Body-Mind-Soul or All Three Together
Last week, I attended Dr. Gabor Maté’s talk in Istanbul. Reading someone’s writings is one thing, but being in the same space and listening to them speak is a completely different experience. One way or another, we are a combination of body, gesture, voice, and timing, and sometimes even the small pause before a person answers a question can carry a whole narrative in itself.
Gabor Maté is one of today’s holistic-thinking doctors who does not separate psychology— or in other words, emotions and thoughts—from the body. This separative thinking is a product of our modern systems; originally, there was no such division. Looking back at Plato’s works, we come across thoughts like,
“The real mistake is having separate doctors for the soul and the body.” This was also shared by Nihan Kaya, a writer who includes the body in her contemplations.
Separating the soul from the body, the problem from the solution, or seeing everything as a sequential cause-and-effect relationship is a highly dysfunctional approach in the long run. The methods we use to alleviate symptoms momentarily become habits over time, and by suppressing the root cause, we end up dealing with even greater issues. In any journey of healing or self-discovery, it is essential to involve the body in the process. To exclude the body is to leave our earthly existence out of the equation—and given that we spend our lives on this earth, this is a realization that shows how illogical such an approach can be.
Although we often say “body, mind, soul” in everyday language, categorizing these three doesn’t truly mean much. Humans may need to break things into parts in order to understand and define wholeness, but we are capable of thinking deeply enough to recognize that many of our problems stem from squeezing this wholeness into separate layers. The fact that we can understand this concept verbally but fail to apply it in practice or in solving our problems stems from the same mistake: even though we know we shouldn’t separate the three, we stop at just reading or saying, “Yes, they’re right.”
However, starting to think with our bodies right now is the first step toward realizing this wholeness. When we try to make assumptions about a state without experiencing it through the body, we waste unnecessary energy. Instead, we need to directly involve the body in the experience. But isn’t the body always involved in every experience? Without your body, you can’t drink water, eat, walk, make love, attend a class, or even sit in meditation. Our existence in the world is tied to the body. So what does it mean to involve the body in the experience?
It means including the body in action with an awakened consciousness. And to cultivate this wakefulness, we must regularly nourish the body with conscious movements, much like feeding it with food. This means fostering the body’s inner perception, its internal awareness, and being able to see and understand it from within without looking in the mirror. But not interpreting—because the body gives us simpler, more direct signals. Its language is clear, and to make space for this clarity in our lives, it may help to consider that the mind is also in the body.
It’s hard to change familiar definitions. As humans, in order to create a common language of communication, we will, of course, continue to define the concepts of mind, body, and soul with separate words. But even though their words are separate, we can feel that the three are not separate from one another but interconnected, working as named parts of a larger whole.
After all, the soul is a completely abstract concept, and science has only recently begun to explore the neuro-mind and the “connectome” with a scientific lens. Even though the body is tangible, it remains a mystery. Perhaps if we viewed all three from the same place, we could fill in the gaps…