our entire experience on its head, doesn’t it?? Even if this assertion is only possibly true, it changes everything.
Human Design confirms for us something that every human intuitively knows at their foundation (whether they are consciously aware of it or not), that: all of our wisdom - all of our actual knowing - the true in-built facility for appropriate decision-making - is held, in fact, in the body - in the physical body itself.
CONTINUED…
Well… that’s a real pain in the butt, because the total weight of our modern experience has trained us to dissociate from the body! I mean, think about it. For most of us, the body is little more than a burden to bear - a necessary evil of the human evolutionary experience. And so we pay just enough attention to the body to protect against becoming fat, or falling ill. But for most of us, that’s about it.
We, to such a great extent (and unfortunately to our detriment), have become so far removed from our own bodies - carried away into the world of intellect + comparison. We have become disembodied, alienated almost totally from our basic nature + its talents.
Instead, we live inside of this great Concept Cloud of our own minds + mental calculation, primarily + typically removed from the more grounded, embodied expressions (and impressions) of our own important lives.
But don’t misunderstand me. The mind is an invaluable resource. It’s just that we’ve misused it. We’ve misunderstood its role + we have given it primary authority over our lives.
We’ve awarded it a role for which it simply isn’t qualified.
CONTINUED…
Really, the appropriate role for the mind is as Relaxed Witness. The mind is here to simply Relax + Enjoy the Ride. Its ideal position is not that of Driver, but as Passenger. If we were to play this analogy out, it would be completely relaxed, in the back seat of a stretch limousine, simply enjoying the ride. It would be looking out the window, and it would be lost in wonder at everything that it sees.
You get a sense for this quality of wonder-filled witnessing-of-experience in children. You can remember that childlike quality that has no interest in strategy or calculation - a quality that lives entirely in this space of whimsy + of wonder, where everything is not only what it seems, but also so much more.
And this is also why children learn at such an alarming rate compared to adults. I’ve seen statistics on this - they’re just remarkable. This is because the more we ‘know,’ the less we’re learning. The more we ‘know,’ the less room we have left inside to honestly receive.
So the mind is not here to know things; it’s here to not-know things, and then to be amazed at what it sees as a result. It’s designed to be lost in wonder in the back seat of the car (your body), simply enjoying the ride of lived-experience.
When the mind is allowed to relax in that position, what happens is that it can begin to learn! It can take in a heck of a lot more information, and it can do it creatively, too.
CONTINUED…
One small step beyond this, we find the most ultimate expression of the mind’s true genius: communication. Which means that my mind isn’t here for me to figure myself out or to solve the riddle of life or to achieve or succeed or to appear smart. It isn’t here for me to make good business decisions with or to manipulate money with.
My mind is here for you: my mind is here to tell you about what I’ve seen along the way of living. And your mind is here for the other as well. This is how we have been designed to network. The mind is a networking system - it is a mechanism of networking. But that’s not how we’ve known to use it.
Instead, we have turned all of that amazing energy against ourselves. We didn’t know that we were doing this. We didn’t choose to. It was trained into us. It was habitualized + imprinted. It was how we learned to survive a technological civilization.
But this programming has had a profound (and sticky) effect. We’ve become self-obsessive. We’ve become so desperate to figure ourselves out, to do life right.
We’ve learned to compare ourselves to others + to measure ourselves against arbitrary values that really have nothing whatsoever to do with personal truth.
CONTINUED…
At best, when it comes to decision-making, the mind can weigh pros + cons, and then attempt an educated guess. At best. We never gain access to confident knowing in the space of the mind. So it is quite obviously not the appropriate resource for confident decision-making. It is not the appropriate body of intelligence with which to navigate + direct the course of our lives.
That role belongs to the physical human form, to the body of experience + an intelligence that is sensory. Masterful decision-making is a function not of mental calculation, but of sensitivity + of feeling.
Consider what a difference this could make if it were true.