When the Body Feels Good: Zeiler on Eu-Appearance
Have you ever had this feeling that you could do anything with your body? Feeling so good about your physical prowess that you could unroot trees (German saying)? Besides running, I have been doing Calisthenics for a few decades: Bodyweight exercises, where full body control is much needed to do the moves, which makes you feel like a gymnast. It feels so good to perform a muscle-up or a flying pull-up, jumping from one bar to another one that is positioned in an unknown height behind you. It seems impossible, but the body follows your mind's proposal (sometimes). I'll come back to the bars later but let's start with what the research says. When reading the papers about Leder's theory and that only when we are feeling discomfort, we feel our bodies. From my experience, I would say otherwise. So, let's look at the research and a different take on the matter.
Drew Leder[1] gave us a vocabulary for something every runner already knows in the body, even without the words for it. In everyday life, our bodies mostly dis-appear: we move through the world without thinking about how to place a foot or breathe. But when something goes wrong, the body reasserts itself. Leder calls this dys-appearance: the body showing up as bad, hurt, or ill. A twisted ankle, a stitch in the side, the first twinge of an overuse injury. Suddenly the body is impossible to ignore.
For decades, phenomenological research on embodiment followed this thread almost exclusively into pain and illness. Kristin Zeiler[2] asked the obvious but neglected question: what about the opposite? What happens when we become vividly aware of our bodies not because something is wrong, but because something feels right?
Why nobody asked this before
Zeiler's explanation is simple and a little sobering: pain demands attention. It calls for help! From the person suffering, from the people around them, from the medical field. A body that feels good doesn't make the same claim on anyone's time. So, research followed the demand, and eu-appearance sat unexamined.
Zeiler starts from the same phenomenological ground as Leder: the body is not an object we carry around, but the very "anchorage" from which we experience the world at all (Merleau-Ponty[3]). Most of the time, this anchorage is pre-reflective: “I don't think about how my legs work, I just run”. Occasionally it becomes reflective: “I deliberately attend to how my body feels”. Leder assumed this second, reflective mode was mostly triggered by something going wrong. Zeiler's contribution is to show that reflective bodily awareness can just as easily be triggered by something going right and that this need not involve any discomfort or self-alienation at all.
She coins the term eu-appearance, from the Greek eu (good, well) and stasis (to stand): the body standing forth to the subject as good, easy, or well. Physical exercise, she argues, is one of the clearest examples.
The lived body, disrupted and undisrupted
Following Merleau-Ponty, the runner's connection to a trail isn't a runner "in" a landscape, it's closer to a working relationship between mind, body, and terrain (world) that mostly runs on autopilot. Pain is what interrupts that relationship. It doesn't just hurt locally; it collapses both space and time. Leder calls this a spatiotemporal constriction: the far trail ahead, the plans for after the run, all of it shrinks down to the hurting body part, right here, right now. In the more severe cases, the body-part in pain even starts to feel like something other than "me", an alien object rather than a lived part of the self.
Zeiler nuances this picture in a useful way. She doesn't treat pain as one uniform experience. Even a person living with chronic pain isn't necessarily consumed by it at every moment. Zeiler describes a man at breakfast who is aware of his hurting leg, but can still attend to the smell of coffee, his children, the sun through the window. The pain colours his attention without fully occupying it. Only in the most extreme cases, she reaches for Levinas[4] and Scarry's[5] writing on torture, does pain become truly totalizing, blotting out everything else, including language itself. So rather than a simple sudden-pain-versus-chronic-pain differentiation, the real distinction Zeiler draws is between pain that narrows attention and pain that annihilates it.
This matters because it sets up her real argument: if pain exists on a spectrum from "colours my attention" to "consumes it entirely," there's no reason positive bodily awareness can't follow a similar logic. Attention drawn toward the body without discomfort, without alienation, sometimes even more focused when the situation calls for it.
Physical exercise as eu-appearance
Zeiler's central example is a woman swimming in the sea on a hot day. She feels the warmth of the water, the strength of her own arms, the rhythm of her stroke. She's aware of her body as good, easy, well; sometimes pre-reflectively, simply enjoying the movement, and sometimes reflectively, deliberately tuning in to the feel of her own strength and rhythm. Zeiler pairs this with an example from Binh Dinh Kung Fu breathing practice, where a practitioner consciously moves breath from chest to abdomen and back. Thus, a fully deliberate, reflective attention to the body that produces harmony rather than distance or alienation.
The same logic extends naturally to trail running, and to calisthenics: attention to footfall on uneven ground, to breath finding its rhythm, to the shift of weight on a climb or, on the bar, to the moment right before a muscle-up locks in, when weight and grip and shoulder all resolve at once. None of this is in Zeiler's text directly, but it's the same structure she's describing: a mind-body-world relationship that stays intact, even strengthens, under conscious attention.
This is the move that makes her argument interesting rather than obvious. There's a long-standing assumption in phenomenology: she cites Erwin Straus and Plugge that as soon as you consciously attend to your body, you alienate yourself from it; you turn it into an object, something "other." Zeiler pushes back directly. Eu-appearance shows that reflective attention to the body doesn't have to produce distance or discomfort. The swimmer who focuses on the strength of her stroke isn't alienated from her body, she's more at home in it.
She also complicates Leder's claim that pain is felt in the body while pleasure is felt more diffusely, "in and from the world." Zeiler isn't fully convinced by this contrast. The swimmer's pleasure, she argues, is very much felt in the body, not just around it. Both pain and pleasure, in her account, can be sensations properly located in lived embodiment; the difference isn't where they're felt but what they do to the mind-body-world relationship. Dys-appearance disrupts that relationship. Eu-appearance doesn't: it can even deepen it!
The skill of attention
Zeiler suggests that eu-appearance, like any bodily skill, can be cultivated. The swimmer who has fully incorporated the skill of swimming can shift her reflective attention onto the positive feel of her body precisely because she no longer has to think about the mechanics. Someone still learning experiences a flash of eu-appearance too, but differently: less settled, more of a discovery than a practiced return.
This, for me as a trail runner and bodyweight exercise nerd, this rings true. The early kilometres of learning to run trails demand constant conscious correction. Where do I place my foot? How can I slow my breathing uphill or keep my heart from racing on a technical downhill? And on the bar: which muscles fire first, how do I time the swing, where does my body need to be when I let go? You train for years and those considerations fade into the background, and what's left is room to actually notice the good: the rhythm, the ground, the breath, or the bar. Eu-appearance isn't just a mood. It's something built, the way any bodily skill is built: through repetition, until attention to the body stops meaning distance from it, and starts meaning presence.
Written by Ingo@Lozania-Lifestyle.de
[1] Leder, D. (1990). The Absent Body. The University of Chicago Press.
[2] Zeiler, K. (2010). A phenomenological analysis of bodily self-awareness in the experience of pain and pleasure: On dys-appearance and eu-appearance. Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy, 13(4), https://doi.org/10.1007/s11019-010-9237-4
[3] Merleau-Ponty, M. (2002). Phenomenology of perception (C. Smith, Trans.). Routledge. (Original work published 1945)
[4] Levinas, E. (2005). Totality and infinity: An essay on exteriority (A. Lingis, Trans.). Duquesne University Press. (Original work published 1961)
[5] Scarry, E. (1985). The body in pain: The making and unmaking of the world. Oxford University Press.