The Gift of Being Sick

It is funny how “catching a cold” grounds me to the present moment by continually reminding me of my “unhealthy” physical condition. It is hard to move past the barrier of “pain” that being sick creates. In our healthy moments, the body disappears (for the most part), while under the condition of sickness, it becomes [...]

Deep Breathing: The Corpse Pose

How often do you focus on your breath, on the very process of your physical breathing self? After several weeks of daily physical training, I have become aware of the impotant healing and relaxing potential of focused breathing.
As it usually is, throughout the day, I tend to get enwrapped in various work-related projects and [...]

Indifference and Once-Occurence

An email from a friend this evening contained an aphorism from E.M. Cioran. The aphorism (from, I’m guessing “The Trouble With Being Born”) is:
She meant absolutely nothing to me. Realizing, suddenly, after so many years, that whatever happens I shall never see her again, I nearly collapsed. We understand what death is [...]

Kiyokazu Washida: “My Body…Dead Body…Corpse” from “The Screaming Body” (JP title: 悲鳴をあげる身体)

This is my unpublished (amateur) translation of Prof. Washida’s work. My tools were a Kanji dictionary and a Japanese-English dictionary. I hope you find this stimulating.
Then there is the question of “whose body is this?” Namely, the person that is my body becomes a problem in the fact that the relationship of “me” to “my” [...]

Carrion Existence (2003)

Carrion Existence
Commenting on the horrifying future of the skin and of the constancy of its decay, Cioran said, “Much more than the skeleton, it is the flesh, I mean the carrion flesh, which disturbs and alarms us—and which alleviates us as well (1974).” Further, in the same essay, he writes, “In order to conceive, and [...]