Practicing to Understand (Mindbody)

Hypocognition is a term from the intersection of linguistics and cognition, identifying an inability to understand something, because you cannot model it. In cognitive linguistics, modeling is assumed to be achieved by assigning words to things, but more broadly, when we lack representations (whether they are words, or images, or mathematical formulations) for a given concept, we cannot really grasp it - we cannot even understand that we don’t understand it.

“You can see an object or idea and still not realize its significance or its meaning unless you have developed the mental machinery to put it into the functional context that it needs to be in to provide you with clarity”.

Zat Rana

(Not so) coincidentally, a movement practice is an excellent way to model the mindbody phenomenon; by giving us reference after reference of what it IS, from as many vantage points as possible...

Mindbody is something which we are/inhabit/manifest. It speaks to a whole made of pieces that cannot be separated without losing the meaning of the whole - but at this point in our social evolution, we still fail to describe that second order relationship well. Maybe it is for a lack of practices that truly aim to crack that dichotomy. Maybe such practice can begin to yield references, for example, for what it means to “inhabit a body” and “be that body”, simultaneously.

Hypocognition is usually used to refer to things besides ourselves... but what about turning that lens back upon ourselves? What don’t we see, of who and what we are, for lack of models and mental machinery which manufacture the context for making our own existence comprehensible?