All of our experiences (tracing back as early as growing in our mother’s womb), all of the stresses, injuries and traumas, as well as the feelings of safety, joy, grace and goodness that have affected our lives—all of these change the shape of our bodies. Sometimes these changes are obvious, such as tightly folded arms, a stiff spine, slumped shoulders or a caved-in chest. Others are subtle, such as a slight asymmetry of the shoulders, a seemingly insignificant turning to one side, arms or legs that seem small in relation to the trunk, a retraction of the pelvis or an uneven skin coloration indicating coldness and warmth. These form the bedrock of who we have become. They are a starting point of who we are becoming.
We take in information from the world through our external sense organs, those of sight, sound, touch, smell and taste. Most of us rely primarily on the first two. However, we are receiving crucial information from all of our senses. Of equal, if not greater, importance than the information from our external senses are the vast streams of information that we register from our internal sense organs. We receive this information from our muscles, joints, gravity receptors and visceral organs (see the discussion of SIBAM in Chapter 7). In fact, without this interoceptive sensory information, we would be fundamentally lost—more so even than an individual who is both blind and deaf.* Without internal information we would not be able to walk on the earth or know our emotions and our desires. Our relationship with others is utterly dependent upon a mutual exchange of sensory data, both external and internal. We gaze, touch and speak, and through a resonance of our sensations, know ourselves and each other. The overall sense when this process is in sync is one of belonging and goodness. Without access to the feeling sense, through bodily sensations, our lives would be one-dimensional, black and white. Both our physical life and feeling life, from our most primal cravings to the loftiest artistic creations, depend upon embodiment. And while most of this book is theoretical and didactic, I invite you, the reader, to participate in brief awareness encounters in this chapter. The reason for these “interruptions” is to encourage you to participate and actively engage in this material—making direct personal contact with the essence of the body’s innate capacity to feel, to heal and to know.
A Basic Awareness Encounter
Look at your right hand with the palm facing you. Observe it with your eyes. Now close your hand into a fist. Watch the movement and visually note the end position. Open the hand and look at it again. Now, close your eyes and feel the physical sensation of your open hand. While keeping your eyes closed, slowly contract the hand again into a fist; then once again open it. With the eyes still closed, focus all of your attention on this opening and closing as you repeat the movement. Notice how your awareness changes as you continue to be mindful of the sensations of this seemingly simple body activity.
This little exercise may seem banal. However, to actually become aware of our body without being distracted by what’s going on around us or by our thoughts and images (about the action) can be truly a Herculean task. Yet it is a task with rich rewards. Our tendency is to identify with our thoughts to such an extent that we confuse them with reality; we believe that we are our thoughts. With this exercise you can detect the fundamental difference between your visual image of your body and your actual “interoceptive” experience. Body awareness helps us get some distance from our negative emotions and belief systems as well as contacting those of goodness. In discovering that we are not just our thoughts and images, we begin a journey to fullness as living, participating, sentient, embodied creatures.
In the Beginning
What follows is a brief review of humanity’s experience with embodiment and awareness. This admittedly speculative exploration is offered in the hope that it will better illustrate how the two important concepts of embodiment and awareness have been perceived and have developed over the ages.
Biologically, we have evolved powerful movement systems designed for protection, hunting and avoiding being hunted. These automatic (instinctual) action systems—things that the body does to protect itself—were designed for rapid response when we come upon a snake or tiger. Without thinking we immediately react—escaping, fighting or freezing. For our earliest ancestors, physical readiness was a basic survival requirement. They had to be in the “here and now” every single moment of every single day. They were prepared to respond instantaneously and meaningfully to a few molecules of a novel scent or to the sound of a twig snapping in the distance. Simply put, they had to react from their guts. Without these compelling sensory prompts, our hunter-gatherer forbearers would not have lived to tell the tale. The degree to which they were “self-aware” of their instinctual responses remains, however, an unanswered question.
Instincts, at their archaic roots, are compelled actions. They are movements that the body does or postural adjustments that prepare us for those actions. For this reason, physical sensations that guide these actions are the vehicle for direct knowledge of our instinctual selves. The advent of tools, symbols and then a rudimentary language allowed our ancestors to communicate with each other, sharing which action patterns worked and which didn’t, thereby refining their collective behaviors. To this end, one might speculate that they embraced art, dance and storytelling—and in the process attained, cultivated and developed, over time, reflective self-awareness. Cave paintings and other archaeological evidence record the saga of the evolution of embodied human consciousness as it blossomed in self-knowledge, in abstract symbols and finally in written language.
As individuals congregated in populated communities, their survival need for constant environmental vigilance waned. Their awareness of bodily sensation took on more of a social function—what is now termed social and emotional intelligence. Survival no longer depended solely on the urgency of fight, flight or freeze. Rather, as society became more and more complex, the need for greater mental capacity to navigate our position within the group increased. Nuanced body language—the reading of facial and postural cues (the unspoken language of the body)—gave way to establishing impulse control, which propelled our progenitors toward an increasingly mental framework.
By the so-called age of reason, in the mid-seventeenth century, the importance of rationality ascended to new heights. Disembodiment, in the alleged service of this rationality, had become the norm. Instincts and the immediacy of physical drives (such as sex) had become an embarrassment or worse. The subjugating power of the church reinforced this deepening split between mind and body. Finally, the supremacy of rationality congealed in Descartes’ “I think; therefore I am,” an iconic statement for modernity. The rest is history, for better and for worse.
However, while apparently disengaged, our compelling instincts remain coiled, waiting to ignite and reunite body and mind into effective coordinated action. If, for example, we become stranded in the wilderness, our instincts for predation, protection and shelter will click into sharp focus. If not we will surely die. Additionally, the full power of our intellects will be enrolled to service these bodily instincts. The snapping twig, a novel scent or a fleeting shadow will arouse us to a heightened alert readiness. Sticks, leaves and mud will present themselves as precious building material and protection from the elements. When death looms, rumination is worthless, while body engagement in the here and now is invaluable.
Mostly, though, our gripping survival instincts seem largely useless; in fact, in day-to-day life they are frequently detrimental. We expend an enormous amount of energy suppressing our instinctual eruptions. For example, when our boss passes over us and promotes a less experienced rival, we (perceiving actual threat) momentarily explode, then stuff our murderous rage back into our bodies from whence it came—almost before we can feel it. The cumulative consequences of suppressing such powerful impulses, however, takes its toll in the form of back pain, headaches, high blood pressure, heart disease and gastrointestinal disorders, just to mention a few.
Today our survival depends very little on actually executing our bas
ic instincts. Rather, our physical and psychological health depends on having deliberate and nonreactive access to them. Because our ancient design plan remains intact, it is our legacy to feel really alive only when our survival instincts are fully engaged. However, and this is the rub, modern life rarely provides the opportunity for that kind of raw and powerful expression. And when we are called to action, being swept away with a fight-or-flight response is rarely appropriate to the social context in which we find ourselves. As such, we are damned if we do and damned if we don’t.
Unable to feel our instinctual aliveness, we are left with certain cravings. These impulses generally revolve around two of our primary instincts: those for self-survival (threat) and those for species survival (sex). Furthermore, if we cannot find a “real” situation to evoke these instincts, we manufacture one. For example, we may engage in inappropriate and dangerous sexual liaisons or jump off cliffs with our ankles attached to bungee cords. These temporary fixes don’t satisfy our yearnings. Most of the time we have solely our thoughts as meager substitutes for our instinctual drives. We not only put a lot of energy into our thoughts, but we also frequently confuse them with reality; we come to believe erroneously, as did Descartes, that we are our thoughts. Thoughts, unfortunately, are poor surrogates for experienced aliveness, and when disconnected from feelings, they result in corrosive rumination, fantasy, delusion and excessive worry. Such perseveration is not really surprising, as the paranoid tendency toward concern for potential threat in the face of ambiguity might have had a significant adaptive advantage in earlier times. Now, however, it is the currency of our judgmental, negativistic “superegos.” On the other hand, when we are informed by clear body sensations and feelings, worry is diminished, while creativity and a sense of purpose are enhanced.
The poet David Budbill, working in his Vermont garden, speaks to this very human condition in his relevant verse, “This Shining Moment in the Now”:132
When I am every day all day all body and no mind, when I am physically, wholly and completely, in this world with the birds, the deer, the sky, the wind, the trees … this shining moment in the now, devoid of mental rumination.
And in another sort of garden, a young woman expresses the following sentiment in a sexuality seminar, “I feel like the most important thing is being there, in my body, with my husband and not inside of my head.” The poet Budbill finds relief from the tyranny of his mind through methodical physical work. Many urban dwellers use jogging to tame their minds. However, such respite is usually temporary and can quickly transition to excess and then become a way of avoiding uncomfortable sensations and feelings.
We all ruminate on the undigested cud of unresolved problems, whether or not this helps us to solve them. “Unnecessary suffering,” through repetitive negative thinking, is well known to practitioners of meditation, Buddhism, Taoism and other spiritual traditions. It is also the impetus for cognitive-behavioral therapies. These practices, traditions and therapies point to a common solution: defeating the tyranny of obsessive thinking before it spews its toxic emissions into the body. However, approaches that attempt to tame the restless mind may not be nearly as accessible or effective as those that help us return to our bodies in a sustaining way. The poet Budbill discovered that when he fully engaged his body in purposeful activity, his mind finally rested. The immersion in his body is what allowed him to directly encounter the nitty-gritty, moment-to-moment experience of being alive. Rather than obsessive worry or regret, he opened to the experience of appreciation and gratitude in the “shining moment in the now.”
For our distant forbearers, survival was the only game in town. This put them in a perpetually reactive mode—surviving from threat to threat, triggering one protective instinct after another. While we are under the domination of these same instincts, saddled with the reflexive reactions to perceived threat, we possess the opportunity to recognize them, stand back, observe and befriend these powerful sensations and drives, without necessarily acting on them. The conscious containment and reflection upon our wild and primal urges enlivens us and keeps us focused on actively pursuing our needs and desires. It is the basis for reflective self-awareness. Rather than automatically reacting to (or suppressing) our instincts, we can explore them mindfully, through the vehicle of sensate awareness. To be embodied (as I will use the term in referring to our contemporary experience) means that we are guided by our instincts, while simultaneously having the opportunity to be self-aware of that guidance. This self-awareness requires us to recognize and track our sensations and feelings. We unveil our instincts as they live within us, rather than being alienated from them or forcibly driven by them.
These facts of life make living in the now, free of ruminative thoughts, a formidable task. When embodied, we linger longer in the lush landscape of the present moment. Even though we live in a world where bad things can and do happen, where unseen dangers nip at our heels, we can still live in the now. When we are able to be fully present, we can thrive with more pleasure, wonder and wisdom then we could have imagined.
“Embodiment” is a personal-evolutionary solution to the tyranny of the yapping “monkey mind.” It is one that paradoxically allows instinct and reason to be held together, fused in joyful participation and flow.† Embodiment is about gaining, through the vehicle of awareness, the capacity to feel the ambient physical sensations of unfettered energy and aliveness as they pulse through our bodies. It is here that mind and body, thought and feeling, psyche and spirit, are held together, welded in an undifferentiated unity of experience. Through embodiment we gain a unique way to touch into our darkest primitive instincts and to experience them as they play into the daylight dance of consciousness; and in so doing to know ourselves as though for the first time—in a way that imparts vitality, flow, color, hue and creativity to our lives.
The poet laureate T. S. Elliot seems to have grasped the paradox of such evolving consciousness in “Little Gidding,” the fourth quartet of his epic poem Four Quartets:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Embodiment and Creativity
It is well known that Albert Einstein thought in images. His theories reflect this processing, as do his own metaphors. For example, pictures of elevators and trains moving past each other are indelibly etched in our understanding of the theory of relativity. It is much less known that he also thought with his body. He reveals, in his biography, how some of his greatest discoveries appeared to come first from his body in the form of tingling, vibrating and other enlivening physical sensations. In a process that appears to have been mysterious, even to him, his bodily sensations informed the images and insights that led him to his great discoveries.
Decades later, when Einstein’s brain was dissected and studied for medical research, the only distinguishing feature was the size and structure of his parietal lobes, the region of the brain where information from the body is integrated for orientation in space and time.‡ There is another revealing story about this great man. When asked by a reporter what he thought would be the next great breakthrough in science, Einstein pondered for a moment and then replied, “To prove that the universe is friendly.” He did not mean, I believe, that there would not ever be pain and suffering in life, but that the universe was, well … playful, wonderful and fascinating. Such was his delight in the inner universe of his body. The Tibetan lama Dr. Tsamp Ngawang taught that “the body is a mandala. If you look inside it is an endless source of revelation.”
I do not mean to give the impression that Einstein was the exemplar of a fully embodied man. Certainly, this was not the case. However, in this particular way, I believe he was. And it was this attunement that (arguably) allowed him to think outside of the box—far beyond its perimeters. Clearly, this is a mark of genius. Partaking in great intellectual discovery and engaging with the sensations o
f the body are not mutually exclusive experiences. In fact, for the human animal, this may be what “wholeness” is all about. In the philosopher Nietzsche’s words, “I am body through and through, nothing more; and the soul is just a word for something in the body.” The great American bard Ralph Waldo Emerson sums this all up: “What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.”
In a more psychological vein, Eugene Gendlin remarks that “the door into the bodily living of our situations is right in the center of our very ordinary body.” However, this “ordinary” is also the extraordinary. As the Kum Nye tradition of Tibetan Buddhism teaches, “the space outside the body though vast is finite, while the space inside of the body is infinite.” This application ignites a wonder and delight that delivers enlightenment in Tantric Buddhism.133 This is not just an “Eastern” notion. Dr. Daniel Brown, Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, adds that “focusing helps to cultivate a kind of internal bodily awareness that is so much the foundation of spiritual practice.” R. D. Laing adds that “without the inner world the outer loses its meaning, and without the outer the inner loses its substance.”
We have all had the experience, at some time in our lives, of just “knowing something in our guts.” Without it making “logical” sense, and often to the contrary of “logic,” we just “knew it was right.” And when we did not follow this gut instinct, there were often harsh consequences. We label this kind of precognition as “intuition.” I believe intuition emerges from the seamless joining of instinctual bodily reactions with thoughts, inner pictures and perceptions. How this holistic “thinking” works remains somewhat of a mystery (though speculation abounds), as is evidenced by the writings of the homeopathic physician, Dr. Rajan Sankaran: “Sensation is the connecting point between the mind and the body, the point at which physical and mental phenomena are spoken in the same language, where the boundaries between these two realms disappear and one can actually perceive what is true for the whole being.” Such is the essence of deep intuition.
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