One way of understanding embodiment is as experiencing the world with the whole of our being, with all its subtle layers, rather than solely the narrow bandwidth of our head. We are listening to the world through the body, like a transceiver - an instrument that is capable of both sending and receiving informational signals. That transceiver has a much broader bandwidth than our thinking mind on its own. To use our whole bandwidth we need to tune into the body to learn its language through sensation.
The way we operate normally is we take information in through one of the five senses, go into our head and quickly give what we have experienced a label, turn it into a concept. This concept is associated with memory, in the past. We place what we experience into a category of boxes we’ve labelled over the years and as soon as our experience goes into that box, it becomes an idea and we are no longer in the present moment.
When we operate on a level of thoughts and concepts in the head, we are distanced from our direct experience. In order for us to tap into the wisdom of the body, we need to drop down from the head into the body and its way of knowing, which is felt rather than understood conceptually.
Experiencing life through the entirety of our body allows us access to more information, we open our bandwidth exponentially as we take in signals and resonate with our surroundings. Our relationships with other people and life in general begin to take on a different quality. An intimacy. A sense of wholeness. This sense of being a separate unit, begins to dissolve into an experience of mutuality and interbeing.
Disembodiment is uniquely human
Animals, of course, are always embodied, they don’t retreat into their head, like we do. When starlings gather into huge flocks, murmurations, they fly in amazing formations at high speeds, dramatically and unexpectedly changing direction. There is no choreographer, no planned moves, there is just a mass of highly attuned birds, each tuning into the nearest few birds around them to detect and intuit their next move.
Ants are another interesting example of decentralised intelligence. No ant in a colony is in charge, not even the queen, despite the title we have given her. No ant gives another ant instructions or orders about what to do. Yet the colony responds and adapts to the world surrounding it with great precision and intelligence.
Author Philip Shepherd likens the human embodied experience of tuning into our surroundings to an ant colony:
“To understand what it might mean to experience the thinking of your being through your attunement, consider [...] how an ant colony attunes to the guidance of the world with a collective ability to respond, learn and act that no individual ant takes charge of. When we lose our attunement, we have to put the abstract intelligence of the head in charge - and then our ability to respond, learn and act is supervised by its abstractions, which are blind to harmony and hungry for control.” (Shepherd p.218)
The undermined other brains
Farmers and growers often develop a resonant intimacy with their land and animals that allows them an intuitive understanding and knowing of what is taking place and what is needed at any given time. However, the more pressure and stress we are under, the more we retreat into the head and the sensing transceiver of our body tenses up. If we are chronically stressed, we may find it difficult to relax enough to drop down from the head back into the body.
But what it is that we’re feeling in the body, what are we tuning into? With our interoceptive ability to feel and sense into our body’s internal experience we can detect gross sensations of the body as well as emotions and feelings, all of which give us important information about what is going on with us and our relationship to the surrounding world. But there are subtler levels of energy which we’ve not been taught to pay attention to.
In the West we conventionally think that the brain in our head drives our body. Current scientific research shows that, in addition to the brain in our head, we have a large neural network in our gut and our heart that both operate like a brain. These 3 brains are connected through the vagus nerve. There’s more information travelling from our gut and heart to our brain than from the brain down, which suggests they have a lot more influence than we give them credit for. Even though we don’t acknowledge these two other brains, the recognition of the 3 brains exists in our language: we say “listen to your heart”, and we talk about “gut instinct”.
These powerful energy centres, the head, heart and the gut, constitute the subtle energy system in the Japanese traditions of Zen and Aikido and Chinese traditions such as Qigong, and in the Indian wisdom traditions. They are connected by the central channel that carries the subtle life energy or chi. The more attuned we become to the body, the more we experience it as energy, not just as flesh, bone and organs. As we attune to the energy body, we are tapping into that which connects us all, the vital impulse that runs through all of life.
Cultures of non-conceptual knowing
We undermine the gut and the heart and tend to only value the intellect; abstract and conceptual knowing. But there are indigenous, natural tribes that are using these different ways of knowing.
West-African Anlo-Ewe culture perceive the world through the sensations in the body. They have a word for it “seselelame” which translates as “feel-feel-at-flesh-inside”. The Anlo-Ewe don’t just hear sounds with their ears or see sights with their eyes, they also feel them in and through the body. (Geurts p.40)
In the Amazon, the indigenous Pirahã tribe engage with their environment through the heart as much as their brain. Bruce Parry, a BBC filmmaker, has spent long periods with the Pirahã. In his documentary film Tawai, when he asks a Pirahã man if he is thinking with words or just feeling with his senses, the man replies by saying the spirit of the trees speaks in his heart and then in his head. Through their attunement to their environment the Pirahã can, for example, sense that a snake is going to cross their path, several minutes before it actually happens.
Language is something that reflects the level of their immediate experience of their surroundings. The Pirahã language is tied to the present moment and lacks the abstraction that we have in our languages. They don’t have past or future tenses, numbers, or pronouns to substitute for names of things, nor do they have words for colours. A red shirt is described as being “blood-like”. The likeness to blood refers to something that’s alive and real with a concrete reference point in the world, whereas the word “red” is completely abstract. (Shepherd p.175)
When the body knows the world in this sort of way, it’s not relying on concepts or abstractions of language, but on nonverbal non-conceptual direct experience and knowing. We are so used to operating in concepts that when we look at something, like a tree, our minds say “tree”. But if we drop the names and concepts for the world for a moment, what do we experience?
Following the animating principle
When we stop operating on this purely conceptual level and include the various levels of sensation of the body in our experience, our separateness from the rest of the world can begin to soften and interconnectedness can be felt. And that can be incredibly relieving: We’re being lived by an impulse of life so mysterious and ingenious, it’s beyond our comprehension.
Somatic coach Richard Strozzi-Heckler calls this energy the animating principle:
“We are all animated and informed by a core life energy that is experienced as a personal aliveness as well as a universal force. Consciously engaging with this core energy reveals the true nature of our interconnectedness with all of life, animate and inanimate. This core energy is the foundation upon which we learn and evolve.” (Strozzi-Heckler p.44)
Getting used to listening to it is one thing, learning to trust it is another. Trusting it is an invitation to familiarising ourselves with not knowing, loosening our grip on goals, strategies and expectations we tie to our actions. It’s an invitation to a life in alignment with the earth, and thus like a single ant, we can attune and take our place within our ecosystem trusting that harmony and balance will be found, even if we don’t know exactly how it is going to take place.
Geurts, Kathryn Linn 2002: Culture and the Senses: Bodily Ways of Knowing in an African Community. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Shepherd, Philip 2017: Radical Wholeness. The Embodied Present and the Ordinary Grace of Being. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books.
Strozzi-Heckler, Richard 2014: The Art of Somatic Coaching. Embodying Skillful Action, Wisdom and Action. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books.