 I've got AMA 40 here. So we tend to know ourselves by our body tension in part, right? So in reaction to the stresses of life, we tend to tense up and then once we learn to get through tough times through increasing body tension, then it rarely goes away. It just builds on that. So people most interested in learning things that they can just add on top of themselves, which is why learning Alexander Technique is so counterintuitive because Alexander Technique is a technique of subtraction. You let go forms of unnecessary muscular tension. And so without our current levels of muscular tension, we really don't know ourselves. And some people so fear intimacy or connection or fusion with other people that one of the ways that they maintain their own sense of boundaries and their own sense of safety is to have lots of muscular holding patterns, lots of muscular tension. That's how they understand themselves as a completely independent person from others and not in danger of being overly vulnerable. So I'm reading this book on psychoanalysis on the body, Relational Perspectives on the Body. So a lot of people don't like to talk about emotions, but you may notice some people they only come alive when they're talking about their illness. So if they got something real like back pain or ulcers or some debilitating skin condition, then they like something come alive, like talking about their illness. But when they're talking about what they're feeling, they're not conscious of what they're feeling or they can't articulate it. So having it like a mind-body illness like back pain or skin conditions. This is a way that people can feel alive. Now I remember when I bought my first car, it was a Volkswagen Bug 1968 VW Bug, I bought it in the summer of 1985. I so love that car, I used to take such great care of it. I had air fresheners, I used to wash it and vacuum it. And then I pranked it. While I was changing a radio station, I ran in the back of a parked school bus in September of 1985. And when I got it repaired, I never felt about it the same way. Like it had been so damaged, now it had a new front end and the paint job didn't fully match and so I just didn't care about my car the same way after that prank. A lot of people are like that with their bodies. Once they feel like their bodies let them down or failed them in some way, they just can't care for it again. They just kind of split themselves off from their body. Like their body has betrayed them. And so they start having antipathy for their body. And a lot of people, they have to live in an abstract fantasy because reality is too painful. So if they were, for example, to admit that they were lonely, their whole approach to life would absolutely collapse. They would collapse. And so if you have to live in fantasy and delusion, then you're split off from your body. And other people, they view the body as something unimportant that women take care of, that their mother. As infants you used to, you cry and your mother responds. You get hurt and your mother takes care of you. And so they go through life with this unconscious understanding that the body is something that their wife or their mother takes care of. And it's not very important and if you take care of your own body, then you're really usurping your mother's role or your wife's role. I'm just fascinated by all these different mind-body illnesses, most about your illnesses, you know, from back pain to skin conditions to ulcers, any illness where there's no objective cause. And overwhelmingly with back pain, for example, there's no difference in the radiographic studies between people who have back pain and people who don't. So when there's no objective medical cause for your illness, then you're likely dealing with mind-body syndrome, where because of unconscious rage, resentment, fear that you can't handle, that you're not conscious of, the mind protects you from unwelcome realizations by giving you physical symptoms to focus on. So it could be back pain or with skin conditions or stomach aches or digestion problems. It's the way that the mind distracts you from unwelcome realizations about how jealous you are or how enraged you are or how inadequate you feel. So you get to be distracted by your genuine real back pain. So when we experience emotions, usually experience them first of all in our body and then later the mind kind of deduces, oh, I'm feeling happy, I'm feeling sad, I'm feeling inadequate. But if we block access to our emotions, then we don't have any way of kind of regulating our emotions and so the body has to grab our attention. So that's one of the bc's for mind-body illness.