The serious debate today is no longer about mind and body, but about the body of experience and the body of medicine.  David Kleinberg-Levin

The body of experience is what we discover in our daily aches and pains, in our sensuous and sexual delights, in our exhilirations and exhaustions, in boredom and depression, in our deeply felt yearnings.  Sometimes, it is what we methodically study by taking on various practices of attending— to posture, movement, breath, excitation, strenuous exercise, touch, the ebbs and flows of feeling and emotion.

Giving voice to the body of experience is not easy. Its natural expressions are in the rough vernaculars of the street, crude eruptions of feeling. Its more refined expressions are in poetry, song, literature, story-telling.

The body of medicine is the objectively analyzed body of intricate systems, cells, neuropeptides, fluid flows, ... Its language is algebraic, quantitative relationships among parts and systems, formulaic causal connections.

Although investigations of both bodies have appeared since the very origins of history, appearing in every culture, the trajectories of their developments radically diverge. There has been little evolution of practices for studying and cultivating the experienced body; ancient practices for investigating breathing—Taoist, Sufi, Christian, Yogic, Chasidic— are strikingly similar to methods developed during the past century in Western Europe and the US. Modern expressions have advanced little, if at all, over the volumes of discourse developed in the ancient sites of practice and reflection. By dramatic contrast, knowledge about the objective body coming from biomedicine and evolutionary biology is awesome in its rapidly proliferating enormous scope. Imaging technologies, the genome projects, AI, nanotechnologies, and bodily enhancement technologies have yielded breathtaking insights into the intricacies of the body and how to shape bodily processes in desirable ways.  It is increasingly a source of enormous corporate growth, funding, jobs, and influence over the way people think of their bodily life.

This disproportion both in the development of practices of investigation and languages of expression pose a serious problem for the status of experiential knowing, driving it into isolation, self-doubt, even poverty. One existential result is that in realms of disease and health, the increasingly powerful articulations of biomedicine overwhelm the soft and unsure voice of the person experiencing disease, making it difficult to maintain one's own sense of how to care for oneself without being swept away by the increasingly authoritative and arcane voice of the scientific diagnostician. On a larger scale, the increasingly muted voice of experience makes it difficult to make a case for the importance of the environment in the life of human consciousness; the debate whirls endlessly about mathematical projections of possible climate changes, while the forests, fresh air, clear water that so much enliven our experience disintegrate before our stinging eyes.

Below are some of the communities who have been addressing this fundamental conflict and the crises supported by its prevalence: