Notes on The Wisdom of Your Body: Finding Healing, Wholeness, and Connection Through Embodied Living by Hillary McBride
In The Wisdom of Your Body: Finding Healing, Wholeness, and Connection Through Embodied Living, Dr. Hillary McBride says that we ought to refer to our bodies not as "it" but as "he / him" or "she / her" (or whatever other personal pronouns).
It's very common for us to speak of our bodies as "it", which gives us permission to see the body as an unfortunate, deteriorating vehicle for our brains. So when we speak of the body, we say things like, "It needs water, food, sleep, and sex." Even though I consider myself a materialist, I didn't realize until hearing about this change in perspective that I was actually sneaking a kind of dualism into my worldview. In this semi-dualism, the brain is "me" and the body is just the thing that carries my brain from place to place. It is true that the brain seems to be the seat of consciousness (especially probably the frontal lobe), but it's also true that the brain can't operate on its own. In a practical sense, it literally can't function without blood; and that blood has to be oxygenated and filtered and nutrient-enriched and so on, which means that it must pass through all of our other major organs as well. As one Redditor recently said (paraphrased), "We think with our blood." I don't think they meant that the blood is literally the thing that does the thinking, but rather that human thinking isn't separable from blood; i.e., even though the brain is the thinking machine, it only runs on blood, and without blood, it's just a hunk of inanimate organic matter. In a more philosophical sense, too, the brain relies on its connections with sense organs to be able to make any kinds of decisions. The sense organs are what bring fresh information into the brain. Without fresh information, what would a brain do? It's hard to know for sure, but it seems like it would either do nothing at all or be forced to ruminate on only the things it knows already. Such rumination might take the form of hallucinations, but this only seems plausible if it already possessed memories of an external world of some kind. Can you imagine what life would be like if you had no sense organs at all — if you couldn't see, hear, taste, smell, or touch? What would existence mean at that point? What would your personality be like if you were born this way? What would you be in such a scenario?
I suspect that most of us who (accidentally) adopt this kind of semi-dualism don't think of (e.g.) our hands as a core part of ourselves. We think of hands as a nice but ultimately expendable little feature on the nice but ultimately expendable vehicle that drives us around. (The body seems dispensable in at least a hypothetical, sci-fi sense if not currently in a practical sense; i.e., we can at least plausibly imagine our brains beind scooped out and placed in another body with no harm done to our personalities, memories, beliefs, etc.) But losing a hand is one small step on the way to losing all sense organs as imagined above. Yes, after losing a hand, most of our sensory systems remain intact, but now one part is gone. From my own small experiences with numbness in various parts of my body, the lack of sensation and control always makes me feel like I've forgotten something, like if I could just remember that thing that's on the tip of my brain, then I could feel and control that body part again. So does losing a hand mean that I've lost not a superficial feature but a chunk of what really makes me "me" in a deep sense?
The point I'm trying and probably failing to articulate is that there really is no distinction between "me" and "my body". There isn't a "me" without my body. And as I lose parts of my body, so I also lose parts of "me" in a real, deep sense. Referring to our bodies using personal pronouns rather than as "it" is a way of trying to make this monist, materialist view of the mind salient and visceral.
And even if all of the above philosophy is garbage, using personal pronouns might still be useful in a practical sense because it might help us to treat our bodies with more compassion and care. It's easier to feel compassion for your body when you think of it as a person with wants and needs rather than as a fussy, high-maintenance machine that ultimately doesn't have any value.