Hello and welcome to another episode of Mindfulness Plus.

I'm your host Thomas Mekonki. Thank you so much for listening.

Earth Day is coming up. Earth Day is coming up.

Earth Day is upon us.

And I wanted to take some time in this episode to kind of explore our relationship with the Earth.

Sound like kind of not so related topic to you?

I hope by the end of the episode you think differently. There's a lot of complexity I could get into from a psychological perspective

on the phenomenon of disembodiment. But I want to just keep it simple and practice oriented today.

And on the simple side of the street, where I like to stroll these days, I would say that

disembodiment is just part of our nature as human beings. We have these big, juicy brains that are metabolic hogs. They take a

lot of energy to run. They're these predictive machines. They tell us about what's going on in the

moment, what might happen next. We're constantly mapping the world, trying to find patterns that hopefully help us meet the next

moment a little bit better than we met the last moment.

How's that for simple?

So we human beings, we're endowed with this capacity to think abstractly.

And by abstract means, you know, in the original Latin, to draw away from.

We're drawing awareness away from physical embodied reality into a world of symbols.

So we human beings, whether we know it or not, we hang out in a symbolic world,

what some philosophers have called the world of mind, which is distinct, in a sense, from the world, from the earth. This is where

I want to go today. Strictly speaking, we're never disembodied, right? Like, as long as we're living, breathing, even if we've been lost in reverie and our thoughts for a thousand years, we're still in a body.

The body's right here.

And yet we don't always experience being in a body.

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