#bodymind

Anthony Goldsmith

The nervous system was never designed for constant masking.

Anthony Goldsmith

Fear, trauma, stress, grief, anger, worry, the body often carries emotional load through different systems and patterns of tension.

• Kidneys + nervous system → fear and survival responses.

• Heart + nervous system → emotional stress and trauma patterns.

• Adrenals → chronic stress, hypervigilance, overwhelm.

• Brain + heart connection → stress regulation and nervous system load.

• Lungs + breathing patterns → sadness, grief, emotional holding.

• Liver + body tension → anger, frustration, irritability.

• Gallbladder → resentment, stored emotional tension.

• Stomach, pancreas + spleen → worry, overthinking, digestive stress.

This body is not built on ruins

It rests on promises

Of the people I am, was, and will never be

Wise men built their houses on rocks

Because the wise pretend they aren’t fools too

Ah, but us idiots and deformities

We dream under skeleton skies

I hate love am this body

And it isn’t romantic or even beautiful

It’s just being, a fucked up being

An ugly, magnificent being

At least now that we were adults we could admit we were using confusing terms to talk about vague ideas: in this case, salvation by “the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.”

Except, as Professor Skip went on to point out, “Holy Spirit” can be as simple or as complicated a term as we want to make it. While people have argued for millennia over the workings of the Trinity, Spirit has always most fundamentally meant—in Hebrew, Greek, and English—“breath.”

This same professor would also be the first to suggest we might mean something about God when we talk about “creation” and “incarnation,” that the story of God might have to do with more than just saving souls. Take Hebrew law, for example—what to do, how to arrange things, whom to care for—not that much in there about how to get saved.

Mind Is an Embodied Phenomenon: Neurodiversity Is About Bodyminds, Not Just Brains by Ryan Boren for Stimpunks Foundation [August 2021]

Word Count: 621 Genre: Blog post

Structurally, human “awakening” is usually triggered by extreme pain or existential shock, not by blissful contemplation. The body-mind is forced into epistemic recognition of itself because survival pressures cannot be ignored.

Pain acts as a revelatory mechanism, exposing the underlying causal chains of existence.

Awareness of “I exist” arises often not as a philosophical luxury, but as a response to being pressed to act, endure, or adapt.

Any romanticized idea of awakening such as bliss, unity, or comfort is a post-hoc narrative overlay; the structural catalyst is suffering.