Reverb 10: Day 12 - Body Integration?

Today's Reverb 10 prompt:

December 12 – Body Integration

This year, when did you feel the most integrated with your body? Did you have a moment where there wasn’t mind and body, but simply a cohesive YOU, alive and present?

(Author: Patrick Reynolds)

Ugh.  I've struggled to answer some of the other prompts here, but I've always had a sense of where I was going when I sat down and started writing.  Usually it's been a gut instinct, first thing that comes to mind sort of response.

But this prompt?  I've got nothing.

I don't know that I really ever think of myself as being mind and body.  I think a lot of the time I'm not highly aware of my body at all, unless it happens to be malfunctioning.

I think the moment this year when I was most aware of my body was in the days immediately following my January car accident.  I was dumb enough to show up at the office the day after the accident.  That plan only lasted about half a day before I went home, napped, and landed in a walk-in clinic to make sure that since everything hurt, nothing was seriously injured.  I was relieved when the doctor told me to take the remainder of the week off of work, but didn't believe it would be possible when he told me that all I should do the following day was sleep.  It was all I did.

But I don't think of my mind and body as things that aren't integrated.  Maybe I'm just different from most people?  Do you all feel separate from your body a lot?  It usually takes trauma for me to feel that way, as if I'm living in one place and time internally, and a wholly different place and time physically.

I do, however, have moments of clarity, when I feel fully present - moments when it seems like time stops and colors brighten and I take in everything in a different sort of way.  There were some of those this year.  Moments like watching my baby brother's face as he spoke his wedding vows to the woman he loved.  The moment I lost my job was like that - burned into my consciousness.  The moment I first read Robert Benson's line about ducks in a row and thought to myself "I don't even have ducks."

If those are the moments when body and mind are integrated, well, then, I've listed a few for you.

But I still maintain that I don't feel as if my body and mind are separate most of the time, and integration of the two is rare.  I'd say that it is the lack of unity between the two that is the far more unique occurrence in my life.