Reflection: What Your Body Already Knows

Prompts to consider

• Merleau-Ponty says that when you search for a word, you're not labeling a pre-formed thought, you're using language to *complete* a thought that can't fully exist without it. Spend a few minutes writing about something you feel but haven't quite articulated. As you write, notice: are you discovering what you think, or reporting it? What does that suggest about where thought actually lives?
• Your body schema: the pre-conscious map of where you are, what you can do, how far you extend. Has your body schema ever been disrupted, by injury, illness, pregnancy, aging, a dramatic change in physical fitness? What was it like to have your practical self-understanding suddenly unreliable? What did you learn about the kind of being you are from that disruption?
• Merleau-Ponty says other people's emotions are directly visible in their bodies, not inferred from behavior. Think of someone you love and know very well. Can you notice them perceiving their feelings directly through their body, in posture, movement, face, rather than deducing them? What changes in how you relate to them if you think of your perception of them as a form of bodily contact, not just information-processing?