In a society that values thinking over feeling, logic over intuition, and willpower over surrender, the modern person is in flight from their own body. To reject the body is to become trapped in a narrow, horizontal space where harbingers of awakening, such as grief, confusion and despair, go unnoticed.
Sensing trouble, but unaware of its source deep within, the ego only knows to keep working at the surface. We find ourselves doubling down on planning, strategising, and seeking materialistic answers to transpersonal questions. Sooner or later, we must face our stuckness, which can only shift if we stop and descend into the body.
Each person’s soul is encoded with a unique story and an indelible message that flows through us if we can learn to sway with the wisdom of our body. The attitude required is one of trust – a quality in short supply, given our modern conviction that the body is a mere sack of chemicals, a machine without a soul.
In The Ego and the Id, Sigmund Freud compared our unconscious, instinctual drives to a horse, with ego-consciousness represented by its rider. According to this metaphor, the rider must determine the person’s goals and guide the horse to them. Otherwise, the powerful mount will run amok, hijacking our logical mind in order to satisfy biological urges. Freud deemed the id, the ‘inner horse’, to be inherently untrustworthy and little more than locomotor energy.
As the most often represented animal in prehistoric art, the symbol of the horse has been with us from the start. In some myths, horses are charged with wild, barbarous and even demonic energies. Yet in others, they stand for wisdom, healing and clairvoyance, often acting as spiritual guides. On a literal level, horses are known for their exquisite attunement to human emotion.
Therefore, when it comes to the relationship between mind and body, perhaps the centaur is a more optimistic equine symbol. The centaur myth, in which rider and horse are one, expresses the ideal union between animal instinct and human reason; between the deep unconscious and the higher rational mind. Instead of one half seeking to control the other, two halves combine to form a synergistic whole.
But in order to achieve such a partnership, we have to meet our pain in the open field. In Greek mythology, Chiron was regarded as the wisest and most just of all the centaurs. Although a great healer, Chiron was left with an incurable wound after accidentally being struck by one of Hercules’ poisoned arrows. He was forced to live with that unbearable pain for eternity.
An important detail is that the arrow struck Chiron in the lower half of his body, which represents our instinctive emotions and unconscious bodily intelligence. Whereas the centaur’s human upper half symbolises consciousness and divine reason. It is significant that Chiron remains unable to cure the wound in his animal half despite all his accumulated knowledge.
Like Chiron, we each collect deep and enduring emotional wounds as we move through life. The wounding may begin at the beginning. Is it not traumatic and bewildering to be separated from the safety of the womb, even more so if we are confronted by a world of raised voices and whirring machinery?
We are then wounded by culture in a thousand different ways. For instance, we tell children to sit still, overriding their instinctive longing for spontaneity and play. Gradually, excitement and enthusiasm become taboo. The same happens with anger, sadness, fear, and so on, amounting to psychospiritual castration and a draining of life force.
Many of us go through life in denial of our wounds. Too afraid to stop and notice the pain, we cut ourselves off from the body, living from the neck up. Somatic wisdom goes deep underground while wounds intensify under the numbing pressure.
Others scramble to fight or fix their wounds, much as Freud argued for the triumph of mind over body. But this creates fear, shame and further wounding. During a recent trip to the beach, I overheard a father castigating his son, barely 3 years old, for soiling his underwear. This man was issuing a series of desperate injunctions: be ashamed of your body; fear your inner horse; lock your wildness in a shadowy cage and throw away the key.
I have never tamed a wild horse, but I suspect that scolding words and a closed heart wouldn’t help. In the same way, when attending to deep emotional pain and agonising internal splits, we need a soft touch, trust and patience. Our wounds may not be curable, but ‘curing’ is not the point. We need healing, which is borne out of an ever-evolving, mutually respectful relationship between mind and body. The image of Chiron tending his eternal wound captures this idea beautifully.
The key then is to form an equal partnership between mind and body, psyche and soma, conscious and unconscious. If we overidentify with ego-consciousness, symbolised by Chiron’s human half, we disown the tremendous power of our instinctive animal side. This robs us of spontaneity, vitality and opportunities for authentic healing.
If we can learn to stop and tend our wounds, we become eligible for guidance from the deeper soul. Instead of cutting off the body and becoming a lonely rider left to wander the vast, desolate plains, we need to forge a union between mind and body. Until then, we are missing half the picture, half the map, and we will never truly grasp who we are and what we are here to do.