Reclaiming Bodily Knowledge and Experiential Knowing

Sor Juana championed intellectual knowledge, yet she lived in and through her body—a body subject to pain, to the restrictions of her gender and status, to the embodied experience of convent life. Contemporary healthcare has often split mind from body, privileging abstract scientific knowledge over what bodies themselves know and communicate. This particularly harms women, whose bodily experiences are pathologized or dismissed. Healthcare justice requires reclaiming bodily knowledge: trusting symptoms and sensations, recognizing menstrual cycles as wisdom not pathology, understanding pain as communication. Sor Juana's integration of rigorous intellect with lived embodiment models how healthcare can honor both scientific knowledge and bodily experience. This means listening to what bodies tell us, respecting somatic practices like dance, breath work, and touch, and recognizing that knowledge lives in the body. It means trusting people's reports of their own pain, sensation, and needs rather than dismissing embodied experience as merely emotional or irrational. Healthcare honoring this principle integrates mind and body, science and sensation, analysis and intuition into holistic healing approaches.