Embodied Pathways
Discover how to nurture your connection with nature and your own embodied wisdom. This podcast is part of the Embodied Pathways project (https://embodiedpathways.org/).
Embodied Pathways
Exploring the Power of Embodiment: Awareness, Activism and Interrelatedness
Join me on a transformative journey as we explore the multifaceted realm of embodiment with insights from thought leaders in the field. Mark Walsh opens the discussion with his nuanced definitions of embodiment, illuminating its role in our identity and relationships. Mark explores various definitions of embodiment, from the subjective study of the body to an intelligence that encompasses awareness, choice, self, and the other. He touches on embodiment as an umbrella term for body-mind arts, including yoga, martial arts, and somatic practices, emphasizing the distinction between physical activities and those genuinely embodied through awareness and self-development. Mark conveys the richness of embodiment, moving beyond seeing the body merely as a 'brain taxi' to appreciating it in its lived, experiential wholeness.
The conversation shifts as I welcome Rae Johnson, who offers an enriching dialogue on interoception and intercorporeality. Rae brings a queer-identified scholar's lens to the discussion. Rae explores interoception, proprioception, exteroception, and intercorporeality, showing how each offers unique insights into our relationship with our bodies and the world around us. They unpack the integral relationship between embodiment and activism, highlighting the significance of nonverbal communication in conveying messages that may not align with our spoken words. Rae examines the concept of implicit bias, how it leaks through our body language, and how it can impact trust and perception in interpersonal interactions.
Next, I introduce Olu Taiwo, a storyteller and scholar who masterfully weaves together personal anecdotes and academic knowledge. He draws parallels between the ancient wisdom of Tai Chi and modern neuroscience. Olu defines embodiment as the agency of being and knowing within one's body, which he illustrates with the idea of 'engrams' - habituated bodily knowledge. He explains how engrams can be beneficial for learning techniques but also responsible for negative patterns like poor posture or unhealthy habits. Olu also shares the wisdom he gained from his encounter with a life-threatening illness, underscoring the importance of gratitude and presence. He presents embodiment as a continual process, a journey rather than a destination.
The conversation concludes with Charlene Spretnak, who introduces dynamic interrelatedness, revealing how contemporary biology reveals our deep interconnectivity. She unpacks how recent discoveries in human biology challenge the mechanistic view of the human organism that has prevailed for centuries. Dynamic interrelatedness offers a radical understanding of the body-mind connection, human relationships, and our interaction with nature. The implications of recognizing our relational nature are vast, affecting personal growth, healthcare, education, and our response to the climate emergency. She considers how this knowledge could transform our approach to community preparedness, healthcare practices, and support for climate refugees, ultimately reimagining public policy and societal structures in harmony with our interrelated existence.
Featuring:
Mark Walsh
https://embodimentunlimited.com/mark-walsh-bio/
Rae Johnson
https://raejohnsonsomatic.com/
Charlene Spretnak
https://www.charlenespretnak.com/
Adrian
Welcome to this very special episode of the Embodied Pathways podcast. In this episode, we have not one, but four different people. Mark Walsh, Ray Johnson, Olu Taiwo and Charlene Spretnak.
Each of them will engage with two questions. What is embodiment? And second, how do we deepen our experience of embodiment?
Although common themes emerge, they all have very different approaches to this question. And what emerges is a really rich and wide overview. Now, originally, when I planned this, I was going to do a series of short interviews of about 10 minutes each.
That didn't work out because when I came to do the live interviews, my curiosity got the better of me and I ended up going on for about 20 minutes or so. So this is going to be just part one. And very shortly, we'll have part two, where there'll be four more people answering these same questions.
But let's not get ahead of ourselves ....
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Today, we're going to be starting off with Mark Walsh, who comes up with a really lovely and concise series of definitions about what is embodiment. Mark Walsh is the author of several books, including Working with the Body in Training and Coaching and Embodied Meditation.
He's the co-founder of the Embodied Facilitator Course and an online certificate in Embodied Coaching. Mark is also an Aikido Black Belt and has many years of experience of other martial arts, experience in yoga, body work, improv comedy, dance and meditation. I've known Mark for well over a decade and have worked with him on several projects, including the ridiculously ambitious Embodiment Conference, which had over a thousand teachers and 500,000 delegates.
So over to Mark, who sent me this recording of his thoughts on what is embodiment.
Mark Walsh
Okay, what is embodiment? I get asked this question quite a lot and I've got a few answers. I think if someone says they have the answer, you might want to be suspicious of that.
It's probably best to hit it from a few different perspectives. Actually, in my book, I do a whole chapter on this. Let's start with the simple and then go from there.
So the subjective study of the body. Okay, another way of looking at it would be how we are. So this is actually deeper than it first sounds.
How the manner with which we, it's relational and it's ontological. It's about being, how we are, the manner of our relational ontology. To push that sentence up a bit, you could also say it's how we are, who we are.
So it's definitely linked to our identity. How we are is the shortest version, subjective study of the body a bit longer. One way of looking at it, I think, is a type of intelligence.
So I break this down in various books and videos you can find out there, but basically there's like eight different subsets here. Awareness and choice, self and other. So self-awareness, which has a short and a long time frame, like state awareness and trait awareness.
Changing that, so that's being able to manage your state. So it includes expressing yourself and also being able to develop yourself over time. And then empathy, awareness of others, but both of state and trait again.
And then being able to lead or influence others. Again, state. And if you're a coach and you're working with people to develop traits, working with them long-term or a Aikido teacher or something like that.
Okay, so there's a type of intelligence. I like that definition because it's very practical. Like when I work in business, for example, it's like, right, these are skills, it's not esoteric, it's not magical, it's not vague, it's not poetic.
So I'd add poetic definitions. They can be very good to have these very practical definitions. Another definition at the bottom, a bit more comedic, you can say it's not what you think.
Think I saw that on a t-shirt years ago. Maybe it was a BMC t-shirt, but it's not what you think. That's a good sort of slightly kind of Zen, jokey definition.
Another definition, and this next big one I'd say is the umbrella term for all the body-mind arts. So this includes sort of seven major categories. Plus, you could have lots in here, but basically anything that involves the body and movement, but as an aspect of self.
So not just mindfully aware of the body, but aware as a body. Yeah, contrast with mindfulness might be another definition. It's just awareness, it's awareness and choice, but how we develop ourselves through the body.
So as a field of study, we could say it includes yoga, martial arts, Western awareness practices like somatics, Feldenkrais technique, body work, dance movement, and body therapy. So these areas, any one of them is a life work, and any one of them could just be physical, right? So we can say embodiment isn't just physical because you get the gym and do pull-ups, that's fine.
It's not a problem, but it's not embodied. You could do that with awareness, that's mindful, or you could do that to develop yourself. That I would say is embodied.
So yeah, that would be a kind of another set of definitions. Another way I'd answer this would be experientially. So I'd give people an experience.
One of my old friends, Francis Briers, a friend and colleague, used to say 'the body is more than a brain taxi'. But you can say that, which is great, but then how do we give people an experience of that? You know, sometimes I get people to look at their arm and say this arm has held babies and been kissed by lovers and had fights and written poems, and this arm is not just a piece of meat, you know? Sometimes you'll hear people use distinction from Greek Soma versus Sartre, the body in its lived experiential wholeness versus the body as a piece of meat.
But you can experientially, you know, how is it to be objectified, to be treated like a chair, to be moved around to, you know, there's an ethical implication to embodiment. You could look at all the ways the body impacts perception and cognition and emotions and relationship, and you can describe embodiment in terms of the body having more functions simply than transport. I think often this sort of let's dance is a pretty good answer to what is embodiment, right?
Let's play with other people's embodiment, let's play with our own embodiment, let's step in and out of different ways of being and see how the world looks differently. So that would be another way of exploring it. So I don't think there's one definition, that's the definition.
I think you have to hit it from different angles. I think it has trended, you know, I'm one of the people responsible for that, for better and for worse. So hashtag embodiment, just sort of thrown in front of everything to mean sort of like, yeah, it's like yoga, but cooler, you know?
So I think that's a problem. And in different fields, it can also have different definitions, like body cognition, you know, robotics. And if you look at the philosophers, Merleau-Ponty and people like that, you'll get like more philosophical definitions.
The subjective study of the body, and the cognitive intelligence, the field of study, how we are. Come back to that simple one, if that's too complex. So anyway, I hope that's useful and enjoy everybody else's versions.
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Adrian:
Next, we'll hear from Rae Johnson. Rae is a queer identified scholar working at the intersection of somatic studies and social justice. They are the author of numerous articles and several books, including Knowing In Our Bones and Embodied Activism.
Rae teaches internationally on the embodied experience of oppression, somatic research methods, and the poetic body. Now, I've been involved with environmental activism for many years. So I was really inspired by the way that Rae reveals how important embodiment is to activism.
Rae, welcome to the Embodied Pathways podcast.
Rae Johnson:
Thanks, Adrian. It's nice to be here.
Adrian:
Let's turn to my first question. What does embodiment mean to you?
Rae Johnson:
It's a great question. And I think it's a term that often gets thrown around fairly loosely without anyone having a particularly clear idea of what it means, what it is, and not necessarily any shared understanding. So that was really one of the challenges for me as I began working closely with graduate students, is they would ask me this question.
And I had multiple answers, depending on what sources I was referencing. And I tried to give them multiple perspectives. But here's what I've landed on.
That for me, embodiment has to do with the awareness of our capacity for sensing, feeling, and action.
Adrian:
Nice.
Rae Johnson:
That it's something that's not just inherent and embedded. Those functions are in various configurations and degrees in all of us. We all have some capacity for sensing, feeling, and action.
But for me, embodiment is the cultivation of the awareness of those things. And that through that awareness, we are able to have more conscious choice about how to act on those sensations and feelings, and perhaps even also how to influence, shape, and direct them.
Adrian:
So it's awareness that then leads to choice.
Rae Johnson:
Exactly. Awareness leads to choice.
Adrian:
So that leads us on, like, perhaps to the second question: How do we deepen this awareness that gives us this capacity for choice? How do we get there?
Rae Johnson:
Yeah. I think it's helpful to unpack this sort of sense of a global awareness of our bodies. Even though I think in a lot of practices, in embodiment practices, in what we might call somatic practices, there's often this very vague invitation just to, you know, feel into your body.
Just notice what's happening in your body right now. Well, and that's great for people who are already pretty kinesthetically attuned and have some capacity for that already, maybe sort of born that way, with kind of been able to feel their bodies in ways that made them actually experience themselves as different from lots of other people who weren't as aware of their bodies. And so you give somebody with a reasonably high degree of kinesthetic awareness that invitation to just, you know, check in and feel what's happening in your body, and they can come up with all kinds of things, right?
It's a rich territory for them. But for someone with a history of trauma, whose protective strategies required cutting off awareness of the sensations and feelings in their body, and that's more of us than I think any of us would like to have be true, is that so many of us are carrying a degree of that response in our bodies because of our life experiences. But also for those who just naturally aren't that attuned, who don't have those capacities sort of naturally occurring in them.
They go, what are you talking about? What do you mean? Just feel what's there.
Close your eyes and feel what's there. Either that's scary or it's just perplexing, right? And so I think it's really helpful to begin to articulate and differentiate that vague global embodiment feelings in our body into a couple of things that have actually been researched, and that we can actually begin to sort of put our hands on and begin to understand in a better way, and that have come with built-in strategies for cultivating those particular awarenesses.
So I am talking about interoception, which is the ability to sense our own homeostatic processes for regulating ourselves. Our heart rate, our breathing, our digestion, all of the things that are sort of happening to us viscerally. And by that, I mean, literally in our viscera, in our guts.
Things like feeling too hot or too cold. The awareness of those interoceptive signals can help us take action to bring us into homeostasis, and they're actually survival skills. We need to be able to self-adjust.
Oh, I'm too hot. Oh, I'm thirsty. Oh, I need to lie down, right?
So interoception helps us do all of those things. And when you dig into it more deeply, it's also the neurological substrate of emotion. So by cultivating our capacity for interoception, all the things that are going on inside our body, we're also helping ourselves get more in tune with the subtleties and nuances, shapes, flavors, shades of our emotional life.
But that's one piece of this bigger thing that we're calling embodiment. There's also proprioception, which is the sense of our bodies in motion and in relation to gravity. That without proprioception, if we close our eyes, we would fall down.
Our sense of ourselves is not just visual orienting through space and through the environment. It's also, hmm, where is my elbow right now? Oh, it's about that far when I can feel it because I'm using my proprioceptive capacity.
There's exteroception, all of the senses that tune us into the world outside, sight and sound and taste and smell and touch. Incredibly important, not just for orienting us toward goal-directed activities, but also giving us a sense of sensory richness and aliveness in our world. And I'm not suggesting that we're trying to improve our vision or that people with impaired hearing, for example, don't have the capacity to cultivate those senses.
It's about learning how to appreciate what's there, the information that it gives us, and how that information is affecting us on a subtle level all the time anyway.
Adrian:
Yeah, so there's a sense of the way that those three different broad areas interact.
Rae Johnson:
Yes, and how each of them can be cultivated through practice. I want to add one more territory. There's more than actually even just four, but I want to add the territory that was first described by a phenomenological philosopher named Maurice Merleau-Ponty, which is intercorporeality.
We also have this sensory embodied awareness of who else is in the room with us. We pick up signals from one another. We are able to, through neuroscientists suggest, through our mirror neurons, are actually able to engage in a process of kinesthetic, that is, body-to-body empathy, so that if we witness, for example, pain or fear in someone else or sorrow, we actually begin to feel similar feelings inside ourselves.
They are elicited by the witnessing of sensory data in someone else. The similar kinds of sensory data gets elicited and activated in us. We see someone crying and tears form in our own eyes.
We watch somebody being hurt and we go, we cringe. So this intercorporeal capacity, I actually think is the basis for how we come to be related to one another, not just for our own survival, but for all of our emotional, psychological, and social needs, and that becoming more attuned to those interoceptive, rather intercorporeal signals that we pick up, and that I think most of us are socialized not to pay attention to, to not be conscious of, but that by actually intentionally beginning to notice, hmm, something just happened in the room and I feel different now because of what I'm noticing in other people, in their bodies.
But that can be really crucial information for helping us navigate our relationships with one another.
Adrian:
Making that intentional choice to become more aware what's going on in my body, and what is that telling me about everything else that's around?
Rae Johnson:
Yes, because our bodies are always embedded, always interacting with our environments, whether we're paying attention to that interaction.
Adrian:
It's going back to where we began, it's that's going on all the time. Are you paying attention? Where is your awareness?
Is it focused in on all of that and becoming more, more engaged, the capacity for choice that emerges?
Rae Johnson:
The channel is always there, and information is always running through it. You could actually think of it as radio signals. They're always in the air.
All the things that are being broadcast by all the radio stations around the world are always in the air. What we need to do is tune into it. And when we learn how to tune into it, what becomes invisible or static noise, then, oh, all of a sudden there's a Bach cantata playing, or there's some rap, or there's an interview with an artist.
All of this data requires us to tune into it in order for it to become comprehensible and meaningful to us. And then once we do, our bodies are this incredibly rich and nourishing source of information and knowledge and pleasure.
Adrian:
And this idea of the body having knowledge is something I'm fascinated with. It's coming up so much.
Rae Johnson:
Yeah, and it's interesting because I've been in this field for a long time, and I will often hear this phrase, the body never lies. And I think that's nonsense. Of course it lies.
Of course our bodies send a signal that are not actually in alignment with even our physical well-being. You can be a cocaine addict, and your body's saying, I would like some cocaine now, please. And if you act on that as if the body never lies, your addiction continues, right?
So it's not that our bodies are this unerring font of wisdom and knowledge. What they are, are an incredibly rich, diverse, and complex set of data. A stream of information that when we ignore it, when we're making decisions, or when we're trying to make meaning of things, when we ignore that data set, our decisions and our conclusions are distorted. They're skewed.
Adrian;
Yeah, and that's where we come back to, if we're going to make the most effective choices in our lives, we need that embodied awareness.
Rae Johnson:
We need to listen. It's not like we blindly act on it as if the body never lies, or as if the body always knows best. It doesn't.
But it's often telling us something that's not available to our conscious awareness unless we tune in. Yeah, it's like, oh, oh, my body's actually saying something a little bit different than what my head's saying. And I'm speaking metaphorically, of course, because it's all one system.
But still, for the purposes of this conversation, to be able to say, ah, my gut's telling me something different. And if I listen to my gut, all of a sudden I can see this situation differently. And I think I need to approach it in a way that's not how I was initially going to approach it at all, because I have other possibilities available based on the information that I got by tuning in.
Adrian:
Fab! Thank you.
Rae Johnson:
You're welcome. My pleasure.
Adrian:
We could go on. I mean, I suppose there's the question of how this ties in with activism. Is that something you'd like to unpack a little bit?
Rae Johnson:
I would absolutely like to unpack that a little bit. I was hoping you would ask, because in fact, it leads really nicely into activism for me, and just for the purposes of this conversation. For me, activism is any intentional action that someone takes in support of social change.
So I understand it very broadly. It's not just about looking at the institutional structures and the legislative bodies and lobbying and looking at ways to make institutional or systems change. For me, activism is also about working at the micro level in terms of changing the way we relate to people in our everyday lives, paying attention to the power dynamics that got embedded through systems of injustice, that we actually have the capacity to change and to shift and to transform if we begin paying attention to them.
So how the body and how conscious embodiment feeds into activism is that our bodies are always signaling and receiving signals in terms of other people's lived experience. We do that largely through what's called nonverbal communication, which is our postures, our gestures, our facial expression, how much space we keep between us, how we navigate interpersonal space, whether we touch one another, how we touch one another, where, who gets to touch whom, eye contact, all of this really complicated, complex, nuanced set of communication that goes on body to body that we pick up and we make meaning of them based on how we were socialized.
And that may not be how the person that we're with was socialized. There can, in fact, be different body languages being spoken so we can misunderstand one another on a body to body level. That can really affect what's going on verbally is when our bodies are saying to one another something that contradicts what our words are saying to one another.
So it can be this huge source of miscommunication, misunderstanding across social difference, but our bodies also leak our implicit bias. So even when we think of ourselves as not being prejudiced or discriminatory or that we actually believe this set of things about a particular social group, if our socialization hasn't been really consciously examined, we may hold bias and prejudice that we're not even aware of. And that bias and prejudice gets unconsciously communicated through our body language so that members of that different social group pick it up, read it quite correctly, and go, wow, even though this person is saying all the right things, I don't trust them and I don't believe them.
And they probably couldn't tell you why, but I suspect that why they don't trust or believe or feel reassured or welcomed by this other person is because they are correctly reading that person's body and all of those implicit bias signals are coming through non-verbally and they're going, you know what? You don't actually want me here or you don't think I'm worth listening to or whatever it is. So I think the body can be this incredibly crucial source of information when we're trying to work across social difference.
Adrian:
And there's work for us to do to tune into, what am I communicating here with my body? That's the job at work to be done for certainly owning that for myself.
Rae Johnson:
And to become more consciously aware of what you're picking up in other people's bodies. Like, oh, they just broke eye contact. I'm interpreting that as they're not interested in me.
I wonder if that's true. Why don't I check that out with them? Because until you check it out, you're left acting on an interpretation that may or may not be accurate.
And that those conversations, the I'm feeling misunderstood right now, I noticed that you stopped looking at me or that you turned slightly away or that you backed up. And I'm reading all of those things as that you don't want to engage with me. Is that how you're feeling?
No, actually, I'm a highly sensitive person. I've got some neurodivergence going on and other people are a little overwhelming to me. So I have to take breaks with my eye contact and I need more space because that's how I was socialized.
And two feet apart is too close for me. I was just trying to get comfortable so that I could stay engaged with you because I really am interested in hearing what you were saying. Oh, oh, okay, completely different.
And we don't know unless we pay attention, recognize the signals that we're interpreting and then use them as an opportunity to get curious.
Adrian:
Lovely- embodied curiosity. That's been a wonderful way to spend half an hour. I feel I've learned a lot, got a really good overview of what embodiment is and the way that we can take this into our everyday lives.
And for those of us that identify as activists, a lot of richness there.
Rae Johnson:
Yeah, for me when I realized that there was something going on with our bodies that actually had a lot to do with injustice, whether that is injustice across different social groups or the injustice that we perpetuate on the environment. As soon as I realized that, I recognized that the work that I've been doing in semantics for all these years actually had a much more meaningful and important purpose than just personal development.
Adrian:
Yeah, it's a valuable insight. Thank you. Rae, that's been lovely.
Rae Johnson:
Good, I'm glad you enjoyed it. As you could probably tell, I love talking about this stuff. Let's just keep in mind to continue to touch base with one another now that we've made contact.
Adrian:
Super, take care and we'll be in touch.
Rae Johnson:
Okay, bye-bye.
Adrian:
Cheers, bye-bye.
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Adrian:
Next up, we have Dr. Olu Taiwo. Olu is Associate Professor at the University of Winchester where he teaches acting, street arts, visual development and contemporary performance.
Olu has a background in fine art, street dance, African percussion, physical theatre and the martial arts. Olu and I go back quite a few years. We were colleagues at the University of Winchester and I'm recalling a particularly exciting adventure we had at a conference in Cuba many years ago. So I'm just bringing that to mind and there's some wonderful memories of that. So Olu, welcome to the Embodied Pathways podcast.
Olu Taiwo:
Thank you very much for inviting me. I'm just remembering that time. I remember the time when we were walking, do you remember?
We were walking down towards the main building to the conference and then a couple of Secret Service guys stopped me and started speaking in Spanish and I turned around and said, hello, I'm not Spanish. We thought you was Cuban. We thought you were trying to tout some money from these people.
It was hilarious. But also very funny because it was ironic that in Cuba, that's where a lot of Yoruba people, where my parents come from, a lot of the enslaved Yoruba men went to Cuba or went or were taken to Cuba and so the religion, Santaria, is essentially a syncretized religion based on Christianity and Yoruba Ifa and the Yoruba gods and things. And so I remember going there and thinking, my goodness, so many people look like uncles and aunts and their faces and their structures look really similar.
And it blew my mind actually. And also it made me both excited and also sad because it was like, you know, for want of a better, it could have been me, you know, at a different time or space. Yeah, there's a lot of mixed feelings, but it was such a glorious adventure and I'm so pleased that that happened and I have those memories.
The question that you want to ask me, is it ….
Adrian:
What does embodiment mean to you, Olu?
Olu Taiwo:
There's a short answer and a long answer. And the short answer is the agency of being in a body, in your body, so the agency of knowledge, so that it is part of your physical expression.
So I might go and start learning a new trade. And then somebody asks me oh, how you get on? Oh, yes, cause I'm not quite embodied it yet, but I'm getting there. So we would use that language quite happily. Or if it's a new technique in martial arts and you suddenly go yes, I've got it.
And here you've embodied the technique. I think in sports studies it's called engrams, which is like an engram, is a kind of embodied memory. So learning to drive a car. When you first learn to drive a car, it's like what you're going to turn a wheel, you're going to look in a mirror, you're going to change this. How the hell am I going to do this? And then, after about a year, you're trying to dodge the camera so you can record. You can actually speak to someone on the phone while you're driving, listening to music.
So the engram is the habituated knowledge of the body. And engrams are good when it comes to learning techniques and things. But it's also it has this negative bad use can create bad engrams. So bad posture, bad use can create bad engrams. So bad posture, bad eating habits, negative thinking. So that's the kind of short answer. It's like it's like it's the agency of being in a body and the agency of knowing fully. So it becomes part of it.
We say like in in my, with my students in acting, I say uh, when we're rehearsing, I say you haven't started rehearsing until you're out of the book. While you're still on the book, with the book in hand, then you're what I call in preparation, which is fine, but you haven't embodied the words yet. So therefore you can't act them. You can prepare the acting, but the act comes when you do not have to think of the words anymore, they just emerge from the situation. So there's kind of that. The longer answer for me is a more mystical answer, which is to say that we often think of our bodies as a blank canvas at birth. You know, when a child is born they're a blank canvas. So we can imprint ideas and to a certain degree that's right, because we are. That's the whole idea. We we have these tools to enable us to, you know, to, to, to address the world that we're, we're in. But the body has these amazing inbuilt mechanisms. In Tai Chi we talk about three dantians: Dantian in the head, dantian in the chest and a main dantian which, when people talk about dantian's center, they tend to think of it in the center of the body, below the hara, just below the belly button, and there is a whole series of things there which I won't go into now, but there's a whole series of relationships that one understands about those three spaces.
Of course, modern biological research talks about neural nets in the head. We all know about that Neural net in the heart and then the neural net in the stomach, often called the second brain. You see, whether we like it or not, we do listen to them. It's our education that keeps drawing us away from it. At a minute it's like, oh, I don't want to go there. I've got a funny feeling about my gut. I've got a horrible gut feeling about this. You know, oh, I want to do it, but my head says I shouldn't do it. But I really want to do it!
See if we don't need information about those things to know that we have them. You just do it, don't we just do it. It's there and in fact it's. It's how do we develop those things. It's also inter, it's intergenerational, but it's also interspecies. Dogs will get it. They'll understand the tone of your voice, they'll understand. They'll understand. They won't understand complex ideas, because we don't speak dog language, but the non-verbal, the physical, the embodied movement. That's how we communicate and quite complex communications. So that's the kind of background of embodiment.
There is another aspect of embodiment which I think is quite interesting, which comes down to a more philosophical basis which I'm very interested in, which is that our awareness and the witness I teach this in Chekhov talks about this in acting, Michael Chekhov, but also it's a very strong Buddhist context as well, and Sanskrit, we have it in Yoruba land in terms of Ifa. Again, we say it in our language. So we actually need to it's not a difficult thing to grasp because we know it which is like oh, my body's not feeling too good today. It's like saying my chair, somebody's been sitting on my chair, I'm not the chair, my body's not feeling too good today. So I know that I own a body. A body's saying don't have any more, I really want some more. Well, that's a clear example of two conflicting discussions about what is what. So the body is not separate because again in Europe it's so obsessed with distinctions and separations and dissection.
I often say because I have to speak from an African perspective it's not separate. It's saying that the body is distinct from you. And likewise with the mind. Because you'll say, oh God, my mind's all foggy right now. Yesterday I was totally on it, but today my mind's not helping me, it's going against me right now. I can't. You know, yesterday I was totally on it, but today my mind's not helping, it's going against me a bit. That's a recognition that the mind is not you and we think about that. That's your psyche, your mind. Or the Greeks had it. They understood, they studied in Egypt, they understood. They understood this. We own the psyche, we own the mind. The problem is for a lot of people is that they become identified with the mind and the body, but it's not saying it's separate. I'm not separate from the mind, we're not separate from the body, but we're distinct because it's the awareness that is aware that I have a body and I have a mind awareness is the key, then awareness is a key presence, awareness, witness, the moment.
All there is is a moment. There is nothing else other than the moment. Everything else is a wonderful fractal, so, yeah, so. So that opens up this thing about embodiment, because it allows for saying embodiment is the process of continue to be continually being so that's that's an important point, that embodiment is a process. Yeah, you don't become, you don't. Oh, I'm now embodied. That's just the wrong attitude. Period. Anyway, we are engaged in embodying.
Adrian:
I'm wondering, does this lead us a little bit closer to the question of how we might deepen our sense of embodiment or enrich that process of embodiment?
Olu Taiwo:
Yeah, luckily, you know, there have been higher beings, much higher than I've ever reached or may even reach, who have left techniques for us. And what is significant is yoga, meditation, prayer, contemplation, Tai Chi, Chuan, Feldenkrais, Five Rhythms, dancing I could name loads and these are all gifts to humanity. You have to watch for the ones who are marketing. There's people who do a course for a week and they say, right now, I'm a teacher, yeah, sucker. So watch for those, because truth is truth, but it's out there.
And one thing I've been doing recently, over the years, because you probably know, but I've had quite a few health issues over the past, because you probably know, but I've had quite a few health issues over the past seven years and, um, you get into a situation where you suddenly see there's a possibility of death and you think, wow, okay, right now, this is stuff that's got real. And of course, the irony is, for me, it wasn't death that became the fear. I wasn't really frightened of death, it's actually, but I haven't finished, I'm not done yet, and I think, oh, right now, that's interesting. It's almost like. Until you put in a situation where you have to really confront value, you might suppose, oh, I want to avoid death. I want to have this before I die. But actually that wasn't it to avoid death, I want to have this before I die, you know. But actually that wasn't it, because the the sense of death at that time was very much kind of soothing. As on chemotherapy, and I thought, oh, what is really? It's actually quite, it's quite good to just go to sleep, you know, like a big long sleep, fantastic. But then the fear is like, yeah, but I haven't finished my.
I think the Hindu’s - they call it dharma. I haven't finished my work. Then you, the Hindu, they call it Dharma, I haven't finished my work. Then you know, that's valuable, what you've got to do, become valuable, and doing requires embodiment. Yeah, so that's really when I started to sort of fully appreciate the experience and the importance of gratitude. I mean, I was on chemotherapy because I had breast cancer.
It was a shock because I was doing Tai Chi and basketball. You know a fit guy. It was like a shock to my system. I was immortal.
And suddenly this thing strikes you and you think, right, okay, you have to reinvent, and everything shortens. People suddenly think, you know, supposing I've got a year left. And then I realized something quite profound, very quickly and with the help of a few masters. That was always helpful, listening to people enlightened figures is that if I start to think about the past and I go, oh god, you know, what did I do wrong, what could have done better? Oh no, what, what I failed? What that does is that the body just produces cortisone. It just produces bad hormones, which is not good for the body at all, stress hormones and and adrenaline for kind of like fear. For you know, all this stuff comes in. So the body has no concept of time. It doesn't go. Oh don worry, he's only thinking of the past. Don't bother producing it, it's going to cause it all. There's no threat to the moment. It doesn't do that, it just goes. You're in the threat.
Adrian
It doesn't know the difference does it?
Olu Taiwo:
There's no difference. Because there is no difference. Time in this context is constructed, the body is present. This is the importance of embodiment in the present and the now. And awareness is what are we aware of in the moment? And so, in other words, I was like, oh no, in a year's time, suppose I haven't got this and I haven't done that. And what about children? And have I got my affairs in order?
Again, body starts to go into alarm mode and starts producing these negative hormones. There's a kind of a cyclical hermeneutic response where ‘Ah!’ - ‘Oh’, Ah!’ - and spirals quite quickly. And so the only place I did I did do quite a bit tai chi and Tai Chi and yoga while I was on chemotherapy, which was amazing. So all I really had to experience was tiredness.
But what I learned was that when I wake up and open my eyes and the sheer act of opening your eyes and allowing light to flood in is a miracle. It's easy for me to go oh my God, I've come to this. I'm actually feeling excited. Just because I've opened my eyes, I've really fallen down. That could be a response, but actually what it was was, as soon as I feel that response, you could feel the kind of endorphins and all the kind of positive hormones just being created and I just suddenly clicked again. I thought, aha! we can really control the chemistry in our bodies by how we think and how we exist and how we approach our embodied experience in the moment. So that was one of my, that was one of my tools for recovery.
Adrian
Gosh, we've covered embodiment, life, death awareness, all of which are different aspects of our embodiment. Thanks, Olu, that's been super.
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Adrian:
I'd now like to introduce Charlene Spretnak, who's Professor Emerita in Philosophy and Religion and lives in California. Now, Charlene has long been fascinated with what she calls dynamic interrelatedness. This is a thread which has run right the way through all of the eight books she's written, and these books weave together cultural history, ecological politics, feminism, spirituality and social commentary. They include Green Politics, The Resurgence of the Real and Relational Reality. Charlene is a co-founder of the Green Party in the United States and a co-founder of two branches of the feminist movement Ecofeminism and Women's Spirituality. Charlene, it's quite a privilege to have the opportunity to have you here and to hear some of your ideas on these two really big questions. So welcome to the Embodied Pathways podcast.
Charlene Spretnak:
Thank you.
Adrian
So let's jump straight in: What does embodiment mean to you?
Charlene Spretnak:
The term embodiment; to me it refers to our physical being, to the ways in which we're structured, the ways in which we function, and for the past 350 years of modernity, modern culture built out all our knowledge systems on the mechanistic worldview. So the human organism was viewed as an aggregate of biomechanical systems period Also on top of that, in the West the dominant perception since classical Greek philosophy has been that there's a radical discontinuity between body and mind, between humans and nature and between self and the world. However, the good news is that in the past 20 years, the field of human biology has made this grand leap, resulting from thousands of discoveries. This is a leap away from that 350-year mechanistic detour, to the realization that everything in the physical world, including us, is structured and functions by dynamic interrelatedness.
It is increasingly recognized, I would say, that everything exists in fields of myriad subtle interrelationships, which are actually intra-relationships within this universe. And these relationships are called dynamic because they change at every nanosecond, responding creatively to various perturbations and new situations that arise, which they also help to create. So at every instant we are in play, fully involved in countless subtle relationships. Both tangible and intangible actions are driven by dynamic interrelatedness. For instance, our levels of stress and the quality of our relationships and acquaintanceships. These affect our cardiac system, metabolism, immune system, cognition and memory and much more, at every fraction of a second, including whether a particular gene we inherited is expressed or suppressed. So I see a sea change underway because of the numerous discoveries that we humans are far more dynamically interrelated with other people, with nature and internally within our body-mind than the mechanistic model assumed, and this awakening has finally nudged aside the Western notion of a supposedly isolate, thoroughly autonomous self. Instead, each of us is physically a self-in-relationship, and my own interest in tracking these many relational discoveries is what does this mean to people, to our lives individually and collectively, now that we know?
So, after immersing myself in the ramifications of these recent discoveries, I've arrived at a brief reflection I'd like to share, and it does include some example of the discoveries. If we knew ourselves to be so dynamically interrelated that even witnessing violence across a room as children damages the genetic material in our cells. That the growth of our brain and the development of our mind depended on the love we got as infants. That the robustness of our immune system was affected by whether we felt our parents loved us enough. That we heal faster, learn better, feel more connected with others if we commune with nature, even through pictures. Would we, could we cherish and protect our extraordinarily relational nature of being? Would we think through the implications of these discoveries and realize that everything from the personal to the workplace, and community to public policy needs to be reimagined and redesigned now to bring our ways of living in sync with our relational self?
Adrian:
So there's a sense that we're embodied and embedded in this relational dynamic.
Charlene Spretnak:
Exactly! well put, Adrian.
Adrian:
I've been reading your work actually for for quite a long time and I've I've seen this thread coming through and gradually developing and coming to this conclusion that nothing exists outside of interrelationship. That's the kind of the nub of it all, isn't it?
Charlene Spretnak:
Yes.
Adrian:
You did a very important article for the European Journal of Ecopsychology, which I'm the editor of, called Dynamic Interrelationship in an Era of Disasters, and in that article you really unpacked some of the practical dimensions of this. Is that related to how we might deepen our sense of embodiment?
Charlene Spretnak:
I think so because I think the way we deepen that understanding is by living as if we're not isolate, totally autonomous beings, cut off from everybody else. We may or may not be in a relationship with people. No, that's once we acknowledge and attend to the dynamic interrelatedness that infuses our every moment. And if we don't do that, we're going against the grain. We're still slogging along as if we were these, you know, cut off little mechanistic, biomechanical things, and that's the last thing we want to be doing now. I mean we really wouldn't want to be doing it at any time. But the whole human race I mean we really wouldn't want to be doing it at any time but the whole human race, all life forms on the planet, are heading into extremely difficult times as the climate emergency escalates and intensifies. So I think it's, of course, very interesting that the whole field of biology is now completely res the way, moved very quickly into some fields, especially like healthcare and education. In stressful times, of course, we're going to have puncture, biopsy. Wounds heal faster in the hospital, patients feel less pain and anxiety and they also have lower blood pressure and they require shorter hospital stays. And they require shorter hospital stays. So also outside the hospital. Just what kind of relational health care are you receiving? What's the quality of it? In a doctor's office, a study was found that people with diabetes developed many fewer complications if their doctor was skilled in compassionate health care. So that's something we would need to know, because sometimes you know we're going to be giving health care, even peer-to-peer in evacuation centers, relocation centers. I think it's pretty clear now not only that there are going to be millions of people trying to cross borders to escape from the effects of the climate emergency, but also, within every country, there are going to be millions of climate refugees who have lost everything. Where are they going to go? How are they going to be resettled?
I think that even if we look at a community and say how could they best be prepared Well, I'll just speak for my country the whole concept of emergency community preparedness it's out there. There's a website from the Federal Emergency Management Agency with lots of good ideas on it, but basically everybody kind of ignores that. Oh, that's boring, I'm not doing that in my town. Are you doing that in your town? No, I haven't heard anything about that. But what I think we could do to good effect would be to reframe that and use the need for community emergency preparedness as a scaffolding, as an excuse to reweave the social fabric and connect people better. Because right now we're in general, not in a good condition to meet these difficulties in communities, because people have become quite isolated compared to the kinds of connections there used to be in neighborhoods and towns. So, yeah, I think we could, you know, use the need for this to really achieve something that's quite desperately needed, which is more interconnection. And there could be all kinds of things. For instance, you know a human phone tree. Be prepared for the fact that all phone lines, landlines, cell phones might be out. So how would a town communicate with people? You know what the situation is, where the emergency food and water is being given out. So you could set up just a network, and these networks and weaving together of existing networks would just make a much healthier community, a much more resilient community, and that's true for after a disaster too.
I think a lot of us have already been through one. I live in California, so we've been through a big wildfire. When it's over, you just like wander out into the town and see what's possible. Everyone's so shaken up I wonder what's even possible. And to see these networks, you know, ready to go into action and ready to start doing what's needed to help people, and evacuation centers and elsewhere. It just makes such a difference for the town, the community.
And during the fire I went down to the evacuation center for our town, which was the high school gym, and I saw that as usual, they'd set out all the cots as a big grid, because in the West that's our notion of efficiency you need to fill a space with as many cots as you can. You put it in a grid form. But that's completely wrong. Once we understand what people need as relational beings and I think they should replicate almost like a map of the town you know, make little concentric circles or something to replicate different neighborhoods, so that people who are so shaken up or depressed and maybe have lost everything would see people they know or even just recognize from being in their neighborhood. They wouldn't be completely alone in a drift. Also, if the air is good enough, healthy, it's very important to get out into nature as soon as people can after a disaster, because that's so healing, deeply healing, good for us down to the cellular level. So we would deepen our sense of it by seeing how much better it works when we apply this new relational knowledge that has come out of the discoveries.
And I think also it's very important to apply the relational knowledge to the way we educate children for these very difficult times ahead, because the children who are born today or say you know, within the last five years there they will be 2040, early 2040s as young adults and situations are likely to be considerably deteriorated by then.
So it's known now through the relational discoveries what it takes to build resilience in a person at those first three years of life, the kind of love and interaction that's needed and how this has everything to do with the way the mind develops. It actually increases in volume. Our mind increases in volume after birth if we have loving situation. And then when they get into school, instead of that modern system we were all schooled in where there are all these different separate systems at different hours we study, I think the curriculum could be completely remade in a relational way so they see the relationship you know for children. They would see the relationship of trees and birds and their neighborhood, how it all works together. And then you know it would be increasingly complex at each grade level looking at different kinds of relationships that make the social world, the physical world, how it all fits together. So the child will grow up knowing we are held in all these dynamic interrelationships.
Adrian:
Dynamic interrelationships really is a way of making us all much more resilient, as well as much more connected.
Charlene Spretnak:
Yes, and let's just look really at what's coming at us In stressful times. We're going to be interacting with other people, no matter how stressed or frightened or traumatized we might be and they might be. And I hope that every person could remember that everyone you encounter is a wonder of interrelationships and creative possibilities. And remember that a harsh word from you during those stressful times will instantly fill the other person's being, because it's perceived all the way down to the cellular level and ripples out through subtly vibrating fields of interrelatedness. But remember too that a kind word will do the same thing.
Adrian:
Wonderful. That sounds like a really lovely thought to end with Charlene.
Charlene Spretnak:
Well, thank you for this conversation.
Adrian
That's been grand. It's really good to hear how bringing these ideas of dynamic interrelatedness very much into where we're at right now and where we're headed really kind of brings it home to us how pragmatic this is. Charlene Spretnak, thank you for your thoughts on embodiment.
Charlene Spretnak:
Thank you.
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Adrian:
Well, it was an absolute blast making that episode! I hope you enjoyed listening to it as much as I did putting it together. I think what comes out from listening to these diverse voices is the very wide range of ways of understanding what embodiment actually is. It's so complex and so rich and, remember, this is just part one of two episodes and we'll be coming back again shortly with another four people addressing those same apparently quite simple but extraordinarily complex question. Look forward to seeing you next time. Thanks for listening.
References:
Mark Walsh
https://embodimentunlimited.com/mark-walsh-bio/
Working with the Body in Training and Coaching , 2021, Open University Press.
Embodied Meditation, 2019, Unicorn Slayer Press.
Rae Johnson
https://raejohnsonsomatic.com/
Knowing In Our Bones, 2011. Lambert Academic Publishing.
Embodied Activism. 2023, North Atlantic Books.
Charlene Spretnak
https://www.charlenespretnak.com/
Dynamic Interrelationship in an Era of Disasters, https://ecopsychology-journal.eu/v8/EJE%20v8_Spretnak.pdf
Green Politics, by Charlene Spretnak and Fritjof Capra, 1984, E. P. Dutton.
The Resurgence of the Real and Relational Reality. 1997, Basic Books.