What is the mind-body connection?

Day by day I come to a greater appreciation of how interconnected our physical, material, biological systems are — this body that we live in is not comprised of a duality (mind and body) but is a synchronous whole. The compelling apparent truth of Cartesian Dualism has become an underpinning of modern Western thought. We are brains that inhabit a body; we theorize that we can transplant our brain into another body and still be who we are.

The philosophy of course goes deeper — and I'm not here to explore whether I am still me if my brain finds itself transplanted into another body sometime in the future after I've survived cryogenic freezing. There's an entire playground of intellectual entertainments there, but today I am interested in something else.

Do we benefit from this dualism? Are we served by thinking that our mind is a distinct entity, separate from our body other than by an arranged marriage from birth? The brain may enjoy this marriage, it may not — but it is bound to the body by law of nature.

I can't speak to Dualism's totality of consequences, but I do see drawbacks. We may presume that maladies of the mind must be treated solely through direct treatment of the mind itself — talk therapies, anti-depressants, psychadelics alone. These are powerful modalities but perhaps incomplete.

My armchair understanding of the state of psychology and psychiatry is that the field is entering into a more holistic understanding of the mind, particularly in regard to its connection to the body. I more and more hear the phrase “trauma is stored in the body”, and the book “The Body Keeps the Score” comes to mind. Modern treatments like EMDR attempt to re-process traumatic memories by soliciting those memories and having the patient perform different eye movements to alter the emotions that said memories solicit.

I think more and more on this as I continue a daily meditation practice where I pay close attentions to the sensations of the body. Friends of mine have theorized that the equanimous observation of the sensations of the body allow the mind to surface memories associated with such sensations, and that once the sensations are observed (and “not reacted to”), they may pass and so too a portion or entirety of a particular trauma released.

I am excited to continue observing.