“No matter how much I move myself around, my strongest tendency is to move in the same ways that I have always moved, guided by the same deeply seated postural habits, sensory cues, and mental images of my body; but if I can succeed in surrendering to the movements that another person imposes on my body, without my own system of cues and responses interfering, it is possible to treat my mind to a flood of sensations that are novel in important ways, sensation that may well be able to indicate things I have been doing that have produced aches and pains at the same times as they have reinforced my normal sense of self.
And even more important, this movement of surrender and new sensation can demonstrate to me that I am not permanently obliged to continue acting out a habitual compulsion. I can see that habit is habit, that I am something else, and for that moment at any rate, I can choose to repeat it or not. And if I can drop a compulsive behaviour or attitude for a moment without causing a crisis, then perhaps I can dispense with it all together. As any physician knows, this kind of insight can often be worth more than any number of drugs or procedures for the reversal of a chronic condition.
In other words, just as the mind organises the rest of the body’s tissues into a life process, sensations to a large degree organise the mind. They do not simply give the mind the material to organise; they are themselves a major organising principle.”
Deane Juhan – Job’s Body (Introduction xxvii)
