WHAT A BODY KNOWS Kimerer LaMothe

Review
There is wisdom in desire, says dancer and philosopher Kimerer LaMothe: a wisdom guiding us to move in ways that align our pleasure, health and wellbeing. Yet because we are trained in 'mind over body' ways of living, we tend to perceive our desires as unruly forces that we must control, and so we ignore what our bodies know. Kimerer considers our three fundamental desires - for food, sex and spirit - and shows the wisdom in each, as they guide us to satisfaction and development. She describes that our desires are us, they are what we are creating in the moment. So, when we learn to find and move with the wisdom they contain, we discover and unfold our true self.
294pp, 138mm x 214mm, Paperback, 2009

Extract
Having Faith
Have faith that the work of asking and trusting is what you need to become who you are.

How, when we are people who are constantly changing, growing, and becoming, can we expect to stay with one person for the rest of our lives? How can we expect, in a world of over seven billion people, to find the one person who will be our soul mate, the other half that complements and completes us?

The answer is faith. We need faith that our practices of asking our partners for the touch we need and trusting our desire to tell us are what will enable us to become who we are.

The feeling of passion that draws us together is one we recognize as life enabling. For it opens a world of sensations, a world in which new thoughts and feelings and actions are possible. As we practice asking and trusting, this world grows more real around us and within us. We taste love.

Yet this love is far from static. It lives, and it lives in our ongoing movement in relation to one other. As we sense, ask, trust, touch and are touched, we create patterns of sensation and response that release us into the ever-evolving present of this new world.

As a result, as we practice asking for what we need and trusting in the rhythms of desire to tell us, we not only create our relationships, we create ourselves. Who we are changes. We become persons for whom this love and this world are real. We create ourselves into persons who can, more and more, sense and respond to whatever challenges either of us face by drawing upon the resources of that world and deepening our love.

As we grow in these ways, the kinds of touch we need to release us will change, as will the forms of our desire itself, and our experience of the life that needs enabling.

At the same time, we are not the only ones who are changing. Our partners are as well, and they are changing because of us, because of their desire for us, as they sense and ask and trust and respond to us. In our every interaction, then, how we act, what we say, how we move are part of what will enable each of us to become the person we are.

The implications are radical. As we learn to ask and trust, and as our ability to give and receive a life enabling touch develops, we realize with our partners how, in our mutual desire for relationship, we are both becoming the singular beings we are.

Our coming together is not a merging of two individuals. It is a twofold affirmation that the world that opens when we are together is the world in which we want and need to live to unfold our potential for giving and receiving love.

The one love connecting us lives when it blooms as two.

This is the faith. It is faith that whatever I do in helping you become who you are is what I need to learn to do in order to become who I am. It is faith that your doing what will support me in my becoming is what you need to become who you are, and for the same reasons. It is faith that the asking and trusting I must do in relation to you is freeing me not only from whatever keeps me from moving in relationship to you, but also from what keeps me from moving in my own life, along my path.

It is not that I need your love or the security of a relationship in order to grow. It is nearly the reverse. The faith is that I need the challenges involved in learning to love you and in teaching you how to love me in order to unfold what I have to give the world.

All we have to offer the world is the work that the satisfaction of our desires demand.

This faith, once realized, extends beyond asking and trusting to the farthest horizons of our existence. It is faith that the love that draws us together, demanding our interest and trust, is a love that is good for us, and good for the world. It is faith that the love that is developing in and between us is the best of what we have to give to the world.

The wisdom in our desire for sex is guiding us to move in ways that keep this faith alive.

From What a Body Knows, ?2009 by Kimerer L. LaMothe, published by O Books.