The Human Body

Quotations, Sayings, Poems, Lore, Facts, Science, Wisdom
Theme: Mind-Body Movement Arts

Compiled by Michael P. Garofalo

Valley Spirit Center, Red Bluff, California

May 21, 2009

"But there is a new wilderness, a new trackless waste, a new unknown and limitless territory, a new terrain of chaos, that calls us. It is a territory that has not been, and cannot be, colonized and domesticated by human ambition and greed, that in its true extent cannot be mapped by human logic at all. This is the "forest" of the human body. The body is now our forest, our jungle, our "outlandish" expanse in which we are invited to let go of everything we think, allow ourselves to be stripped down to our most irreducible person, to die in every experiential sense possible and see what, if anything, remains. In this, I am speaking not of the body we think we have, the body we conceptualize as part of our "me" or my self-image. Rather, I am talking about the body that we meet when we are willing to descend into it, to surrender into its darkness and its mysteries, and to explore it with our awareness."
- Reginald Ray, Touching Enlightenment: Finding Realization in the Body, p. 12

I don't know about the accuracy of the following "facts" about the heart, but, if true, they are quite amazing:

"The entire blood system is estimated at 62,100 miles.
There are 12 pints of blood in an adult male and 9 in an adult female.
5 - 10% of the body's total energy is used to keep the heart beating.
5 - 7.5 gallons of blood are pumped per minute during strenuous exercise.
A heart contracts 2.5 billion times during the average lifetime.
The heart pumps 3.1 billion gallons of blood over a lifespan of 75 years.
46 of the world's largest oil tankers could be filled with blood pumped by the human heart in a normal lifetime.
There are about a billion red blood cells in 2 - 3 drops of blood.
300 million cells die each minute. Two percent of blood cells die each day and are replaced."

Mew Hing's 18 Daoist Palms System

Think about it! Like this fellow once did: