Monarch Meds #2: the Felt-body & the Skin

Monarch meds (meditations) is a series where I instinctively select two books and then, in a stroke of serendipity, open each to a random page.

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These texts when read conjunctly speaks to universals of the human condition, straddling the realms of physiology and phenomenology to reveal how skin holds threads of emotional, physical, and existential elements. Tonino Griffero, in his passage, is advocating for an understanding of human experience and ethics that is rooted in our embodied existence. He challenges traditional dichotomies between mind and body, internal and external, suggesting that our emotions, expressions, and ethical lives are all interwoven aspects of our being in the world. Edward T. Hall, interested in the skin, portrays the organ for what it really is: not as merely a boundary or shield but as a dynamic interface for communication. He speaks to the skin itself as a living being, sensitive to the ebb and flow of emotional states. This scientific insight into the skin's capacity to emit and detect heat resonates with the Griffero’s idea of the felt-body as an arena of knowledge. Here, the body is not a passive vessel but an active participant in the world, embodying and expressing our being in a way that transcends dualistic conceptions of inside and outside.

This is fascinating when speaking to the concept of what is knowledge and what is knowing. We sometimes conceive of the world as happening to us, like we are in an environment and then our personal, internal senses perceive the world around us, which then impacts our internal states of being. If we think about ourselves like this, we are, in a sense, buying into the dichotomy of inside vs. outside—mind vs. body. We start to believe that the external world is separate from ourselves, and thus knowing it would too happen in an external plane. Perhaps, though, our internal states actually effect the external environment in a kind of