When we're talking about embodiment, or whatever, what is this "the body" we're talking about?
Because I haven’t found one, and I’ve looked a lot.
I can see the bit of tissue we call an "arm" ... I can feel it, outside and in ... I can close my eyes and feel the sensation there, though there are times when the location of that sensation is seriously in question, or gone altogether.
(Has anyone else experienced that last bit? Like in some ways a felt sensation has a place, a location, but from another perspective it's nowhere in particular. That is to say it's as much everywhere as anywhere. Not in an overwhelming way, just in a way that isn't what I thought it was initially.)
So I can see — and feel, and propriocept and on and on with the variances in types of perception — an arm, an abdomen, thousands of small streams the yogis saw and called "nadis," skin, space outside the skin (or what appears as such, either way an ability to feel what isn't touching me but is close), the experience of a surveillance called "the nervous system" ...
But nowhere have I found a "body."
If I'm sharing about embodiment, you'd think I know what the f it is. But I don't.
My inquiries keep get simpler and simpler.
My best definition right now would have to do something with a *quality of attention.* The body is a word we use to point to a particular way of being, as in: it's *not* being lost in thought; it's something else.
...
I love this, by the way. In case that's not obvious. For me, seeing deeper into the heart of what I'm doing is the ultimate liberation, even as, or perhaps precisely to the degree by which, the ground falls out from beneath my once sturdy (seeming) stance.