Michael Lippman

Let's talk a little more about this "I'm so out of touch with my body" thing.  Carl Jung said there are four main personality types:  thinking, feeling, intuitive, and sensation. 

Thinking and feeling are opposite to each other on the "wheel", just as intuitive and sensation are opposites.  So, if I'm an intuitive type -- which I am -- you can imagine that "intuition" is at the top of the wheel, and sensation is therefore at the bottom of the wheel.  Inuition is my "superior function", and sensation is my "inferior function".  

It's with the inferior function that things get interesting. 

Sensation has to do with all things of the body.  And with the nuts and bolts of this world : balancing my checkbook, keeping my car clean, keeping my nose hairs trimmed (that's my wife talking), etc.  That's my inferior function.  I'm not good at those things.  I smoked pot for 10 plus years and let my body be a blob on a chair as I "created art" in a state of intuitive bliss.  That's classic intuitive type behavior.

Here's the catch:  In the second half of life (and I'm right there baby, just turned 42) the job is to excavate the inferior function.  And -- as my wife loves to quote -- "when you use the inferior function consciously , that's when you meet God." 

So the title of this blog, "Boy Meets Kale", is a wish, an intention, a need.  For me, getting to know my body may be my path to the divine -- not by dancing ecstatically with my strengths, but by developing a relationship with what is weak in me.