Body Matters

“…I quite naturally want to live, in order to satisfy all my capacities for life, and not simply my capacity for reasoning, that is, not one twentieth of my capacity for life. What does reason know? Reason only knows what it has succeeded in learning (some things, perhaps, it will never learn) and human nature acts as a whole, with everything that is in it, consciously or unconsciously, and, even it if goes wrong, it lives.” 
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Being a body connects us to everyone who has ever lived; to other people, other species, other beings, across time, geographies and situations. What does it mean to live as a body? How do we embody our environment, our upbringing, education, current structures of power, cultural and social values? What if the different symptoms or illnesses people suffer from are ways in which bodies speak against ways they are being neglected, commodified or exploited? Can we liberate from cultural prejudice, gender stereotypes, or class determinism through liberating in our bodies, through unknotting the knots of inherited values that we never consciously chose or that do not align with our inner truths?

Rooted in embodied culture, a fundamental part of our work is to lure people back into their bodies. Including ourselves. Even though it seems odd to separate from the totality of our lived experience something called “the body”, a division of me, which can thereby be put into words. To call it in such a way immediately means that there is an “it”, something I have, as we usually say, rather than something I am. This text is an attempt to embrace the view of the body and humans as embodied beings through words, though the body lives beyond words.

Mapping the Territory 

Body is a process and a totality of our lived experiences. A personal space where we experience our aliveness and find fulfilment. It cannot be accessed from outside. From outside the body is socially constructed. People who share a culture live in the belief systems specified by that culture. Collective construction of self-images and group identities shape individual bodily experiences, meanings and practices. Body is a mediator between external forces, expectations, cultural beliefs, and inner forces, internal drives, conscious or unconscious desires and invisible currents that move us. Body is at an encounter between these socio-cultural, phenomenological, biological, intuitive and embodied unconscious phenomena — all taking part in orchestrating our engagement with life.

In traditional way of education we are usually encouraged to train ourselves to know many things (within a specific epistemological ontology), to become smart in certain aspects of life valued by the modern world. Often these are part of the external forces. The inner world is not given much attention in the narratives we grow up with. This creates a split in our perception. We split ourselves from ourselves and cannot experience our real strength, true intentions and personal meaning-making. Getting out of touch with the body is also a result of such a split. It creates a habit to experience the world through the mind alone, through goal-setting, counting, comparing, success-measuring, judging according to endless lists of right and wrong. We then often look at the world and ourselves as if from a distance, through specific beliefs, learned ways of seeing and assigning value. 

It gradually becomes common scientific (accepted) knowledge that chemistry of the body is inseparable from the chemistry of the brain. We used to think we were "brains on a stick”, and our bodies were there to hold the stick and take the brain to places. Now we know that it’s far from being true. Our bodies are ancient, millions of years old, very intelligent, very powerful. “Bodies move, sense, touch, smell, taste, and act in conjunction with thought and speech within a space, for people experience themselves simultaneously in and as their bodies” Thomas J. Csordas, an anthropology professor researching phenomenology and embodiment, wrote in his book The Sacred Self. Another phenomenological philosopher, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, viewed the body as perceiving and thinking organism. In his book The Phenomenology of Perception he described the embodied experience as "knowledge in the hands”. 

The Embodied Self  

When we don't feel our bodies we also don't feel ways in which the world actually touches us and how we resonate with it. A sociologist and political scientist Hartmut Rosa, in his book Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World, writes that we are beings of resonances, and for sensing resonances we need to inhabit our perceptions beyond the rational mind. In fact, he writes how resonances often disappear when we are continuously told what to do, not trusting our own instincts and inclinations. The body plays an important role in sensing what's important to us, what matters beyond the beliefs we internalised often without choosing. The intimate knowledge of this lives in our cells. When it’s not there we feel the void of its absence.

The process of unlearning, unconditioning and liberating ourselves from learned behaviours, preconceived ideas, expectations or interpretations is the process of refusing to accept these limitations or being convinced by them. In the body we can connect with our lived experiences, our ancestry and its influences, our perception of things inner and outer. We learn more about ourselves, what we resonate with, what feels foreign to us. This is true for both physical and non-physical discoveries. Sometimes we realise that much of what we considered our personality is actually not ours. A physician and author Gabor Mate described in a recent article how “during our dependent and vulnerable childhoods we develop the psychological, behavioural, and emotional composite that later we mistake for ourselves”. In fact this composite is made up of ways of protecting ourselves in stressed environments, that we needed as children and didn’t let go of as adults. These often mask a real person with real needs, desires, and values.

What we value has roots in the physical body. It could be described as a synergy between instincts, reason and emotions. Emotions are often misunderstood. Culturally, we’ve learned to mistrust them, to hide, to avoid, overwhelm, pretend we feel something else, or manifest other reactions. But actually, in their honest perception, embodied emotions contribute to our ability to act intelligently. They make our world more meaningful, and help us find fulfilment. They offer ways to check-in with reality, reflecting how are we doing at any given moment. Every emotion is there for something, part of our ability to discern. Emotions are responses to events that are relevant to what we value. As an educator and author Guy Claxton suggests in his book Intelligence in the Flesh, “feelings are a bodily glue that sticks our reasoning and our common sense together. Feelings are somatic events that embody our values and concerns”.

Through emotions we also feel other people, places, situations. A difficulty with embodying emotions is that they are often influenced by our beliefs and personal history lessons. As a rather silly but straight forward example, let’s say if a past experience tells me that people with big ears are not to be trusted, it’s likely that meeting such a person and leaving unquestioned those “history lessons” might lead to an inadequate emotional response from my side. Which in turn might lead to a repetition of a situation from the past, as most probably that person with big ears will not enjoy my somewhat judgmental stand towards them, setting a ground for a conflict, unless their state of enlightenment lead them to unlimited compassion and understanding towards confused people like myself in that situation. The big question to sit with is how the actual untangling of old beliefs and cultural overlays could happen? And whether healing of historical perspectives as well as traumatic experiences from the past, could become real, if excavated and discerned emotions were to become our guides and reminders of what’s important?

Thinking of emotional discernment, we could understand the different emotions as a kind of compass of energy. Anger, for example, gives us energy to deal with the situation where something dear is blocked or threatened, bringing with it such qualities as courage to reveal a conflict, clarity to express what is needed, composure to not exaggerate or overemphasise own feeling, empathy to still see the person behind the perceived threat. We often retrieve from the body in order to not go through a strong feeling. Indeed such wave can be a challenge to experience and not be swept off the feet by. A poet and writer Rainer Maria Rilke, in his piece The Beholder, speaks of a wrestler who gives in to the power of the great storm and became wider, strengthened and nameless. On the other side of the storm that an emotion can turn into, may await a true strength, a more real one perhaps, more free from having to hide something or from something.

A process of embodying emotion is further expanded into “embodied reflection”, a term used by the co-authors Francisco Varela, Eleanor Rosch and Evan Thompson in their book Embodied Mind to describe a kind of thinking that involves body and mind together. It’s an act of learning and unlearning at the same time. Through an embodied reflection, they emphasize, we dive deeper into our responses to the world, bring what might be instinctive to the surface, voice gut feelings, reveal things that might have been unconsciously guiding us in life and reflect on them critically. It also works the other way around — grounding ideas and checking-in whether we resonate with those ideas as a whole-body experience. Grounding interpretations in intuitive experiences, bodily experiences of the senses and of thought are interacting.

Potentially, we could think about it as a way for intelligence to unify, to recover from splits of learned divisions and self-created contradictions. Such way to understand the embodied self offers, what might seem, contradictory ways of thinking and knowing. An effortless effort of natural coordination and discernment, evolving and regulating the finer vibrations of our psychic organs. The embodied self has been described as a jazz band: improvising and still playing together, each player equally important. Sometimes there is a solo, sometimes all play together in counterpoints. Mutual attention, respect and inspiration stay a common denominator.

 Practice of the Embodied Self 

How does one begin the journey from resonating with an idea towards growing into it and letting it become part of oneself? A journey of learning that never ends, where the more you learn the more there is to learn, just like reality around and within, keeps on expanding and deepening as long as you keep on walking. But the moment you begin to move from comprehending something or being able to talk about it, towards a kind of understanding that extends and links to the demands of everyday life, you begin to practice the embodied self.

Practice is a bridge between an intention and an act, a process of continuous becoming, a sustained reorientation of our attention and intention. It’s about letting go of something, and letting something else come. Through practice towards the embodied self what we feel we cultivate are experiences that encourage and potentially enable us to become more conscious of our own perceptions and abilities, of the inner resources of strength, silence and presence. Such practice is formed by small everyday steps of syncing body and mind, thinking and feeling, sensing and expressing. It can consist of exercises that raise interoceptive awareness, concentration, relaxation, movement, ability to focus attention and allow the full breath to breath us into more embodied attention. 

For us in fact embodied attention is the root, the base, the direction, the intention, not for serving any kind of measurable calculated benefits, but intending to support us with aligning and tuning in to the multitudes of ourselves and our surroundings. It can be about noticing our ways of sitting, walking, being with others, eating, being silent or running after thoughts. It can also be about paying attention to inner sensations, allowing the felt sense to emerge, to take its time to form and our inner awareness to unfold at its own pace. Sometimes it’s silent, sometimes there’s a whole ensemble of influences. Through this practice of interoceptive awareness we can potentially learn to distinguish authentic moments from those when we are being ran by habitual postures, whether emotional, physical, spiritual, or else.

There is a word that a writer Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann uses to describe deep, spiritual act of reflective and respectful listening — “dadirri”. Words form concepts and practices. They draw our attention to sensations or phenomena. They give us framework and shape our attention to the world. “Dadirri is inner, deep listening and quiet, still awareness. Dadirri recognises the deep spring that is inside us. We call on it and it calls to us.”, writes Miriam-Rose. It’s a way of learning and knowing, and the same word is used to describe listening to a storyteller, within a culture that is built on stories passed orally from generation to generation.

Embodied and Embedded 

Everything moves. In the physical, emotional, mental, virtual spaces we inhabit. There is movement that is independent from us — the movement of blood, air, water in our bodies, emotional flows, on a large scale the different movements in nature, the seasons, the rotation of the planet, and so on. There is movement we can affect to a larger or lesser degree, like where we choose to direct our thoughts, when to move from silence to voicing them, how to move through spaces, how to act in different situations and so on. We are in fact movement embodied and embedded in larger motions.

To mention Gabor Mate again, he writes about human beings as biopsychosocial creatures whose “health or illness reflects our relationship with the world we inhabit—including all the variables of family, class, gender, race, political status, and the physical ecology of which we are a part.” He goes on saying that our emotional patterns are responses to our psychological and social environment, and how in his research he discovered that individual illness “tells us about the multigenerational family of origin and the broader culture in which that person’s life unfolds”.

We are shaped by our inner systems as much as by the larger systems of which we are part. We do not exist in isolation from the rest of the ecosystem. We are living systems part of larger living systems, containing smaller living systems, each looking after a variety of complementary aspects of our collective well-being and well-doing. What we casually call the “environment” is not an "other" to us. The hard borders of and within our minds and worlds that separate us from other Earth beings need softening. Postures of human exceptionalism, and human loneliness partly as a result of this limiting ideology, need deconstruction. So we can understand and feel ourselves as, indeed, embodied and embedded creatures that we are amidst other embodied and embedded creatures forming the polyphony of life on Earth.

Embodied Culture

Culture is like the soil we are in. It nurtures and shapes us in profound ways. If we cultivate culture and culture cultivates us, we feel it’s time for re-rooting, re-orientating culture(s) or its aspects towards what may be more mutually nourishing. If we call such movement towards a culture that acknowledges and honours our embodied and embedded nature embodied culture, we could say that it cultivates an emergence of a more ecological mindset, a larger sense of self and interconnectedness that could become a force for social transformation towards more regenerative and sustainable societies.

If we bring the words of Gabor Mate again into our attention for a moment and remember him saying that historically western society has considered body and mind to be separate, as it is visible in our philosophy, education, health system, as well as in everyday life of our perception, relations and behaviours, and even though it is not yet fully understood how fundamentally the body influences the way we are, there is growing understanding that body and mind are one process. So what implications does ithis realization potentially have for us? What responsibilities does it imply? What new discoveries and wonders? In an attempt to draw a map (for ourselves first) to think these questions, we try to reflect here on some potential principles of the embodied culture as we understand it.

Awareness and Presence
Embodied culture is a culture with an expanded field of awareness at its roots, inspired by the integrity of Earth’s living systems. It’s based on listening deeply, asking questions like “how we listen”, “what do we give importance to”, “how do we interpret what we hear”. It’s about showing up and tuning in, offering presence and attention: detaching from the stories and established beliefs we don’t feel connected to anymore, landing into the present moment, paying honest attention to every situation that touches us, to the knowing that comes from direct experience. It is often subtle, and through this process we become more conscious, more aware, more present to and as the unfolding of life that is happening every moment.

Integrity and Honesty
Embodied culture is seeking re-integration of the world in a larger sense. It seeks to bring the disciplines back together, and also zooming-in to the individual level, it seeks health in reconnection, in that all parts of ourselves are integrated: thinking, feeling, senses, intuition, rationality, physicality — all the different aspects of human experience unified in free play. Integrity also means the integration of theory and practice, overcoming discrepancy between what we say and what we do, embodying what we know to be true, doing something and being aware of the “why” we are doing it. Without being embodied and lived values loose their meaning. The inherent power and wisdom of the body, its connection to the subconscious, and to the whole ecosystem of the earth is slowly being acknowledged. So even if integrity can be a controversial word, in this can we understand it as a unified human intelligence, its tangible and intangible nature.

Embeddedness into the Surroundings
Being embedded into the "flesh of the world”, we experience a continuous exchange with our surroundings in ways that both exceed and inform our rational mind. Body, through its senses, is continuously aware of the quality of its living environment. Earlier we mentioned Gabor Mate’s article where he views someone’s health or illness as a reflection of their relationship with the world. When we are attuned and our compass of inner and outer awareness works well, we might realize in a more profound way how everything is connected, how health and sustainability of our surroundings are closely linked to our personal sustainability and health, in fact the two can’t be separated.

Plurality and Balance
Like forests we contain multitudes. Embodying the different aspects and qualities of ourselves, we invite more balance into our lives. Plurality also means embracing the full spectrum of being human, the bliss and challenges of the present, the past and the heritage you received from where you came from, the future and the possibilities that are there for you. Embodied human intelligence is unified in its multifacetedness, human needs are listened to in their plurality — physical, intellectual, emotional, spiritual, inter-personal, environmental, and so on. People are porous, mouldable by stories and narratives, that shape our beliefs about the world and ourselves. Thinking in singularities and fixed identities is a malaise of our cultures. Neoclassical theory of economics is based on the assumption that humans are selfish and the main things they want is to maximise their own gain. Taking a trait out of its context and building societal structures based on such a reductionist assumption took us way out of balance. In reality humans are complex, multilayered, multifaceted beings. Our mental, physical, emotional, social, environmental wellbeing are not separated from one another but are intertwined, continuously searching for balance in reciprocity.

Flow and Creativity
Flow exists within the attention to what is naturally evolving. To join the flow is to reorient from the excess of effort (anything that includes forcing something into being predictable) towards listening. In the world where everything moves all the time uncertainty is part of the flow. If we think we have all the answers, or even that a certain subject is settled, we might loose humility and curiosity in the face of this conceit. When things are not forced into being but allowed to unfold, when there is space for the unknown, creativity becomes possible. It replaces a fear-based need for learned stereotypes or repetitive ideas belonging to the past. Creativity and flow have something to do with the cyclical nature of reality. Our personal rhythms and rhythms of the year, everything in nature is cyclical. Not everything can be scheduled. If we start to associate the schedule with reality, and ourselves, our desires, rhythms and situations as a disturbance, we risk alienating from the lived experience and denying the context in which we are in a wider sense. The balance between our controlled intentions and flow is a continuous process, context-based and situationally appropriate. Like with speaking many languages, we use them depending on where we are and with whom are we talking.

Relationality and Togetherness
In the same way as body experiences the quality of our living environment it experiences the quality of our relationships. If we take relationships with other humans as an example, some qualities of more embodied relations might be through words like eye-level encounters, listening, collaborative mindset, diversity, agency, care. When old patterns of communication based on dominance, compliance and standardisation are let go off, relationships can be free of manipulations, there’s then no more place for making people be or do something someone else has planned for them, no more carrots and sticks, no awards and punishments, no top-down power, and therefore no fear-based power-games, no straight line of education toward a norm. Norm is chosen and evolved through reciprocity. Establishing boundaries where they are needed and removing them where they are unnecessary is a continuous process.

Simplicity and Complexity
Discerning circumstances and entanglements from a place of inner sensing and resonance, navigating the seas of life becomes more simple (not to be confused with easy) and more complex at the same time. Simplicity is that of an early morning in the forest, when sun just recently rose and the polyrhythmic pulse of earth-born beings awakes (while some fall asleep), translating the light into multi-sensorial tenderness. Complexity is that of an early morning in the forest, when sun just recently rose and the polyrhythmic pulse of earth-born beings starts to awake (while some fall asleep), translating the light into multi-sensorial tenderness. Both are qualities of experiencing a rich interconnected world, that calls for our humbleness and openness towards the mysterious unfolding of life on this planet.

Wellbeing
Wellbeing is an integration of all of the above. Physical, emotional, mental, and environmental wellbeing go together. Wellbeing is rooted in active engagement with the world and own path within it. It flourishes through healthy relationships, with humans and other-than-humans, embodying genuine connection, belonging and shaping the world(s) together, where everyone is able to survive as themselves. Individual wellbeing is also social and environmental wellbeing, it’s an inner and an outer integrity, with and within living systems. 

This story is not and won’t ever be finished in a sense of settled or completed once and forever. Written in 2017, it stays in the making, just as our visions for a more embodied culture, and our aspirations for re-imagining the over-intellectualised, and often somatically and sensuously impoverished institutions that we’ve built. Learning to live otherwise is a process. Thanks for being part of it.

* We want to apologise to the body, that while writing this text we did not rebel against cultural linguistic conditioning and continued calling the body “it”. Clearly, as much as ‘nature’ needs a new pronoun, so does the body!

Images of works by the artist Francis Upritchard we took at Biennale di Venezia 2017