The Body and the Mind Do Not Always Travel Together

I heard this first in an old martial arts movie. Not a good one — none of the films I watched obsessively as a teenager were ever going to win anything, and I watched them obsessively anyway, trying to mimic the training, the stances, the specific economy of movement the actors performed as if it were real combat. They weren’t real combat. It didn’t matter. What I was actually watching for was something else.

These movies always had a father figure. The old master, wise, unbeatable, dispensing principles in a tone that made even simple sentences sound like they’d been carried down from somewhere ancient. Ridiculous, by any serious measure. And I found, in those characters, something I didn’t have anywhere else: an example of what a father could sound like if he were teaching you something instead of frightening you. I took their lines seriously because I had nowhere else to take seriously lines like that from.

One of them stayed with me for the rest of my life: the body and the mind do not always travel together.

What It Means, Practically

The principle is simple to state and considerably harder to live: pain, fear, exhaustion, danger — these happen to the body. The mind doesn’t have to be a passenger in the same vehicle. It can step outside, observe, and choose where to put its attention, even while the body is enduring something the mind has no power to stop.

I want to tell you about the first time I used this deliberately, because it’s the clearest example I have.

I was fourteen, in a karate class, and I bit my own tongue badly enough that there was no quick fix available. I swallowed my own blood for two hours while the instructors worked out what to do with me. Eventually I ended up in an old fire department’s first aid room, where an old fireman — not a surgeon, no anesthesia, nothing but whatever equipment that room happened to have — sewed my tongue closed.

I stayed silent through it. Not because it didn’t hurt — it hurt completely, in the specific, total way an unanesthetized needle through tongue tissue hurts. What I did, instead of simply enduring it, was something closer to travel. I located the most painful point and put my attention directly on it — not avoiding it, the opposite, going toward it — and at the same time I found a vantage point outside my own body, watching the scene from a small distance, as if I were a visitor observing rather than the person it was happening to.

The pain didn’t stop. It didn’t become smaller. What changed was the relationship between me and the pain — the part of me that was suffering and the part of me that was watching became, briefly, two different things, and the watching part stayed calm enough to get me through the sewing without flinching.

I said it to myself, somewhere in the middle of it: the body and the mind do not always travel together.

Where Else I’ve Needed It

I’ve used this more times than I can count, in circumstances considerably worse than a tongue injury.

On nights when my father had been violent and I’d managed to bring it back to something survivable, but didn’t know if he’d return while I was asleep to finish whatever the night had started — I’d make my peace with what I couldn’t control and let the principle hold me through it. The body would be in the apartment, in the bed, in the actual danger. The mind would step back, observe the situation as a fact rather than a catastrophe, and find a place to rest that the body’s circumstances didn’t allow.

I’ve used it through chronic pain. I’ve used it through exhaustion that had no end date attached to it. I’ve used it, more recently, through a specific and ongoing problem I want to name plainly, because I think it matters and because this whole project has tried to be honest about costs rather than only about lessons.

For a stretch of time in Colombia — due to a bureaucratic situation I won’t detail here, the kind that’s depressingly typical of how things work in this country — I’ve been without health insurance. During the same period, I haven’t been particularly healthy. Chronic back pain from years of physical work the sanctuary requires. Other things, the kind that produce symptoms you’d rather not have and that don’t resolve on their own.

I face a specific, repeated dilemma because of this: money that could go toward fixing something about my own health is money that could also go toward hay, farm rent, feed, the costs that are not negotiable for two hundred animals who have no other source. The dilemma compounds, because if I ignore my own health long enough, I may not be here long enough to care for any of them — and yet you fight the fight that’s immediately in front of you, and you postpone the ones you can’t fight simultaneously, because that’s the only sequencing available when everything can’t be addressed at once.

I want to be completely clear about something, because I think it’s the most important thing in this entire piece: I am not recommending this. To anyone.

You should not be in the position I’ve been in, choosing between your own care and the cost of hay. If you have access to care and the means to use it, use it — this technique is not a substitute for that, and treating it as one would be irresponsible advice from someone who knows better.

What I’m describing is what’s available when the better option isn’t, and what’s gotten me through specific moments — strange symptoms that don’t feel encouraging, pain that has no immediate fix, the accumulated wear of a body that keeps being asked to do things it probably shouldn’t keep doing. In those specific moments, when there is genuinely nothing else to be done right now, I go back to the fireman’s first aid room, the silent two hours, the principle.

I locate the point. I hold my attention there, directly, without flinching from it. And I watch myself from a small distance, the way I watched myself that day at fourteen, and I remind myself: the body and the mind do not always travel together.

What This Doesn’t Fix

It doesn’t fix anything. I want to be honest about that too. The pain is still there. The underlying problem — whatever it is, on whatever night it’s needed — doesn’t resolve because the mind stepped outside to watch rather than suffer directly. This is not a cure. It’s not even really treatment. It’s a way of getting through a specific stretch of time without being destroyed by it, which is a much smaller and much more honest claim than the technique might otherwise sound like it’s making.

If you find yourself in a situation where this is genuinely the only tool available — where the better option, the actual care, the actual fix, isn’t accessible to you right now, for whatever reason — I think this is the simplest and most powerful thing I know. Not a permanent strategy. Not something to build a life around. Just a way of surviving the specific night, or the specific pain, or the specific fear, without being smashed by it.

Find the point. Go toward it instead of away from it. Step outside yourself far enough to watch rather than only feel.

The body and the mind do not always travel together.

Sometimes, that’s the whole thing that gets you to morning.