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The term bodymind is typically seen and encountered in disability studies, referring to the intricate and often times inseparable relationship between the body and the mind, and how these two units might act as one. The field of psychosomatic medicine investigates this concept. A bodymind also resists the Western notion of dualism.

Prominent scholars who have written academically about the bodymind include Eli Clare, Margaret Price, Sami Schalk, Alyson Patsavas, and Alison Kafer. Clare and Price have proposed that the bodymind expresses the interrelatedness of mental and physical processes, and Schalk defines the boydmind similarly as it pertains to disability and race.



Relevance to Disability Studies
The term bodymind is most generally used in the academic field of disability studies. Disability scholars use the term bodymind to emphasize the interdependence and inseparability of the body and mind.

One of the first scholars to popularize the concept of bodymind is Eli Clare, a writer and activist for queer and disability studies. Clare uses bodymind in his work Brilliant Imperfection as a way to resist common Western assumptions that the body and mind are separate entities, or that the mind is “superior” to the body. Similarly, scholar Margaret Price writes that the combination of ‘body’ and ‘mind’ in one term acknowledges that “mental and physical processes not only affect each other but also give rise to each other—that is, because they tend to act as one, even though they are conventionally understood as two”.

Scholar Sami Schalk in her work Bodyminds Reimagined uses the term bodymind to recognize that “processes within our being impact one another in such a way that the notion of a physical versus mental process is difficult, if not impossible to clearly discern in most cases”. Schalk emphasizes the utility of the term bodymind as it relates to disability and race. In analyzing histories of race, gender, and disability, Schalk notes that it is important to recognize the non-physical impact of various oppressions. For Schalk, the term bodymind highlights the “psychic stress” of oppression. In relation to transgenerational trauma in people of color, bodymind is used to show how the psychological toll of oppression and its resulting stress has lasting mental and physical manifestations.

The connection between the body and mind is not merely theoretical; for example, the interrelation between mental and physical health is explored in the field of psychosomatic medicine, which investigates bodily processes in relation to social and psychological factors. For example, the psychiatric condition major depressive disorder often manifests physically in the forms of excessive sleeping, loss of appetite, weight gain or loss, back pain, and headaches.

Relevance to other disciplines
The term bodymind can be found and used in a number of ways across several disciplines, including:


 * Body psychotherapy,[4][5][6][7] a branch of psychotherapy[8] which applies basic principles of somatic psychology. It originated in the work of Pierre Janet, Sigmund Freud and particularly Wilhelm Reich.
 * Bodymind (in meditation traditions)
 * Disability studies, an academic discipline that explores the narrative of disability in relation to society, the medical world, and individual experience.
 * Namarupa, the concept of mind and body in Buddhism.
 * Philosophy, as it relates to the mind-body problem and dualism.
 * Psychosomatic medicine, an interdisciplinary medical field exploring the relationships among social, psychological, and behavioral factors on bodily processes and quality of life in humans and animals. Clinical situations where mental processes act as a major factor affecting medical outcomes are areas where psychosomatic medicine is useful.[10]Bodymind]