Are You Living a Short Distance from Your Body?

Wednesday, July 5, 2023

There’s a line from The Dubliners, a collection of 15 short stories by James Joyce, that gets batted around frequently, leading me to believe it touches a nerve:

“Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body.”

Never having read The Dubliners myself, I don’t know who Mr. Duffy is or why he lives a short distance from his body, but he has nevertheless taken up a small residence in my head, as well. Living a short distance from your body is such a provocative statement. In the most experiential and philosophical of ways, what does it mean to leave your body behind?

While Mr. Duffy is disembodied and cut off from his direct experience, I’ll tell you who isn’t: first graders playing baseball! With this group, there is no separation from the experience in their head and the expression in their body. Oh, the boredom of the kid out in left field who just laid right down in the grass. Oh, the passion of the one who takes baseball so seriously he’s catching imaginary fly balls in between plays and winging them in to first or third. Oh, the dejection of the kid who just struck out, dragging his feet back to the dugout, drawing the defeat out dramatically.

Embodied. I just like the word and all that it implies. It’s a bountiful word that captures how we can take an experience in so fully it becomes a part of us. Like grief; it so often feels like our literal heart is being wrenched to pieces. And it’s not just experiences. We can also embody our values. Some people embody their values so deeply -- like kindness, say, or stinginess – it saturates their entire being. They become walking Compassion or walking Miserliness. And then there’s feedback. We can even take feedback so fully into our tissues we start to confuse it with who we are. Embodying something makes it real, for good or bad. There is some caution in that.

To be disembodied, however…we can take from the Mr. Duffy quote that living a short distance from your body isn’t a good thing (even as developing a little impulse control around the body probably is). For one, it means we’re living a far less informed life since much of the available, valuable information can only be retrieved through the portals of our senses. Mindfulness, ironically, is the skill we use to get out of our mind and back into our body, this portal of our senses, where we will find our actual life. That mixed message is why writer, community advocate and meditation teacher Sebene Selassie prefers to think of mindfulness as “embodied awareness.” Embodied awareness. That is full-body living. Can you almost feel your pores coming alive as you think about what that would be like?

The power of the ground you are standing on
After a few epic failures, Scott O’Neill, the successful executive and leader of NBA, NLH, and NFL teams and leagues discovered that being grounded in the direct experience of the body is the most productive place to come to terms with reality and make good decisions. It’s why he wrote Be Where Your Feet Are: Seven Principles to Keep You Present, Grounded and Thriving, how he found his way back from a few epic failures and the place from which he went on to build numerous successes.
Interestingly, being grounded, aware, and in direct experience also describes the state of Zen which for many is simple shorthand for peace. It makes sense. To be able to drop the resistance and simply be with our experience, whatever it may be, is both a fully embodied life and a place of equanimity. Who wouldn’t want that? Mr. Duffy, maybe it’s time to feel your feet on the ground.
 
To our bodies,
 
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