going long
“Your self does not end where your flesh ends, but suffuses and blends with the world, including other beings.”
Sandra Blakeslee and Matthew Blakeslee The Body Has a Mind of Its Own
When we take a quick look at the human body, the nature of the thing seems perfectly obvious: It’s a stand-alone object bounded by skin. It’s got a form that’s easy to recognize and that form remains stable for decades. There are inflows and outflows of solids, liquids and gasses, but otherwise it’s basically a system unto itself—a unit.
The singular appearance of the human body is confirmed—so it would seem—by our subjective life experience. Just as we look like individuals, we also feel like individuals. There’s a “me” and a “you” and unless we are lovers in the throes of passion, we remain as singular, individual bodies for the better part of our lives.
Our perception of individuality also seems validated by the doctor’s anatomy chart; the body is right there on the wall, laid out in crisp graphic detail. It stands alone, unconnected to any other force, form or process. Popular magazine covers give us the same impression except that now the form is Photoshopped to sexually-idealized perfection; there’s no background, no context and no life support.
Our perception of the human body as a singular, isolated unit, strong as it may be, is actually an illusion and a dangerous one at that. In actual fact, we are massively interconnected with the biological and social world around us and it’s not altogether clear where the human body begins and ends. Thinking of ourselves as individuals is a pivotal blunder, a profound biological and psycho-social misconception.
This is one of the most revolutionary discoveries in the world of medicine and public health of the last few decades. Findings in the fields of molecular biology, epidemiology, public health, stress medicine and social neuroscience have revealed without question that our health is profoundly influenced by extrasomatic forces. This means that, for all practical purposes, our bodies are bigger than they look and bigger than they feel. There are myriad processes operating beyond the reach of our fingertips, forces that profoundly affect the functioning of our organs, our tissue, our minds and behavior.
But science has actually been late to the game. Native Americans have often spoken about “the long body,” an extended vision of ourselves that includes, not just bones, organs, blood and sinew, but actual qualities of habitat and tribe. This connection goes deep; we don’t just “like” nature and the people around us; we literally integrate habitat and people onto our brains. In this process, tribe and earth become part of our bodies. In turn, our health and cognition become intimately linked to the “outside” world. As the Zen philosopher Alan Watts put it, oceans and rainforests are our “external organs.” We even incorporate tribe and earth into our cognition; we don’t just think with our individual minds, we think with habitat and tribe.
This is why the dislocation of primal people (all of us) from their native habitats has been such a spiritual and health catastrophe. Primal peoples had an intimate physical connection with their land. Relocation was in effect an amputation, a severing of a primal, life-giving connection. Likewise, even non-native people are effectively traumatized by their dislocation from a home range or habitat. We gloss over our suffering with all manner of work, distraction and addiction, but the fact remains, a part of our long body has gone missing.
Naturally, our growing awareness of the long body illuminates the fact that we now live in a “short culture,” a world that prizes the accomplishments and welfare of individuals, not relationship. Likewise, we come to the realization that the vast majority of today’s health and fitness practices are aimed exclusively at the welfare of the isolated individual, the short body. We practice short health, short fitness and short medical care. Sadly, this perspective seems doomed to failure; by maximizing health and fitness individuals in isolation, we actually make them more vulnerable in the long run. The short body cannot thrive on its own.
Even the Paleo movement itself sometimes goes astray. Paleo diets and methods are often used in conventional, Westernized settings to enhance the performance and health of isolated individuals. This, of course, is better than nothing and it’s a far sight better than common, health-negative lifestyles. Nevertheless, we could do a lot better.
We could do better by brining more pro-habitat and pro-social orientations into the mix. Train outdoors as much as possible, but don’t treat nature like just another gym. Stop trying to dominate the landscape and other people with outrageous feats aimed at individual glory. Learn to feel nature with all your senses; inhabit your habitat more completely. If that means slowing down and observing the world, just do it. Likewise, stop practicing health and fitness as if the body was nothing more than an anabolic chemistry experiment. Instead, make your training more relational. Lengthen your body to include the plants, animals, air, water and people around you. When you do, your short body will take care of itself.