How we turned the body into a tool, the mind into a tyrant, and called it self-improvement

We don’t live in our bodies anymore — we manage them.

We track, optimize, discipline, sculpt, and override them while the mind runs the show, endlessly thinking, judging, narrating. The body is expected to perform on command and stay quiet about the cost.

This is not embodiment. It is separation marketed as progress.

The Body as an Object

In modern culture, the body is treated as a project.

Something to fix. Something to perfect. Something to push past its limits in the name of productivity, aesthetics, or resilience.

Pain becomes background noise. Fatigue is framed as weakness.
Hunger, grief, desire, and rest are treated as obstacles.

Most people are not in their bodies. They are hovering above them, issuing instructions. This disembodiment is so normalized that it barely registers as harm.

When Even Healing Gets Intrumentalized

The tragedy is that even spiritual and somatic practices have been absorbed into this logic.

Yoga becomes fitness. Meditation becomes performance optimization.
Breathwork becomes a way to regulate emotions so we can tolerate what should be questioned. Somatic practices become tools to stay functional in systems that are fundamentally unlivable.

Ancient traditions rooted in listening, humility, and relationship are stripped of context and repackaged as techniques for control.

Move more. Breathe better. Be calmer. Be leaner. Be more disciplined.

The body is still not sovereign — it is simply being managed more efficiently.

“My Body Is My Temple”

B.K.S. Iyengar said, “My body is my temple.”

This was never a metaphor about aesthetics or performance.
It was a declaration of oneness.

Not I have a body.
But I am my body.

This collapses the hierarchy modern culture depends on.

No mind above the body.
No soul floating elsewhere.
No self separate from flesh, breath, sensation, gravity, and time.

A temple is not optimized.
It is tended.
It is entered with reverence.
It is lived in.

The Ethical Cost of Disembodiment

Disembodiment doesn’t stop at the personal level.

When we lose contact with our own bodies, we lose contact with consequence. With pain. With pleasure. With vulnerability. With mortality. It becomes easier to exploit land we don’t feel. Easier to dominate bodies we don’t recognize as alive. Easier to live abstractly, violently, without sensing the impact.

A disembodied culture will always justify harm — because it no longer feels it.

Embodiment Is Not a Technique

Embodiment cannot be hacked. It is not a goal. Not a productivity strategy.

It is a return.

A return to sensation.
To timing.
To limits.
To the intelligence that lives beyond thoughts.

Embodiment slows things down. It interrupts narratives. It resists optimization. It asks for honesty instead of ideals. Which is exactly why it is so threatening.

A Quiet Refusal

To live embodied today is a form of refusal.

Refusing to treat the body as hardware.
Refusing to turn practice into extraction.
Refusing to let the mind dominate what it was meant to serve.

“I am my body” is not poetic language. It is a refusal to split. And in a culture built on disembodiment, wholeness is no longer passive — it is radical.