A new approach to healing a nation’s cultural obsession with food, sex and spiritual fulfillment.
What a Body Knows: Finding Wisdom in Desire (O-Books) by Kimerer LaMothe combines the author’s knowledge and experience as a philosopher, dancer, partner and mother to call our attention to a source of wisdom we have learned to ignore. Rather than blame our desires for food, sex, and spirit for our cultural and psychological ills, this book urges us to learn from these desires how to move in ways that will grant us the pleasure, health, and well being we seek. With each desire, the author describes what this wisdom is, how to find it, and why it works. Through a compilation of her own personal experiences, philosophical reflections and cultural analysis, we learn that our desire for food is guiding us to follow the arc of eating pleasure to a sense of enough; that our desire for sex is guiding us to ask our partners for what we need in order to help us give and receive a life-enabling touch, and that our desire for spirit is guiding us to create the network of relations that will support us in becoming who we are.
Finally, here is a book that shows how to find the wisdom in each of these desires – engaging people in the moment-by-moment ways they relate to their own sensations of desire. Like a breath of fresh air – it offers a different idea of what it means to be aware of one’s own self – an idea that aligns mind, body and spirit rather than promoting the kind of ‘mind over body’ sense of self that diverts us from what our bodies know.
What a Body Knows might be called “a mother’s philosophy,” since it has the author’s own experiences with her children woven through its words. Part of her motivation for leaving the Harvard world of philosophy and theology and moving to a farm was to live life in a way that would allow her to tell a different story about who we humans are. She accomplishes her goal in What a Body Knows by offering a healing, liberating perspective on what it means to be a bodily self, complete with concrete practices that support it. Please visit her imaginative website at: www.vitalartsmedia.com .
