<p>Why retrieve the body’s pre-ontological understanding-of-being? This essay is about the process of embodying an appropriately ontological experience and understanding of being. In his Introduction to <i>Being and Time</i>, Heidegger introduces the concept of a pre-ontological understanding-of-being, deploying it as a hermeneutical way to initiate his project. But he makes no further use of this concept; it simply disappears from his thought after that inauguration. It thus has no function in Heidegger’s conception of our potential&#xa0;for self-development in regard to the understanding-of-being and the claim [<i>Ereignung</i>] that that understanding makes on our responsibility for taking into our care [<i>Wächterschaft</i>] the aletheic truth [<i>Wahrheit</i>] of being. But, within just a few years, he unequivocally repudiated his notion of the pre-ontological understanding of being, saying that it perpetuates an interpretation of the <i>Seinsverständnis</i> that thinks of it as inherently conceptual, i.e., as an understanding to be articulated in terms of our common conceptual formations—“the language of Man.” In this essay, I draw on later texts, primarily “The Principle of Identity” (1957) and “Time and Being” (1962), to argue for a radically different interpretation of the pre-ontological <i>Seinsverständnis</i>: a prereflective, pre-objective, pre-subjective mode of simply lived openness: the natural openness of infancy and a promising beginning of a reflectively formed understanding surprisingly adumbrated already in a 1927 lecture course on The Fundamental Problems of Phenomenology and implicitly sought-after, I believe, in his 1943 text on “Aletheia (Heraclitus, Fragment B 16).” In my new interpretation, this pre-ontological experience with being is an ontological potential carried by the body; and it remains available for our retrieval in recollection [<i>Er-innerung</i>] and our self-development in ethical life as thrown-open Da-sein.</p>