Exploring Embodiment: Insights from Philip Shepherd and Claire Dale

In this episode, I continue my exploration of embodiment by interviewing two prominent figures in the field. First, Philip Shepherd, an actor and creator of the Embodied Present Process, shares his views on how embodiment involves joining the world through feeling and bringing the whole of one's intelligence into coherence with the present. Philip discusses how modern culture fosters disembodiment and offers insights into re-embodying through practices that enhance fluidity, groundedness, spaciousness, centeredness, and attunement. 

Next, Claire Dale, a former dance company leader and co-author of Physical Intelligence, explains how she developed the concept of Physical Intelligence. Claire emphasizes the importance of understanding and managing the body's chemistry - hormones like oxytocin and serotonin - to achieve flexibility and resilience. She provides practical techniques such as the 'serotonin twist' to help listeners reduce anxiety and improve their Physical Intelligence.

The episode delves deep into how embodiment and Physical Intelligence can transform our experience and interactions with the world.

• Philip Shepherd: https://embodiedpresent.com/pages/philip-shepherd
• The Physical Intelligence Institute: https://physicalintelligenceinstitute.com/
• Books by Philip Shepherd
• Physical Intelligence. Harness your body's untapped intelligence to achieve more, stress less and live more happily

Transcript

Exploring Embodiment: Insights from Philip Shepherd and Claire Dale

Adrian
In the previous episode of the Embodied Pathways podcast, I invited several key thinkers to reflect on two questions. First, what is embodiment? And second, how do we deepen our experience of embodiment? In this episode, part two of what's become a short series, I ask two more people those same questions.

You'll first hear from Philip Shepherd, whose journey back to the body was powerfully influenced by his experience as an actor. Philip played lead roles on stages worldwide and was co-director of an interdisciplinary theatre company. Philip Shepherd has been teaching embodiment practices for over 40 years and is well known as a leader in the field. 

He's the creator of the Embodied Present Process, which combines effective practices and a deep understanding of how our culture fosters disembodiment. Philip is the author of two books, Radical Wholeness and New Self, New World, and the co author of Deep Fitness. Philip has been pondering my two questions for a long time, so I'm very much looking forward to exploring them with him today.

Philip, welcome to the Embodied Pathways podcast. 

Philip
Thank you, Adrian, and you're so right, I have been pondering these questions for some years. 

Adrian
Probably more than most, I would guess. 

Philip
It's been a long journey for me, and one in which you know, from a relatively early age, I could feel how the dictates of my culture were hampering and constraining my aliveness, is how I felt it. And thank God there are other cultures in the world I've learned so much from them.

And, you know, so much of my journey to embodiment has been a process of discovering the specific ways in which my culture has fostered, encouraged disembodiment and, and to begin to undo that. It's not just ideas. This, these instructions live in our bodies. They shape our neurology. So it's been a wonderful, slow, very rich journey. 

Adrian
So let's, let's start off with the first question that I'm putting to people. What does embodiment mean to you? 

Philip
In the simplest of terms, embodiment is how we join the world. If you're seeking to be present, you can't reason your way there. The brain is an organ that doesn't feel. You can operate on the brain without anaesthetic.

And the only way to join the world is to feel the world, and that happens through the body. You know, there's another somewhat more sophisticated, perhaps, understanding that I have of embodiment, which is that embodiment is a state in which the whole of your intelligence comes into coherence with the present.

And to really, to really understand that, I think we have to revise our culture's understanding of what intelligence is. Because we, you know, we've been taught, well, human intelligence is the ability to reason in an abstract fashion. And when they give you an IQ test, that is what they're testing. And yes, that's a part of our intelligence. 

But for me, it's a, it's a narrow bandwidth on this massive spectrum. And when I go to name that spectrum, The first word that comes to me is sensitivity, and I truly believe that every sensitivity is a form of intelligence. It can be a sensitivity to a child's tears, to birdsong, to cloud formations, to the breeze passing through, to legal argument. I mean, any, any sensitivity is a form of intelligence, but the thing about a sensitivity is that it is necessarily reactive. If the retina didn't react to light, we wouldn't see. So, that reactivity has to be grounded in order to become coherent, and that happens through the body. So, if I, if I'm going to characterize human intelligence, I would call it the quality of grounded sensitivity.

Now, our culture is very, very clever. There's never been a culture as clever as ours. But we've forgotten how to live intelligently and we systematically undermine our groundedness and desensitize ourselves as we leave the body and inhabit this world of ideas, and ideas are, you know, in one sense, frozen energy, and we, we shuttle our ideas and rearrange them and organize them and modify them, but they are static. They are representations of the world, not the world itself, and it's only through the body that you can join the world. And so, in that way of characterizing embodiment, to say that it's a state in which the whole of your intelligence. comes into coherence with the present, I feel mind suffusing every cell of my body. 

We've got this mistaken, to me, identity of brain and mind. We almost use them synonymously. And no, no, the brain is that wonderful organ in the head, and the heart has enough neural density to be considered a brain. Certainly there's the enteric nervous system, the belly brain. And every cell is processing.

I think the whole body is this remarkable resonator that processes the world. And, you know, we're attached to this idea that thinking is an abstract function somewhat dependent on symbols and language. But I think when you get right down to it, a thought is the processing of a relationship. And I can abstractly process the relationship between the numbers one and two and say, oh, when you add them, it's three.

When you subtract one from two, it's one. When you multiply them, it's two. I can, I can process that relationship, but the body is processing countless relationships the whole time it is, it is thinking. And there is so much thinking, processing of the world that goes on that the abstract conscious reasoning mind has no access to. 

So, one of my favourite alternative visions of embodiment and that quality in which the whole of your intelligence comes into coherence with the present is found in the Aleut Nation. So the Aleut Nation inhabits the islands that trail off Alaska and separate the Bering Sea from the Pacific Ocean, and it's a seagoing culture, and they have a relationship to the sea lion that is akin to that of the Plains Indian to the buffalo.

And there's an Aleut Elder alive today who describes as a boy going down to the edge of the ocean, and the hunters were there sitting, attuning to the world, attuning to the sea. They would sit in stillness for hours. And then one of them would say ‘Sea lion coming’, and all the heads would turn and look in the same direction.

Not because they could see the sea lion - It might be ten miles offshore - but they could feel its presence. So, we have this idea that intelligence, our intelligence is held within us the way you'd hold a bit of light in a bottle, but this ability to feel the present and become participatory in it, and attuned to the world, is a more fundamental - embodied intelligence, and it's the one that has enabled us to survive until agriculture was discovered. Every hunter gatherer culture fills the world with a sensitivity that we would dismiss as not even being possible. So to me, embodiment isn't held within the skin, embodiment is a relationship with the world. 

Adrian
Ah, that's so lovely. Such a beautiful way of putting it. That elder you speak of, is that Ilarion?

Philip
Yes, Ilarion Merculieff. Yeah.

Adrian
Yeah, yeah. Fabulous. 

Philip
Gorgeous man. 

Adrian
Yeah, wonderful. There's so much richness in what you've just said. I'm just picking out a few little gems. This notion that relationship is so fundamental. 

Philip
Yeah, you go to the body and what the body most deeply understands is that it belongs. So, if you stand before a tree and feel its presence, the body feels kinship. It feels it belongs. You know, by contrast, you know, that intelligence in the head when it retracts into the head feels alone in the world. And no wonder we feel alone in the world, we're disembodied. And you know, what the body most deeply feels is the present. It feels the earth, it feels the breeze, it feels the sounds, it feels the world around it as it is unfolding in this moment. And I think what the body most deeply realizes is that everything is alive. You know, you can hold a pebble in your hand and feel its presence, and that is not a dead presence. It is alive to the world, and the body recognizes life in everything. So to divorce yourself from the body is to come out of all those relationships that are just fundamental to human life for me. 

Adrian
But we're getting towards the second question of how we can actually awaken this relationship in our own sense of embodiment. 

Philip
Yeah, and for my journey anyway, it's, as I said, it's been one. of recognizing how deeply our culture pulls us into the head and dismisses the body. So, so my journey has been one in which I've softened away from the imperative of doing that tends to eclipse being. You know, when doing is the imperative and it jumps ahead of being, being suffers. So then how to come back to being, which is essentially how to come back to the body, And for me, we can characterize being, and by doing so, we are characterizing our reality. So, for example, being is fluid. There's nothing that is static. Now, rock, you know, flows more slowly than the river, but mountains are waves that have slowed over geological time. Everything flows, and we are two thirds water. We're fluid beings - There is an ocean within us, and as we live, we pull the body out of its fluidity. We compartmentalize it and, and interlace it with these micro tensions that thwart our experience of its natural fluidity.

To recognize that and ease back into the fluidity is to help the body. And there, there are, to me, there are five qualities of being that are really germane. Fluidity is one. Groundedness is another. So, we are always at rest on the earth since the day you were born. And yet, we have severed our relationship with the earth, and we don't feel at rest.

You know, when was the last time you felt truly at rest on the earth? It's a rare instance if it happens at all. And that is our reality. So, so, fluidity and groundedness, it's not, these aren't qualities to achieve. These are your reality. And the question then is how to surrender to your own fluidity, how to surrender to your relationship with the earth and feel yourself come to rest on it. 

Spaciousness is another quality. You know, you can look inside a lump of coal with a physicist's eye, and it's 99. 9 percent empty space. Everything is mainly empty space, and the body is naturally spacious. I, I think of the body as a resonator, and it's the spaciousness that makes that possible. The body resonates to the present, and what we do is we stuff the spaciousness of the body full of tensions and concerns and obligations and plans, and, and we lose its natural spaciousness.

When that happens, it's like stuffing a singing bowl full of sand. It no longer rings. The present no longer sings through the body. And then all you can do is sit in your head and guide yourself. And when you are embodied, you are guided by the present in every moment there. Living intelligence is there whispering to you. And it's the spaciousness is so primary in, in making that happen. But, but we're instructed by our culture to be full of good ideas. And you don't want to be empty headed. We don't trust emptiness. And of course, the Eastern cultures revere it. 

Another quality is centeredness, everything has a center, and life tends to move in spirals, this dance of complementary opposites, and every spiral has a center, and, you know, the Sun has a center around which the planets revolve, and the galaxy has a black hole at its center around which the galaxy revolves, and we have a center, and we have forsaken our center, and we're trying to establish it in the head, and then we wonder why our lives feel off balance.

You know, and, and so part of embodiment for me is, again, not achieving it, but re-sensitizing to it. We have, we have desensitized to our fluidity, to our groundedness, to our spaciousness, to our own center. And the last quality for me of being itself is attunement, that everything, everything attunes to everything else. There's, there's not a molecule in the cosmos that is not attuning to the cosmos. And that, when the Aleut elders feel that sea lion ten miles offshore, they are attuning to its presence. We have lost the ability to attune. We are trying to think our way forward. And when you come back to the body, you can live in a way that is almost free of making decisions. At least that's how it seems to me. You are feeling your way forward, hand in hand with the living present. And it's through the body that you attune to that. 

Adrian
So it's sensing into the body, becoming grounded and attuning that enables us to get into this resonance.

Philip
I think until the body's released into fluidity, it can't respond to the world.

Until the body is grounded, it's just reactive. Until you once again allow the body its natural spaciousness, attunement's impossible. If you cannot land in your center, and for me, the center is in the pelvic bowl, and I really, you know, there's a long honoured tradition of feeling the center in the, just below the belly button, in the tanden, in Japanese culture, the dantian. And that center was articulated in cultures that were so grounded, that had never seen or heard a machine that felt the earth in their fingers. And I think our culture has gone so abstract, so, so high, that to counterbalance that, we need to come down to the perineum. And I really feel the pelvic floor as the ground of my being.

When I land in myself, it's to the pelvic floor I return. When I rest in the present, I'm resting on the pelvic floor. And the pelvic floor is a diaphragm in the body. We have immobilized it, we’ve bound it in, in tension. And to allow the pelvic floor to become the primary initiator of the breath is to invite the whole of the body to participate in the breath.

So you can breathe with the thoracic diaphragm without the pelvic floor moving at all. But if you release the pelvic floor to the breath, the thoracic diaphragm releases with it. And the whole body is invited to release with it. So, as the pelvic floor releases to the breath, there is this wave of release through the whole body.

And you, you feel that release to the in-breath. And you feel that release to the out-breath, and that release begins the body into the state of fluidity. It's like the breath wave, as it washes through the body, restores fluidity. And then you're on your way to, you know, once you're fluid, you can come into relationship with the earth. And once you do that, you open your spaciousness. And once you do that, it's so much easier to feel your center. And from your center, you can attune. 

Adrian
I love the way that your exercises, in quite a quick and fairly simple way, really help people tune into that. I've been working with them myself, of course, and it really does shift things when you can just drop your awareness right down, just soften into the pelvic floor. 

Philip
It's a different world. So, my, my first book was called New Self, New World, and what the title, is pointing to is that when you allow the center of your awareness to slip out of the head, into the body, you feel the self in a new way, and then you open your eyes, and the world is different as well. Yeah, and it really, it's like a phase shift to allow that to happen, and there's wonderful teaching that, that goes partway, but we're stuck on this idea of listening to the body.

In my mind, it's a corrupt idea as a substitute for embodiment, because embedded in that instruction to listen to the body. is the tacit message that, well, you're separate from your body. There is a wall actually separating you from it, and the best you can do is sort of put your ear to the wall to find out what's going on on the other side. And there's value in listening to the body with an injury, but it's not embodiment. Embodiment is when that listener, that center of awareness, takes the plunge and settles deep down to the, you know, the perineum, which is so very deep within your being. And from there, you know, there are these three aspects of, of embodiment that are like different ways of speaking to the same thing. And one is coming to rest in the body, and another is coming to rest on the earth. And another is coming to rest in the present. In a way, they're like three legs of a stool. You can't have one without the other two. And that descent through the body that brings us to that place of rest, violates our cultural instruction that says, go higher. Up is good. Down is bad. You know, if I said, Adrian, you're looking a little down today, there's no ambiguity in what that means, but in another culture, that same phrase might mean ‘You're looking at peace with yourself and at rest on the earth. How wonderful’. But we have so encoded this message that up is good, that in times of stress, rather than coming back to our grounded presence, our energy climbs higher and higher into the head as though only the head could save us. Give control to the head and that's the, you know, that's our ticket right there. And it's disabling. But it's part of this long cultural journey that we made beginning in the Neolithic Revolution where our center was in the belly and it began to climb as we took control of the world. And, you know, with agriculture and domesticating animals and permanent settlements.

And what happened was we left the pelvic bowl and our allegiances began to shift. So they shifted from the mother to the father. We're no longer centered around the mother, we're centered around the father, and we no longer honour the Goddess, we pay homage to the Gods, and it's no longer the sacred Earth, it's, Heaven is in the sky, and everything changed as we, as we made this journey up to the head.

And, you know, I really feel that as a journey from the female pole of my consciousness to the male pole of my consciousness. And we demean the female in the body and we demean it in the world. So, you know, we demean the pelvic bowl. We, we cast it with shame and sin and embarrassment. And, you know, the right left side of the body, where right tends to be dominant and associated with male. And of course, left, our word sinister means left. The word gauche means left, it's mistrusted. And I feel a similar thing in an embodied way with front and back. Our culture is all about the front and showing up and half the world is at our back and we, we suppress the breath in the back and lose our sensitivity to that and I feel that realm at my back as a realm of support that is always ready to help me take the next step. And I feel my ancestors there. I feel my mother there specifically. And I feel the whole of my lived life sort of gathered there, ready to support my next move, my next step. 

Adrian
I'm noticing just as we're talking, my breath is deepening and I'm opening up my back and really - just talking to you is shifting my consciousness, which is pretty profound, I think!

Philip
That's lovely. And with the breath, you may notice that, for me anyway, if I breathe into my front, I suddenly feel separate from you. If I breathe into my back, it feels inclusive. It feels like an open embrace. Such a different sensation.

Adrian
That's been such a treat.

Philip
And for me too, Adrian. Absolutely. Thank you so much.

Adrian
Wow, just taking a deep breath. Thank you, Philip. That's such richness. And, I look forward to revisiting your books again, because there's, there's so much more there for me to explore. 

Philip
Oh, thank you, Adrian. I'm cooking up another book, just to say, I mean, maybe years to come, but it's so exciting to be pulling something new together.

Adrian
Wonderful. Watch this space! Fabulous. Philip, thank you very much. 

Philip
My great pleasure. Take care.

Adrian
Next we'll hear from Claire Dale. Claire led her own dance company to critical acclaim during the 1990s. The experience of developing and leading high profile projects in the arts inspired Claire to develop the concept of physical intelligence. 

Claire co-authored the book Physical Intelligence and founded the Physical Intelligence Institute. Claire has recently launched a new program for everybody called BodySmart that teaches you how to live a happy, fulfilled life through Physical Intelligence. I discovered Claire's work last year when I was looking for a robust, science based training in embodied coaching. I'm pleased to say that I signed up to train with Claire, and I'm now a certified Physical Intelligence coach. 

Claire, welcome to the Embodied Pathways podcast. 

Claire
I'm so excited to be here! I've listened to it many times and I love what you do. 

Adrian
Brilliant. Thank you. So Claire, what does embodiment mean to you?

Claire
That is a great question. What does embodiment mean to me? For me, embodiment means the ability to go inside the body and have a response and some techniques to be able to live with what's happening in our emotions, in our body sensations, in our sense of who we are, and also be able to change, nudge, sometimes even transform, our inner state so that the way that we meet the world, the way that we perceive the world - the way that we think and feel and speak, and behave is what we want it to be, is our absolute best response to who we are in the world. 

Adrian
It's hugely empowering. 

Claire
Yes, it's so easy to fall into a loveless marriage with the body if we're dealing with health issues, or if we've got aches and pains, or if we're ageing as we all are. It can sometimes feel like the body's working against us. What I like to remember is that at every single moment the body wants us to be healthy. The whole body is working every single second to give us a strong platform for living and thriving and being the best human that we can be. So that is what the body wants.

And our conscious being can - and our decision making capabilities can support that - or can work against that. Whatever we're doing, the body still wants that. 

Adrian
Ultimately, the body is on our side. 

Claire
It is on our side and increasingly so if we tend to it. There are many ways of doing that, but the one way that I've found, I suppose, in order to raise the profile of the body and bring it to our attention is to call this whole area of work ‘physical intelligence’.

So to give it the label of an intelligence that elevates it alongside IQ, which we were tested for at school, weren’t we? Well I was anyway, I don't know about you, but regularly our IQ was tested and I was always in that second band, you know, not with the super clever lot, not right at the bottom, but I was in that second band. And I remember those IQ tests leaving me with a sense of, ‘well, I'm okay, but really I've been evaluated quite harshly here’. And then because I was dancing all the time, I'd get praised for that. But in my very subliminal, somatic construct of things, I saw the dance as a second because I watched other people getting praised, you know, more and more for their intellectual capacity. So of course now we have also have emotional intelligence. So really what I'm saying is in the intention of, of thinking about all aspects of the body and the way it responds and the way it is as part of our physical intelligence, the way we use our body is to elevate it in the field of intelligences so that, you know, lest we forget, lest we don't even ever realize that the body, you know, this life inside us, that is the, you know, the body is the only place that we can experience being alive. And being alive is something pretty special. 

Adrian
What I've learned through working with you and reading your work is that the body is where change comes from. It's the absolute root of it all, isn't it? 

Claire
It is, Adrian, and that's because of patterns that are laid down sometimes when we're in our mother's womb, or even sometimes genetically, sort of where it can be programmed for certain patterns of behaviour. But those are not set in stone as much as we once thought. 

When it comes to realising that things are happening in a way for us that we didn't choose and didn't want, or it didn't feel like we chose, then inevitably, you know this as well, that whatever that issue, whatever that material is, is in the body. It is playing out in everyday musculoskeletal patterns in the way that thoughts emerge from the physiological state inside the body. And the emotional components will be evaluated in certain ways, very much because of our physiological programming. How threatened we are, how much pleasure we're used to taking in life, how much we can supersede things that are really difficult and be able to grow and learn from them.

So these are all, all, everything I've mentioned is patterns of behavior. And the thing is that the body is very powerful in this, more powerful than we give it credit for. So if we don't unlock what's happening in the body whilst we're talking or exploring or discovering a new emotional field in some of our issues or materials, material, then we, we can't change.

We can't change as quickly. We can't change as profoundly. And sometimes the change doesn't really happen at all. We just nudge our thoughts into a different place. But as soon as you know it, you're back into the same old patterns. I'm, I'm wondering whether listeners have had the experience of dropping back into old patterns. 

And if we learn to go to the body and say, what's going on when I do that pattern of behavior? State A, the automatic state. And what would I like my bodily state - That includes my emotions and mental stakes. We know the mind is in the body. The mind - we are embodied minds. You can't separate the mind from the body - It's where, where the mind lives. So, what can you do with that information and, and state A and state B can become your anchors for where, how you want the change to feel in your body. And if you start to work with how, how you want the body to feel and start to ask the question, what is the feeling in my body when state A is happening, the automatic state that I, that I actually want to change. Then you need to start to be able to liberate some new chemistry, release some serotonin, perhaps open yourself up so oxytocin can connect you better with the world. Whatever it is, there's a chemistry to this. 

Adrian
And this chemistry is key to the model that you've developed, isn't it? The way that these different hormones impact on the way we are in the world.

Claire
That's right. And the intention of that is to create a cognitive framework that gives access for people that need to, you know, for us all actually to, to have a sense that there's something real and nameable and chemical and physiological going on. We haven't done anything bad or wrong or, you know, we, well, we might've, we might've stepped over a moral line for ourselves, you know, unwittingly, or we might want to look at. I'm not, I'm not making moral or ethical judgments about our behavior. Everyone, everyone can do that for themselves. But what I'm saying is there's no inherent fault in having a, a negative emotion or not being able to cope well in a certain situation or feeling some anxiety or just forgetting to celebrate or be joyful in life. There's nothing intrinsically wrong or bad. There's patterning and there's chemistry. And thinking, knowing about a few, like a handful - in fact we use eight key chemicals - and just very lightly understand what they do and what combinations of them might feel like in the body, or do feel like in the body for you. Then we have this ability to firstly better read some of the data, or at least give it a name. Give it some names, give it a, give it a, um, a chemistry and therefore ask the question, what is the chemistry that I'm really working for here as part of the way I want to change and develop as a human being, what's the kind of cocktail of chemicals that I'd really like to be living with every day? 

So that's, yeah, that's a, that's the way we've, we've created that, that framework. And I think of it as a framework now rather than a model. So it's got some - frameworks, a little bit more flexible. And the reason I like the chemistry is because it's, you know, chemicals move through fluids in the body, the bloodstream and the, the transmission fluid that's throughout the nervous system. And so things are changing in the body the whole time. And so the, the chemistry in the fluids in the body gives us a sense of this ever changing nature of the body, which makes it very complex actually sometimes to really read what's going on. And using a framework, to give some people a climbing frame or some scaffolding to move through the complexity of the body because it doesn't speak the language, the English language, or it doesn't speak the language, any language of words. It's a much more complex language and sometimes difficult to read. So we're helping, trying to help with that legibility.

Adrian
And there's particular ways in which we can soften those patterns that we've got fixed in our bodies and change that chemistry. I wonder if there's anything or any particular techniques that come to mind?

Claire
Mm. Okay, so where my mind goes to straight away - And as I say that I can feel that in my body, because our mind's in our body. So it's quite good, quite useful to start just noticing when you are thinking about somebody that there's a physical state that comes along with that - somebody or something, um, there's a physiological state that comes with that.

So what am I thinking of? I'm, I am. I grew up in a really loving family, but there was quite a lot of tension because my sister was disabled. So she was a year older than me and she was, you know, constantly in and out of hospital, having severe operations on her spine, and so on. And I grew up, and I was always dancing. So there was this very great sort of difference between watching my sister grow up and the way I was growing up, just innately, I was dancing everywhere. Why dance? Why walk from the bedroom to the bathroom to clean your teeth when you could dance there? That was, that was how I was as a kid and still am in some ways.

And watching, you know, as a very young person, watching this difficulty and watching my Mum try to cope with us all, and she ended up having four children, so Gillian was, my sister was the first of four children. I came out of adolescence, you know, childhood and adolescence with a lot of tension in my body. 

Now, you add that to somebody who's got, I mean, I've always had, I've seen something and I've gone for it, or I've had it, I've conceived of something and even if it's way out of the box, I have gone for it, like I did with my dance company and the dance pieces I created. That was really hard work, but I was determined.

So add the, add the cortisol levels that were around as a kid with that, that scenario - albeit very loving scenario, but there was just an innate tension in our, and worry in our, in our situation. And add that to the ambition and determination, you get tension. So I came out of adolescence with quite a lot of tension in my body.

My little abdominal muscles were, and I was very skinny then, were really, really tightly held. And I would be in the grip of tension when I was trying to study for my A levels, um, or whatever I was doing, it felt like I needed a lot of tension. So one of the biggest changes for me when I first started to study the chemistry around this - I've always loved biology, I nearly did a biochemistry degree, actually, I nearly went all the way to, to, to biochemistry, but then I went to dance instead.

And, and, when I discovered that cortisol, the stress and threat hormone, albeit that it wakes us up in the morning, it's absolutely vital for keeping us alive, so we need to love our cortisol, but get it beyond a certain moment, a certain point, as I had habitually done through those moments of tension as a kid, inhibits the proper functioning of the serotonin system. Serotonin then is a, is a close cousin to melatonin, the sleep chemical and I always felt that I was tense in my sleep when I was a kid. I can remember the few really long peaceful sleeps I had, I remember them. So my project, as soon as I knew what was happening, was to raise my serotonin levels and reduce cortisol to optimal.

That meant that I was able to, I had a project, I had something I was able to do to be able to reduce the levels of, just innate anxiety about was this going to work and was it going to be able to pull this off and was it going to be good enough and all of those things that you can imagine. So what happened when I was in the dance world was that I started working with, with dance forms that had a lot of tension. So ballet has a lot of tension. You're holding your weight up all the time. There are some contemporary dance techniques called Graham technique and Cunningham technique, and they're quite tense, I would say they require a lot of muscle tension. And I found I was just replicating the same patterns.

So I went for a while to an area of study: I went to America and I studied anatomical release technique. So how to release the musculature of the whole body and use just the amount of tension that you need. Little bit like the Alexander technique. people might be familiar with. The efficient use of muscular energy. And I did that, and I did a dance form called Contact Improvisation. Hey, how about that? And that's a duet form of movement that you're completely making up, and there's lots of lifting, falling, carrying, um, flying through the air, rolling on the floor. It's like a kind of athletic aikido play. It's like It's like dogs, you know, puppies when you see them roll over each other. It's like that for humans. It's a very particular thing right on the edges of dance practice. But through four or five years of studying that and making dance work that was influenced by that, I released certain parts of my body. I released my psoas muscle, a very deep core muscle that connects right through the center of the body. It's the muscle that when we vomit will contract, when we feel fear, it will contract - kind of knee jerk reaction is the psoas pulling us into a crouched position. So that these very important, deep structures in my body started to release. I started to really trust myself to be upside down around in this very athletic dance form, and I realized that at that point I was losing the tension. I was working much more efficiently and I was feeling so much happier. I was able to let go of things and move through. And so my fluidity and flexibility - and you know, there are four elements that we talk about in the physical intelligence curriculum: Your strength is where we start with this grounding through a release, but very grounded. Then flexibility, how can you adapt and move and flow? Resilience, which comes out of being strong and flexible in combination, being able to really have a really bouncy life and trust your recovery system. And then endurance, which is about, you know, how we, how we go towards the future and create a structured environment for us to develop and learn and be determined without running out of energy. 

So I was obviously focusing on getting my underlying strength in place. And the more I did that, the more flexible I could become. You know, my dancing, my dance company work was very, athletic and very flowing and lots of dangerous catches and flows. And if you tense up when you do that, someone's going to get hurt, right? It's the same with the body: If we tense up and we open the fridge too hard, all the bottles from the inside of the fridge fall out, don't they? So, you know, learning to use the right amount, you know, the right amount of muscular effort for what's needed is, is so closely related to emotions like anxiety, frustration, or peace and calm, and being able to have clarity, being able to turn up the energy dial or dial down the energy, depending on the situation.

So what could people do? So there are some flexibility movements that if you start to move your body every day in a flexible way, you will invite serotonin to release both in your gut and in your brain. Many people may or may not know that our serotonin system goes throughout our entire gut - abdomen - and, you know, serotonin molecules will jump onto the vagus nerve, which is one of the key nerves for how we are, how we are able to feel safe in the world and connect up into the brain and also influence the brain release of serotonin.

So it's a very connected serotonin system. We only really discovered that in the last five years, so we haven't known about gut serotonin for very long. So I'm going on a bit now, but I want to get to just, just as make a suggestion here about what people could do. So one very simple thing to do for your own flexibility, if you find you're working with too much tension and anxiety, is to just swing the arms from side to side. We call it a serotonin twist. And what you do is you ground yourself. You know, if you've got any vulnerabilities in your spine, you just gently pull your core through to your spine. So gently pulling your abdominal muscles through to your spine, gently, if you need to protect the spine. And then just, um, looking around over the right shoulder, looking around over the left shoulder.

I'm doing it now, so my voice might change on your, on the recording. Letting the arms just, just hang as well as you swing the shoulders around and let the spine go into a dynamic twist, looking over the shoulder, swinging one way, swinging the other way. And you'll find that this physically does release serotonin, but it helps you sort of let go, feel freer and tends to immediately, very quickly reduce the feeling of anxiety.

Yeah, we have a seven flexibility moves that you can learn about in our BodySmart program that you were mentioning at the beginning there, Adrian, so it's available - these techniques and many more, hundreds of them actually are available. 

Adrian
I have often used the serotonin twist myself. So I know from personal experience that it's surprisingly powerful - how quickly my sense of myself and my state of mind changes just, just through doing that. So a really lovely one for people to try. 

That's been fab. Feels like we've got a bit of a sense also of how physical intelligence evolved from your dance practice, which is really exciting too.

Thank you very much, Claire, and I look forward to hearing more about physical intelligence as this develops going forwards. 

Claire
Yes. Well, thank you for having me, Adrian. It's been a pure pleasure. Thank you.

Adrian
Super. Thank you, Claire. 

If you enjoyed this episode, do check out the others in the series, the previous and the following episodes. You will hear from philosophers, performers, and researchers exploring these vital questions about embodiment. So until next time, thanks for listening to the Embodied Pathways podcast. Goodbye.

BodySmart:
https://physicalintelligenceinstitute.com/bodysmart/