Village Raw - ISSUE 1

VILLAGE ESSAY
Highgate now has a Neighbourhood Plan
and Community Infrastructure Levy funds
from Camden and Haringey to spend on our
community projects.
If you are passionate about issues such as
community, sustainability, built environment,
traffic and tourism we would love you to get
involved or to share any new ideas for our area.
So get in touch at info@forhighgate.org or
www.highgateneighbourhoodforum.org.uk
ON BEING HUMAN:
LEARNING TO
FEEL AGAIN
Words by Mina Aidoo
I have always questioned my place in
the world. It’s been a personal journey of
mine to discover how we move, how we
navigate our inner and outer lives, how
we relate to others and how we inhabit
the space of our own bodies.
Growing up, I could see how others
were enjoying being human by connecting
through relationships, but I felt like an
outsider. Now I can see the link between
my lack of connection to others and my
lack of felt emotion. I lived as a kind of
robot, unaware of my inner world. I didn’t
think I even had emotions. On the rare
occasions where I did feel something it
was alien or painful and I was unable to
navigate myself with any skill. As humans
we have learned to suppress and fear our
inner world. Or we just don’t know how to
be with our emotional landscape in a way
that is healthy or vital.
Encountering your emotions in a
healthy way means being able to be with
and observe your inner landscape, along
with the mental chatter and physical
sensations that arise. This is important
because the extent to which you can feel
your pain is the extent to which you can
feel pleasure. Or another way of saying
this is the more you can withstand what
it means to be human in your body, the
more expansive, expressive and rich your
life experience becomes.
In our culture, the general relationship
most have with their body is very
narrow. The body is a burden, a machine
that needs to be maintained as it ages.
Perhaps we glean brief pleasures from
our bodies when we eat or have sex, but
we continue to punish them or wish they
were different in some way. This isn’t just
wrong-headed and damaging, it is also
sad, because our bodies have an innate
capacity for healing that we are only just
starting to wake up to.
To access this potential requires us to
not be fearful of being the human animal
that we essentially are. No longer prioritising
the mind over the body or allowing
ideas from our culture to override our
innate bodily wisdom. It means widening
our perception of what the body could be,
namely a portal to deepen into who we
are and to experience a beautifully open
and honest connection with one another
as a result.
Embodiment is a rather unsexy word
for the fascinating journey that I am describing.
We are only accessing a tiny
portion of our human potential because
we continue to deny our body’s voice. If
you feel that you would like to explore the
potential that resides inside you, then
learning to feel in a healthy way is an essential,
high level skill that is sorely needed
in these times of profound disconnection.
We are all craving to be deeply seen,
heard and felt, and embodiment is a sublime
pathway towards that future.
www.minaaidoo.com
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