A lot of modern writings focus on the power of the ‘gut feeling‘, and intuition, and how following body perception and emotions can often be more effective than following our rational mind.
In a similar approach, in the excellent novel around golf, ‘the Legend of Bagger Vance‘, Steven Pressfield writes: “Intelligence, I have told you, does not reside in the brain but in the hands. Let them do the thinking, they’re far wiser than you are“.
Is our body really wiser than we are? Have we outgrown with our mind our body’s self-balance, and its ability to integrate experience to foster our decision-making?
I think we always need to remember that there are instances where we need to respond – where we have to positively exercise the choice to respond to what is happening, instead of reacting. And that requires our mind at work. It might be rare. It might not be in these situations where we have trained and repeated movements thousands, millions of times – situations where we’d better follow what our body wants to do without interfering. But as the body is wise in most instances, so is our mind the wisest overall even if it should interfere much less than it does usually. Even if it chooses only once in a while to decide against our body.
