“Great ideas originate in the muscles.”
THOMAS EDISON
DURING LECTURES, I SOMETIMES ask people in the audience to stand up for a moment—without explaining why. (If you want to try this experiment, stand up now, too.) Then I ask them to look at how their bodies are placed in space.
Many people, especially women, discover that they are standing with feet together, head inclined slightly forward, arms folded across chest or hands clasped in front of them so their bodies are covered and they take up as little space as possible. Others, especially men, are standing with feet apart, head up and back, with arms at their sides or perhaps with one hand braced against their body so an elbow juts out, taking up the maximum amount of space.
Then I ask these groups to exchange styles and see how it feels. When people in the small-space group expand their stance, they often say they feel odd or exposed at first, then stronger and more confident. When those in the big-space group contract their bodies, they often report feeling childlike at first, and then less powerful, even less visible.
This experiment began as a way of demonstrating how quickly “feminine” and “masculine” stances can influence state of mind. Women in particular need to understand how something so simple as physical posture can undermine, or enhance, self-confidence. In the unified body-mind field of the self, the movement of any molecule shifts the others. But I soon understood that women—and probably many men, too—weren’t comfortable taking up too much space; certainly, that wasn’t the goal. Since we had done thesis and antithesis but no synthesis, I added a third stage of asking people to close their eyes and let their bodies gravitate into the most comfortable way of standing, with no effort to please, displease, or displace others. Within a moment or two, both groups were reporting a greater sense of ease and well-being, as if their bodies had a wisdom of their own when habits of mind stopped intervening. The point is: How we stand says something not just about us, but to us.
As someone who has always tended to live in my head, I didn’t realize how powerfully our sense of ourselves resides in our body until I was on a trip to Japan. While walking through the crowded streets of Tokyo, I suddenly realized I was feeling safe and comfortable in a way that was quite remarkable in a country so different from my own, and I couldn’t account for it. Then I realized the source: for the first time in my life, I was taller than most of the men in the street. My mind had been reluctant to register how much this difference mattered, for that would mean confronting how on guard I felt in the streets of my own country, how endangered I and many other women sometimes feel in “public” spaces.
The idea that muscles and sinews instruct our minds is often assumed to be anti-intellectual or childlike. Because Western dualism values mind over body, thinking over feeling, most of us end up ignorant or skeptical of the idea of soma and psyche as a unified energy field. Even when we do acknowledge the existence of body-mind links, the ones that get the attention are usually those in which the mind speaks to the body: for instance, stress-reduction techniques such as meditation and visualization to help reverse the effects of heart disease;1 or the amazing “placebo effect,” in which a harmless sugar pill has the same effect as the medication both patient and doctor believe it to be.2
What gets downplayed or ignored, however, is all those phenomena that suggest body-mind communication is a two-way street; that mind-change can begin with body-change. Here are some examples ranging from the simple to the complex, the transitory to the long-lasting.
BREATH The way we breathe can influence our state of mind. Though in many cultures, the very word for breath implies this knowledge—chi in Chinese, or prana as in pranayama (breathing practices) in Hindi—in our modern Western culture, we rarely go further than acknowledging the importance of breathing in sports (where the E-E rule tells us to exhale on exertion) and in childbirth (where special techniques ease the pangs of labor); as if the physical act of breathing could only aid a physical process. In fact, it is the single function that most influences all others—including mental and emotional ones—and because it is the one autonomic process that can easily be regulated, it can and should be a bridge to exploring many of our untapped powers. For instance: exhaling more slowly than we inhale calms the mind; inhaling more slowly than we exhale energizes it; and balancing the two breaths also balances the right and left brain. Simple deep breathing—and focusing on those breaths—is a bridge to the meditative states that are described in the preceding chapter. The ancient yoga practice of alternate-nostril breathing will “center” both mind and body: just press one nostril closed while inhaling deeply through the other for one count, press both nostrils closed while holding that breath for four counts, and then press the other nostril closed while exhaling for two counts—or any timing in a 1-4-2 ratio. Repeat at least a dozen times until the rhythm feels natural, and then be conscious of those moments of total stillness in midcycle. Yoga tells us this time of being full of breath, full of spirit, is a moment of feeling the true self; the soul.
TOUCH Being touched and held is our earliest source of self-discovery—and a continuing need. We know that infants deprived of daily touching fail to thrive, even when their nutritional and other basic needs are met. Without frequent and direct contact with other living beings, nerve endings communicate fewer signals to the brain, and development is slowed—even stopped. This has been proven over and over again in foundling homes where infants were clean and well fed but rarely held, as well as in the efficiently run Lebenshorn, the Aryan “baby farms” of Hitler’s Germany, where the rates of stunted growth, retardation, and even death were very high. These real-life evidences of the importance of touching counter Freud and other theorists who believed that feeding was the infant’s most crucial need and primary source of bonding. In the 1950s, however, animal-learning theorist Harry Harlow set out to prove the importance of touch all over again with animals. In a famous and cruel experiment still taught in many Introductory Psychology courses, he took rhesus monkeys away from their mothers a few hours after birth, then gave the newborns a choice between one artificial “mother” made of baling wire and another made of terry-cloth. So great was the infants’ need for warmth and comfort that, even when the wire figure contained the only feeding nipple, they preferred the one made of cloth: its softness offered at least a hint of the touch and cuddling they craved (though not enough to make them useful as breeders, as Harlow had hoped they would be).
Only recently has science begun to prove the importance of touch with experiments in enrichment instead of deprivation. When Tiffany Field, a psychologist at the University of Miami Medical School, changed the usual “minimal touch” rule for premature infants in incubators and massaged them gently three times a day, they gained weight faster and were released earlier, thus aiding the infants and reducing hospital costs. When normal babies were allowed more skin-to-skin contact in the first six months, they developed better mentally.* And when some rabbits were fed a damaging high-cholesterol diet but developed 60 percent fewer symptoms than other rabbits from the same litters, experimenters were mystified until they discovered the answer: the healthy rabbits were the ones in the lower cages, thus the only ones reachable by the lab technician, who had been petting and cuddling them each night. Later, controlled experiments produced the same results.3
New techniques for tracking the development of the living brain suggest that touch is the primary source of neurochemical changes in infancy. We also know from anecdotal evidence that massage is effective against depression and hypertension, and that cuddling and sleeping skin-to-skin can do everything from lowering blood pressure and lengthening brain waves to strengthening the immune system.
SEXUALITY Orgasm and other forms of sexual expression are such a source of self-affirmation that two thirds of psychiatrists believe people “nearly always or often” lose self-esteem when deprived of a “regular outlet for sexual gratification.”4 In fact, it is so central to our being that, as countless studies have shown, masturbation is instinctive from a very early age. In later life, sexuality and sensuality are also ways we express ourselves and “talk” to each other: unlike other animals, for whom sex seems to be focused in times of “heat” or estrus when conception is most likely, human sexual pleasure exists independent of conception, and so is a way we communicate as well as procreate. Given gender politics, however, men may be so genitally focused that they miss whole-body sensuousness, while women may focus so much on sensuous cuddling that the sense of inner power that orgasm brings is underplayed.* Once again, progress lies in completing the circle, exploring in the direction we have not been.
The point is that sexual and sensual pleasure is often a spontaneous signal sent out by the deepest self. Women with low self-esteem may miss it by “listening” more to their partner’s body than to their own. Men with low self-esteem may “listen” to external standards of sexual performance at the expense of their partner’s pleasure, and often their own. In fact, like love and laughter, real pleasure is an emotion that can’t be compelled—and thus is an expression of the authentic self. If we trust it, follow it, listen to it, our body will take us places the conscious mind could not have imagined. “When I speak of the erotic,” as poet Audre Lorde explained, “I speak of it as an assertion of the life force of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.” And as novelist Christopher Isherwood wrote, “Sensuality is … like a mine. You go deeper and deeper. There are passages, caves, whole strata. You discover entire geological eras.”
PHYSICAL IMAGERY The body seems to have its own antennae that can sense the degree of esteem—or contempt—in which similar bodies are held. Regardless of how distorted and self-hating our body image may have become, our real bodies seem sensitive to the fate of others like them. Think of the impact of “Black Is Beautiful” or any comparable message on a group whose physical appearance—whether because of sex, race, ethnicity, age, or able-bodiedness—has been key to its devaluing. Stand outside the rare movie with a strong and daring female protagonist, and watch women emerging with higher heads, stronger walks, and greater confidence. Consider the importance of a sports champion who comes from a group that has been made to feel it can’t win, a popular movie in which American Indians are finally the “good guys,” a violinist whose music soars while he sits onstage in leg braces, a deaf actress who introduces millions of moviegoers to the expressiveness of sign language, and even one woman who remains joyous, free, sexual, and good at her work after sixty or seventy. The images of power, grace, and competence that these people convey have a life-giving impact—just as trivialized, stereotyped, degrading, subservient, and pornographic images of bodies that look like ours do the opposite, as though we absorb that denigration or respect through our nerve endings.5 Wherever negative physical imagery has been part of low self-esteem, a counterpoint of positive imagery can be part of raising it.
MOVING IN SPACE Freedom to explore our environment and develop our bodily abilities is a link to intellectual development. We now know that physical freedom in the earliest years develops spatial-visual skills that are important in math, in many kinds of problem-solving, and in what psychologists call “field independence” (the ability to think for oneself). Such skills are equal in boys and girls until about the age of eight, which is when girls typically begin to come under more physical restrictions. After that, their skills diverge slightly, the gap between them becoming especially pronounced at adolescence, when the restrictions on girls’ freedom to explore and master environments also become more pronounced. That this relates to socialization, not inherent ability, seems clear from the fact that boys who have been allowed less mastery of space will tend, like girls, to show signs of less developed spatial-visual abilities and field independence. For example, one study that compared kibbutz-raised boys and girls in Israel with their counterparts in Western and other Middle Eastern countries showed that the kibbutz children had the edge, presumably because they enjoyed more physical freedom. In another study of children’s visual-spatial abilities, Eskimo boys and girls—whose culture allows children of both sexes a high degree of autonomy, including going on long hunting trips—showed no sex difference in intellectual skills. On the other hand, a study of the Temne culture in Africa where females are more restricted showed a familiar male intellectual edge. Cultures as otherwise disparate as a town in New England and a Bantu-speaking society in Kenya, when they shared this gender-bound difference in freedom to master space, also shared gender difference in intellectual skills. Though there is certainly more than one cause for such intellectual differences, Susan Saegert and Roger Hart, the two scholars who collected and evaluated these studies, concluded that “the very different opportunities given to girls versus boys to freely manipulate the environment must surely affect their cognitive representations.”6
Since in all these cultures fear of molestation and other safety concerns were high on the list of reasons for restricting the freedom of girls, the frequent experience of feeling endangered in a female body—a feeling I realized only when it lessened in the streets of Tokyo—turns out to have penalties that stretch far beyond the immediate. As Alison Stallibrass points out in The Self-Respecting Child, a compassionate classic based on her years of experience with play groups, both boys and girls who are discouraged from developing their physical confidence tend to compensate by overvaluing words, by bossing or bullying others, or by preferring the company of adults to that of children. Though adults may reward the verbal child, as she points out, “a child whose mental activity is predominantly verbal is living at secondhand.”7
The good news is that remedial programs in physical skills seem to benefit less active children very quickly, as if their potential were stored up and waiting. When adults have a safe place to make themselves vulnerable, they also can return to this developmental “broken place” and restore a neglected physical skill. More good news is that the redundant backup systems of body and brain tend to compensate if any faculty is lost. Thus, children who move through space on crutches or in a wheelchair also develop the spatial intellectual skills that another child does while running and climbing. And it has recently been discovered that deaf babies of deaf parents begin to babble with their hands—to make gestures that are clearly more organized and repetitive than the random gestures of hearing babies—at about ten months, the same age at which hearing babies begin to speak in syllables in imitation of their parents.8 The point is to develop and value our bodily abilities, whatever they are.
But we have no idea what might happen if both girls and boys were allowed to be adventurous and exploring in safe and enriched environments; or if adults whose childhood freedoms were restricted were encouraged to “go back” and give themselves another chance to throw a baseball, hike in the wilderness, perfect a swan dive, dance the soft-shoe, run a marathon, take up archery, ski cross-country, learn to skateboard, climb a rock face, study t’ai chi, or do whatever else it is they felt attracted to but couldn’t try.
If we had a culture that nurtured the intelligence implicit in blood and bone from infancy on, we wouldn’t need remedial efforts, and there’s no telling how far we might advance. Nonetheless, many people have made big changes in later life by learning how to honor the wisdom of their bodies, like those in the three parables that follow. In the fourth, there is a glimpse of what can happen when one’s life from the very beginning includes that body-wisdom.
• All children are born with a unique self, but some have families that require conformity. For Patti Davis, this was the constant tension of her childhood: feeling different in a setting where “difference” was wrong. In a family that occupied posh California houses and eventually the governor’s mansion, she felt more at home in her friends’ warmer, messier, less affluent homes. In a meat-eating household that took pride in serving game raised on the family ranch, she remembered the animals’ names, and became a vegetarian. With parents too secretive to tell her that she had a half sister, her father’s daughter by his first wife, she was the child who was always curious.
These and other differences brought punishment from Patti’s mother, perhaps herself living out the legacy of a cool and often absent mother. When Patti began to develop breasts early, her mother seemed to become even angrier and dressed her in clothes that disguised her body. Patti retreated into a world of her own, often pretending she was an Indian running through the forest, sometimes fantasizing “real” parents who would rescue her.
But though her imagination found refuge, her body still betrayed its desire for acceptance. “We wear our attitudes in our bodies,” as Patti explained to me recently, “and I grew up looking like a question mark: Am I okay? Do you approve?”
At nineteen, she moved away from home. Her father—himself the child of an alcoholic father and trained in denial—insisted that everything was just fine, but Patti’s mother eventually disinherited her. Meanwhile, Patti made a living as a waitress, changed her name to avoid people who wanted to use her either for or against her powerful father, and created a family of friends. Eventually, she married and began to find her voice as a writer of novels, but she still feared public places, disapproval, and even success, since that went against her mother’s predictions for her and thus didn’t feel “like home.”
One day, her husband invited her to go with him to a gym, since at thirty-two, she still was reluctant to venture into new places alone. She began to learn the weight-training techniques of bodybuilding, including ways to direct one’s mind “into” a specific muscle, so that blood and energy were directed there, too. Though she had been warned that this process could release old toxins stored in the muscles, she had such strong responses of nausea and light-headedness that she wondered if all her childhood pain might be stored there. Nonetheless, she persisted, and by focusing in this way, she gradually began to feel as if she were inside her body instead of fantasizing her way out. Unlike dressing up and other kinds of body care that reminded her of her mother—indeed, that made her fear becoming her mother—this one had no sad echoes of the past. Unlike the symbolic running she had done as a little girl pretending to be an Indian, this new strength made her feel she could stand her ground.
But even before Patti noticed differences in her body’s strength, her husband noticed changes in her behavior. She was willing to go to the gym on her own, sometimes even to more public places, and she began to speak in a more definite way. “I suddenly realized,” she says now, “that all my life, I’d been the Queen of Apology.” She felt proud of new muscle in a body that had been round-shouldered and fragile. As this transformation continued from the inside out, she began to feel more at ease on her own, less fearful and cowering, more able to say what she was feeling.
After seven years of exercising every day and weight-training several times a week, Patti’s body is no longer a question mark. “I realize that even my first novel, which I wrote before I started bodybuilding, was apologetic,” she says now. “There was a big difference in my second one, which took on violence in Nicaragua and so forced me to look at conflict.” In her third novel, House of Secrets, she was able to deal with conflict in a family setting, though still in fiction. Now, she is at work on an autobiography that will examine the effects of her family’s habit of denial on her own life and, since her father, Ronald Reagan, was President of the United States, the effects of his need to insist “everything is fine” on the nation’s political and economic life, too.
Sitting across from Patti at a restaurant where we’ve just been talking, it’s hard to imagine this tall, strong, beautiful woman as the round-shouldered and fearful little girl she once was. In the few years I’ve known her, she has always looked like an artist’s rendering of a woman after the revolution: arms strong, hair flowing, striding in comfortable boots through her city or mine. Only when she talks about the fragile, cowering little girl does she begin unconsciously to hunch her shoulders and shrink slightly in her chair, as if her body were also remembering. For women to enjoy physical strength is a collective revolution. For Patti, overcoming the feelings of weakness and body-fear that had put her at such a disadvantage as a little girl with a punishing mother and a distant father was the beginning of inner strength, too.
• As a smart and sensitive child, John understood what was expected of him by the time he was four. The son of parents who always said, “He’s no trouble at all,” John played by himself under the racks of clothes in his family’s dry-cleaning store. He learned all the don’ts: “Don’t make noise … Don’t bother the customers … Don’t be conspicuous …” He also absorbed his parents’ mix of shame and rage for having been imprisoned in California’s internment camps for Japanese Americans during World War II. It seemed to be the source of his mother’s fearful injunctions to keep his opinions to himself, to be, in her words, “like a ghost.”
But as John later remembered, this message wasn’t unusual in his neighborhood of immigrants. His best friend’s family was Polish, and they also told their kids: “Don’t ask questions … Don’t think you’re like other kids … Don’t trust outsiders …” When that friend disobeyed and got beaten, John admired the defiance with which he insisted, “I didn’t feel a thing.” At twelve, John began to break from his parents by joining the underground of the boys in his neighborhood. Together, they joked and bragged about sex, masturbated in the darkness of a neighborhood movie, and at fourteen, went to local prostitutes together. Though John still disliked his body for being shorter and having less body hair than his non-Japanese friends, he began to think of sex and manhood as his escape; the only part of himself that was strong enough to rebel against his family’s sadness and rescue him from difficult feelings.
When he joined the army reserves to get an education, John at first felt uncomfortable when drill sergeants made them chant: “This is your cock, this is your gun, one is to kill, one is for fun.” Soon, however, he began to feel like one of the guys—the first member of his family to become a real American. Still, he couldn’t quite imagine that a non-Japanese girl would want to go out with him. He eventually fell in love with and proposed to a young woman from a respected and well-to-do Japanese-American family in San Francisco. It was as far as he could get from his family’s shadowed immigrant past.
Within a year after their marriage, however, he was feeling mystified by this bride. She wanted him to take Japanese-style communal baths, to massage his feet and forehead and then have him do the same to her, and to “cuddle.” He tried to comply, but it made him feel like a child again. After all, the only difference between closeness to his mother and to another woman was sexual: he was always impatient for the powerful orgasm that got him out of those unmanly danger zones of childhood vulnerability. When his wife finally got up the courage to complain that their lovemaking was just “mutual masturbation,” he felt hurt and puzzled: What else should it be?
When their son was born, John’s self-doubts surfaced again. He loved this baby so much that he felt as if their bodies melted into each other when he held him. John’s own father had paid little attention to him until he was old enough to help out in the store, and so John assumed this was how fathers and sons were supposed to be. He began to stay later at work to avoid the unsettling emotions he felt when with either his son or his wife. In this way, they fell into a routine of almost entirely separate worlds that continued for a dozen years.
But when John was in his thirties, he began to notice a pins-and-needles tingling in his arms and legs, and then a numbness. Tests revealed very high blood pressure, poor circulation, and other precursors of serious problems. When his doctor included daily whirlpool baths and massages as part of his treatment, John was scared enough to comply.
One day while sitting in a therapy tub, he remembered that his parents had gone to traditional Japanese baths. As he lay on a massage table, he also remembered the old woman masseuse who had “walked” on his parents’ backs, Japanese style, and who always hugged him and gave him sweets. The odd thing was that with each new feeling in his body, there came a new memory of something from childhood. By blotting out the painful events, he had also forgotten that his parents had given him pleasure.
John began to ask his wife for massages—for purely medical reasons, of course. He installed a wooden, Japanese-style hot tub at home and asked her to join him in it after work. While the water swirled around them, they talked about nonroutine things for the first time since their courtship. Gradually, he found himself looking forward to this sensuous end of the day. After their bath, they began a gentle, languorous kind of lovemaking that he hadn’t experienced before; certainly not with the prostitutes he had been visiting ever since his son was born. Sometimes, they just lay on the bed and took a nap curled up against each other like spoons.
One day, John brought his wife a quote from a magazine: The fundamental error is believing that touch is a means to an end. It is not. Touch is an end in itself. Understanding that this was a tacit apology, she gave him a subtle present in return by reading aloud to him in Japanese from an ancient guide to sexual pleasure. It said exactly the same thing as that Masters and Johnson quote, but in a much more poetic way. John found himself wondering: Who is this fascinating stranger I’ve been living with all these years?
Because he had missed the childhood of his son, who was now a teenager with a life of his own, John found himself watching babies in the park who reminded him of that frightening, magnetic, body-melting emotion. Would another baby give him a second chance—just as his own body seemed to have given him one? He asked his wife if she would consider giving birth again, but said he understood if she wouldn’t. He thought: If she trusts me enough to do this, I’ll be the father I couldn’t be until now—and wished my father had been.
A few weeks later when he and his wife were making love in their new, unhurried, sensuous way, John realized that he, too, could have multiple orgasms if he just surrendered his whole body to her touch, and that not every orgasm had to be preceded by an erection. His wife said her erotic readings had led to this discovery. John said it had nothing to do with sex but more with the tears he had finally been able to shed for his parents and for his own numbed years of living “like a ghost.”
But whatever the reason, it didn’t matter. As his wife said as she told me this story—for it was she who had been telling me why she had decided to have a second child—they agreed on a Japanese proverb: “A circle needs no beginning.”
• Like many women whose beauty makes others assume they need no help, Phyllis Rosser got more envy than understanding. We were friends in college, and I admired Phyllis’s sensible attitude toward food, her translucent skin, and her ability to get her papers done on time. Indeed, she generously helped the rest of us who put off everything until the last minute, and was the sort of person her classmates trusted, even when we didn’t trust each other.
After graduation, Phyllis married and moved to a New Jersey suburb. When we did meet at reunions, she seemed to be the same serene, quiet, beautiful woman she had always been. Once I glimpsed her in an airport with her husband, the two of them walking to a gate with their arms around each other’s waist, and I thought: What a good marriage. What a nice man.
But inside Phyllis, something very different was going on. “I felt trapped in a life I had never planned,” she told me recently. “I had no clear idea what I wanted, just something beyond the narrow life I was living. After college, I took acting lessons—but I ended up in a suburban backwater with nothing of my own anyway. I loved my husband and kids, so I blamed myself—I thought I just lacked the courage to break out into the wider world. By the time I had my daughter, our third and last child, I was really depressed. Once, Bill told me he was afraid he’d come home and find me and the baby dead on the floor—that’s how bad it was.”
To her sympathetic husband, this must have seemed doubly mysterious because, from his point of view, their life was going just fine. She remembers his telling her: “Your problem is that you should like yourself better.” Of course, he was right—but how could she like herself when she felt she had no self ?
It was a measure of her desperation that her calm broke, and she had an impulse to do an impractical and possibly dangerous thing: learn how to fly. Even in retrospect, she’s not sure why. Perhaps it was her recurring nightmare of running on a beach while being chased by an airplane from which her parents were trying to shoot her, or perhaps it was the sheer outrageousness of the idea. Or perhaps it was as simple as her one conscious thought at the time: If I have the courage to fly, I can do anything.
She took lessons, and fell in love with the language and symbolism of flying. “There’s something you learn to do in the air called ‘breaking out of a pattern,’ ” she explained, “and that’s exactly what I wanted to do. Given where I was, it was also important that I keep ‘taking off.’ And finally, there was ‘soloing.’ What could be more symbolic than that?”
Months later, when she had trusted her body’s competence and learned to fly, she found that her mind began to take off, too. She had been coming in from the suburbs to volunteer in the chaotic offices of Ms. magazine—which was how we had made contact again—and I noticed her increased interest and energy but didn’t understand its source. It was then the early 1980s, and she suggested covering an upcoming conference on Scholastic Aptitude Tests, those sacred measures of academic accomplishment that were already under challenge for race and class bias. Instinctively, Phyllis felt they had a gender bias, too. She herself had done well on them, but they reminded her of the aptitude tests she had taken in college that had been administered with great authority but had done nothing to help her find her talents.
After that conference, Phyllis began to do soloing of an intellectual kind. She put in several years becoming a self-taught expert in the rarefied field of standardized testing, “even though,” as she explained, “I was an art major with no training in psychometrics.” Her subsequent reporting in Ms. helped bring the gender bias in the SATs to public attention, and she was commissioned by the National Center for Fair and Open Testing to study the impact of test biases on women’s educational opportunities. Two years later, in 1987, she published her report Sex Bias in College Admissions Tests: Why Women Lose Out and was asked to testify before the House Judicial Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights. That was followed by a grant from the Department of Education’s Women’s Educational Equity Act Program to study exactly how sex bias is embedded in the questions of standardized testing. In 1989, her report The SAT Gender Gap: Identifying the Causes was published by the Center for Women Policy Studies.
Partly as a result of her work, many schools began deemphasizing such tests, and some states, either voluntarily or under court order, stopped using them as a basis for distributing public scholarship funds. But to help the majority of students who still have to take the tests, and whose futures are held hostage by their scores, Phyllis contributed an introduction to the 1990 book The Young Women’s Guide to Better SAT Scores: Fighting the Gender Gap.
In the same years she’d been doing this important intellectual work, Phyllis had been exploring emotionally, too, by experimenting with meditation and other self-therapy techniques for depression, “methods that seemed very ‘far out’ and ‘New Age’ at the time,” she remembers. That self-inquiry helped her identify a deep yearning that vocational tests had missed. “I realized,” she said, “that a part of me was in mourning for the artist I had never become.” She began to take sculpture classes at the New York Feminist Art Institute and to work in a studio she set up at home. As I write this, her years of study and solitary work are bearing fruit. She has had a one-woman show and is looking forward to a future of this work that wholly involves both her body and her mind.
In retrospect, her husband, Bill, says that he, too, was afraid in those dark early years: afraid that if Phyllis found a life of her own, she would “just leave me sooner,” as he put it, or that she would find someone else. But, of course, the opposite happened: because they allowed each other to become more themselves, they are still together.
Like so many women, Phyllis is becoming herself after fifty.9 And as for many, the process began with physical risk-taking, perhaps the body’s way of breaking out of the calm and ladylike restrictions she had faced from girlhood on. What’s amazing is how often bodies choose the perfect symbolic act, the one that speaks most particularly to an inner need. Phyllis’s choice of flying gave her the overview of life she had feared belonged only to her parents, and an artist’s ability to make shapes out of endless detail; to see the forest and the trees. Like a sculptor stepping back from a work in progress, she had begun to see the shape of her life.
• What could we become if we had a whole-body, all-five-senses upbringing? Only children of the future may know, but for now, we have an inspiring clue in the life of anthropologist Margaret Mead.
From infancy, she was encouraged—by her mother, a sociologist, and especially by her paternal grandmother, an innovative schoolteacher and free-thinker—to explore the world around her in every way she or they could imagine. Diverse toys and physical challenges, colors and textures, music, art, and perhaps most important, permission to get dirty and make a mess—all these were part of Margaret’s preschool life. Each night her grandmother talked to her about the day’s events while she brushed the little girl’s hair, giving her the experience of being treated as an equal that is a shared theme in the childhoods of many “gifted” children.10 By four, as Margaret later wrote, “I was treated as a full person, whose opinions were solicited and treated seriously.”11
She also memorized poems and maxims by “seeing” their images, thus acquiring a prodigious memory—and, as she would later realize, integrating both sides of her brain. Because of these skills, she never forgot any of the apparently nonsense verse that her grandmother taught her. At four, she could recite:
I’m sitting alone by the fire
Dressed just as I came from the dance,
In a gown, Frog, even you would admire—
It cost a cool thousand in France.
I’m bediamonded out of all reason,
My hair is done up in a queue,
In short, sir, the belle of the season
Is wasting an hour on you.12
And for the rest of her life, she was able to convince both men and women that she herself was “the belle of the season.”
Because Margaret’s grandmother believed in learning every aspect of a process, from beginning to end, at eight Margaret built a loom on which she wove textiles of her own design. Knowing how self-alienating school could be, her mother and grandmother often kept her at home to learn carpentry, wood carving, basketry, dancing, and many sports. She also learned spelling and arithmetic by setting them to rhythmic patterns; another whole-body, whole-brain technique. She could imagine the aroma of a color and describe the taste of a room, a gift for synesthesia, or cross-sensing, that persisted for the rest of her life. She could, for instance, smell fear and anger (an acrid odor), remember on her skin the touch of a friend’s hand for hours afterward, and sense whether someone she knew had been in a room.
With such body-mind unity, she also moved in and out of her unconscious with ease. She might decide what to dream about and then do so, often solving problems in this way. Or she might examine her dreams to see what treasures her creative unconscious had come up with on its own. When planning a speech, she first saw images; and when asked to describe people or a culture, she focused on precisely how they did their work, built their fishing boats, or raised their children—a love of the particular and ordinary that helped make her a brilliant anthropologist.
As her friend and student, futurist Jean Houston, characterized Margaret’s education: “Dualisms were discouraged; she was trained to accept the unity of mind and body, thinking and feeling.”13
As one result, when Mead’s abilities were measured at Jean Houston’s Foundation for Mind Research, her fine eye-to-muscle coordination surpassed that of almost anyone else ever tested. As another result, Houston wrote: “A neurologist who examined Margaret for a head injury reported that according to his instruments she had the least empty mind he had ever encountered.”14
Margaret Mead became a force in her profession while still in her twenties and built an empathetic bridge to other cultures that endures to this day. She was able to absorb complex realities so speedily that some anthropologists doubted her studies were all her own. As her coworker and former husband, Gregory Bateson, explained to her when she was hurt by such doubts, “The reason people don’t believe you is that they don’t know how fast you work.” And, as he testified, you had to see it to believe it.15 She also lived a full life as a lover, wife, and mother, without being submerged by any of those roles, at a time when this was even more difficult than it is now. Yet given her childhood, perhaps it’s not surprising that her sense of herself was so unified and strong; that she was a pioneer in recognizing the relationship between culture and personality; or that she overturned conventional hierarchies and maintained a passionate curiosity about ordinary people and daily life. Certainly, she understood that childrearing was a subject more worthy of study than any other.
“If you ask Western people where ‘I’ exists, many point to their foreheads,” Houston wrote, but “if you asked Margaret Mead that question, she responded matter-of-factly, ‘Why, all over me, of course.’ ”16
Perhaps Margaret Mead wasn’t so extraordinary after all. Just an ordinary woman with chances we all should have.