I think, therefore I am, I feel, therefore I am more than

Western thinking has long been using Descartes’ model of mind and body as separate from each other; the mind as more spiritual and the body as likened to a machine. This duality placed the brain in a hierarchy over the emotions. This model has informed medicine and religion, both powerful entities in shaping our culture.

This duality of thinking plagued me as a youth. I thought of it as heart and mind. Which do I follow, heart or mind? I read Gone With The Wind, who should I be like, Scarlett or Melanie? The thought of my heart and mind working together, in sync, was not even a thought in my head. So without even the possibility of this happening how did I grow through my growing up years? Like most I suppose, often scared and confused, trying to figure things out.

When I was thirteen, (yes thirteen), many of my friends in 8th grade in Catholic school were starting to have sex. It wasn’t as consensual as we’d thought it was. One friend had sex with the dad of the family she babysat for, he told her his wife said it was “OK.” He was a sales rep with a designer make up company and gave her high end make up. Another friend just had a lot of boyfriends.

I was both shocked and left out. We had all been taught to wait until marriage, or to become nuns, so what was going on? Well, when I finally had a boyfriend, much older than myself, I understood somewhat. Being touched felt good. It felt validating in a way that doing schoolwork and being told what to do never could. The culture I grew up in, in most families I knew, did not involve much physical touch or affection. For most of the girls I knew, one kiss, and there went all thoughts of purity. We mistook the feelings in our bodies for the essence of love. How could we have done any differently?

The sad thing, there was no adult to talk to about this. So, we had our secret lives, and hoped not to get pregnant and eventually got married, still not knowing anything much about ourselves, our bodies, and clueless as to how most of us ended up getting divorced in our twenties and thirties. Having sex and bearing babies loses it’s allure when there is no attention to mind, either.

Then as mothers, how did we parent our kids? Tell them the same stories, the same myths about mind/body separation, mind good, go to college, body, bad, don’t have sex? Trying to retain the Christian paradigm, ignoring the cognitive dissonance, buzzing in our heads, we, most of us, told the same stories, not believing in them ourselves, but having no other truer stories to tell.