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Seeking Recommendation Looking for books on the role and function of the body in spiritual practices
- Thread starter solxyz
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Seeking recommendations for books.
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Since you asked about the role of the body in spiritual practices, the spirit (or the mind) must be involved here as well, so it wouldn't do to draw on the traditional alone and investigate the body in isolation - it's more of a philosophical question anyway and probably not really relevant in this context, so I'll proceed from the assumption that you'd like to know more about books on the relationship of the body and the spirit in spiritual practices.
It's a truism that the West, after a long tradition of disparagement and neglect, has finally come around to recognising the body as the equal partner of the mind, with authors enthusiastically pointing out the millenia of headstart the East has in this respect, yada, yada. My objection, however, is that the East has never separated the body from the mind (hence the term ) in their thinking in the first place, so this increased emphasis of the body in modern Western spiritual comes across as a bit forced - it shouldn't be about restoring a balance but about abandoning that artifical distinction altogether. Balance is for dualism; the bodymind concept, however, regards each individual as a unit and not as a sum of two (or three, if you count the soul) discrete parts.
[I realise that the East-West polarity itself is an outdated conceptual holdover from colonial times, so it's just a convenient stereotype for the purposes of this reply.]
Accordingly, Eastern authors tend not to make a big deal out of the 'interdependence and interpenetration of body and mind'. Eastern books on hatha yoga e.g. often take it as a given that working the body also means cultivating the mind, it's only Western authors who get all exercised about this ostensibly 'revolutionary' idea of unifying the body and the mind (who were never two distinct entities to begin with).
My advice would be to look for how-to books anyway, skipping the exercises and reading only the theoretical parts that interest you, which is what I'm doing when I'm not particularly interested in the practical side of things. That's why I'd like to recommend by Swami Satyananda Saraswati, an impressive book - I can't see myself performing the exercises in it anytime soon but it's fascinating how the author describes the bodymind processes involved in such great detail. It's voluminous enough (+1,800 pages!) to accommodate long chapters filled with spiritual thought and probably more instructive than many purely philosophical tomes.
Much tl,dr: when it comes to spirituality, the traditional body-mind dualism doesn't make much sense in my opinion; the kriya yoga book is a great read even if you're not into yoga yourself.
It's a truism that the West, after a long tradition of disparagement and neglect, has finally come around to recognising the body as the equal partner of the mind, with authors enthusiastically pointing out the millenia of headstart the East has in this respect, yada, yada. My objection, however, is that the East has never separated the body from the mind (hence the term ) in their thinking in the first place, so this increased emphasis of the body in modern Western spiritual comes across as a bit forced - it shouldn't be about restoring a balance but about abandoning that artifical distinction altogether. Balance is for dualism; the bodymind concept, however, regards each individual as a unit and not as a sum of two (or three, if you count the soul) discrete parts.
[I realise that the East-West polarity itself is an outdated conceptual holdover from colonial times, so it's just a convenient stereotype for the purposes of this reply.]
Accordingly, Eastern authors tend not to make a big deal out of the 'interdependence and interpenetration of body and mind'. Eastern books on hatha yoga e.g. often take it as a given that working the body also means cultivating the mind, it's only Western authors who get all exercised about this ostensibly 'revolutionary' idea of unifying the body and the mind (who were never two distinct entities to begin with).
My advice would be to look for how-to books anyway, skipping the exercises and reading only the theoretical parts that interest you, which is what I'm doing when I'm not particularly interested in the practical side of things. That's why I'd like to recommend by Swami Satyananda Saraswati, an impressive book - I can't see myself performing the exercises in it anytime soon but it's fascinating how the author describes the bodymind processes involved in such great detail. It's voluminous enough (+1,800 pages!) to accommodate long chapters filled with spiritual thought and probably more instructive than many purely philosophical tomes.
Much tl,dr: when it comes to spirituality, the traditional body-mind dualism doesn't make much sense in my opinion; the kriya yoga book is a great read even if you're not into yoga yourself.
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In traditional teachings, the body and mind are considered as two interrelated principles of a single whole. It's like the two poles of a magnet. For some people, it is easier to start with body-oriented practices, while for others it is easier to start with mind-oriented practices. Hatha Yoga and Raja Yoga in India, the Six Yogas and Mahamudra in Tibet, and so on.