The Disembodied Self
Why what we say may make us feel more disconnected from our bodies
Have you ever caught yourself saying something like “my body is exhausted” as if you and your body were two separate things? Or noticed how you sometimes feel like you’re piloting your body rather than simply being it? This strange split, a sense that “I” am one thing and my body or my mind is another, runs deeper than casual speech. It shapes how we experience ourselves every day.
We’ve inherited ways of thinking about ourselves that treat the mind and body as fundamentally different. Science teaches us to see the body as a machine of interlocking systems. Philosophy has long elevated the thinking mind above the feeling flesh. Together, these frameworks create a kind of disembodiment: a curious distance from our own sensations, even though we’ve never actually experienced a moment outside our bodies.
When body becomes machine
Modern science has given us extraordinary gifts by breaking the body into understandable parts. The heart is a pump, the brain a processor, nerves like electrical wiring. This mechanistic view traces back to Descartes in the 17th century, who split reality into mind (the thinking thing) and matter (the extended thing governed by physical laws). Treating the body as a kind of machine allowed scientists to make lifesaving discoveries, understanding how the heart works as a mechanism led to treatments that save lives every day.
Something got lost in this useful abstraction. We began to objectify our own bodies. When you learn about “the nervous system” or hear that “hormones” are causing your feelings, it’s easy to feel like a passenger in a vehicle, separate from the very sensations coursing through you. The body becomes something to be examined, fixed, optimised, as opposed to the living seed of your experience.
Contemporary science often swings to the opposite extreme of classical dualism but ends up equally discombobulated. Instead of separating mind from body, we reduce mind to brain. “The brain does this, the brain decides that,” we say, as if we are essentially our brains with bodies attached as afterthoughts. Our inner life of feeling and meaning gets explained away as “nothing but neurons firing.” This is still trying to understand ourselves from only half of Descartes’ split, now the material half instead of the mental one.
The more we focus on mechanisms, the more our direct, felt experience recedes. We treat emotions as outputs of the nervous system rather than qualities of our whole self that act in a loop to drive a nervous response. But as William James observed, “a purely disembodied emotion is a nonentity.” Without the living body, feelings literally make no sense.
The long shadow of the split self
This tendency to separate the sensing body from the “real” self runs deep in Western thought. Plato’s philosopher achieves wisdom by rising above bodily desires. Descartes argued that the thinking mind is immaterial and can exist independently, “quite separate from and transcending the body” which matches what yoga philosophy discusses. If your body is other than your true self, of course you’ll distance yourself from bodily feelings or regard them with suspicion or even fear. This consideration of the mind and body as separate can leave us feeling fragmented, living in our “heads”, feeling like the thinking self is one thing and the warm, breathing, sensing body is something alien attached to us or vice versa.
Finding our way back
Despite these entrenched frameworks, our actual experience keeps insisting that mind and body are not really two. When you’re truly absorbed in dancing, gripped in reading, or even just walking on a crisp morning, where exactly is the split? The separation reveals itself as an artifact of analysis, not a feature of lived reality.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote that “the body is the vehicle of being in the world”, the medium through which we perceive and engage with everything (very bhagavad gita). Does your mind float free? Every thought arises with a texture of sensation, a quality of breath, a subtle shift in posture. Your hunger, joy, or pain isn’t happening to a body-object you own. It’s happening as you.
Even science is coming around to this. The paradigm of embodied cognition emphasizes that abstract thinking is rooted in physical experience, the mind is a full-body phenomenon, not just cortical computation. Reasoning and emotion are inextricably intertwined. If you could somehow strip away the body from mental life, you wouldn’t get a clearer mind, you’d have no mind at all.
This is why practices that bring us back into the body, yoga, dance, mindfulness, or simply paying attention to breath, can feel so profound. They aren’t teaching us something new. They’re helping us recognise what was always true: the divide was false from the start.
Coming home
Therefore, frameworks of the nervous system and mind-body dualism served and serve important purposes. They advanced science and medicine in remarkable ways. But they also gave us an abstract picture of ourselves that leaves many of us estranged from our own sensations, living at a remove from the only life we actually have.
The irony is that we have only ever experienced life as whole embodied beings. Your thoughts exist through your body, not apart from it. Your identity is inseparable from the particular body you inhabit, the specific history written in your muscles and bones, the unique way you carry yourself through the world.
Becoming cognisant of the limits of the dualistic outlook opens the door to a more integrated understanding of ourselves, one where intellect and gut feeling, brain and viscera, “mind” and “matter” reunite into the living, breathing unity they’ve been all along. This isn’t just intellectual insight. It grounds us back in the immediacy of being alive and present in a body.
In a world that constantly pulls us into our heads or into virtual abstractions, reclaiming the wholeness of our embodied mind can be quietly radical. It’s an act of self-understanding, certainly. It’s also something simpler and more essential: paradoxically coming home to the only place we’ve ever actually been.