The lived body is your body as you experience life through it, rather than only the body viewed, measured or described from outside.
A photograph can show your posture. It can’t tell the whole story of how sitting there feels.
Warmth. Pain. Ease. The effort of appearing relaxed. The wish to move closer or have the chair to yourself.
You aren’t only a body somebody can look at.
You are also the person feeling the fabric, holding the breath, enjoying the stretch, noticing hunger or discovering that a familiar touch doesn’t feel the same today.
I AWAKE’s body maps and guided practices begin from that perspective. They offer ways to notice and express experience without making appearance the final measure of how well you’re doing.
You don’t have to love every sensation to deserve a more considerate relationship with your body.
First-person experience explains the perspective from within. Somatics introduces a field of practices concerned with sensing, moving and learning through that perspective.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s Maurice Merleau-Ponty introduces the philosophical work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, for whom perception and bodily involvement were central to understanding experience.