by Mark Walsh
How many of these are you skilled in?
Thanks to Rafe Kelley and Ido Portal for the idea for this list.
HOW I KNOW IF I’M CUT OFF FROM MY BODY
Even as an embodiment professional with a life-long practice, I find myself losing touch with my body regularly. It’s easy to judge oneself for this, but this doesn’t help, and it’s hardly surprising, really, given the world that we live in – so we should all probably cut ourselves some slack.
Losing touch with oneself is state disembodiment and the quicker we can notice this and come back, the better. “The power is in the recovery”, as embodiment teacher Wendy Palmer says. I find it helpful to note certain red flags that indicate it’s time to log off and get my yoga mat out, or just slow down and feel for a moment. Usually the journey is from noticing I’m not noticing, to noticing discomfort and, eventually, noticing the relief in coming home.
SO, WHAT ARE THESE RED FLAGS?
Here are some:
• I notice that I’m not noticing my body (but this is tricky: how do you feel not feeling?)
• My posture is not balanced
• I’m brutalising myself with overwork, treating myself like an industrial machine
• My breathing is tight and irregular
• My body aches from tension (especially back, shoulders and belly) or is exhausted. This can feel like coming back to a resentful angry child who has been left alone too long
• I’m rushing. It is possible to be embodied fast (as in martial arts) but rushing skips feeling
• I have a hot “electric” feeling in my head and face
• I stop listening
• I’m eating low quality food, especially when not hungry, or engaging in other addictive behaviours to self-regulate
• I’m hurting myself in subtle or less subtle ways in order to feel
• I have numbness to strong stimuli, like loud music, strong tastes, etc
• There’s a subtle, overall feeling of contraction and limitation in the whole body, like being in a cage, a loss of natural expansiveness
• I’m ungrateful
• I’m treating others as sex or success objects – as means to an end3
THE BODY OF HATE
– Cambridge, UK
I’m 18. I storm out of the pub into a stormy night. Rain hisses like vipers on my flaming skin. I’m napalm. I’m rage incarnate. I’m hurt and I want to hurt. I could gouge out The Buddha’s eyes. I’m not a violent man.
Everything is clenched; my eyes are daggers looking to taste blood. My mind is entangled, trying to process what I’ve just been accused of. I focus on the anger to block it out. I’m dragon’s breath; I’m Satan’s claws.
Around me are the sounds of a Friday night in a gentrified student town. I don’t hear them. I know he’s followed behind as I demanded, when I turned over the table inside like Jesus’ sick brother. He‘s angry too. She also followed and is weeping. Not the first time I’ve made the person I care most about cry. Her long dark hair is a mess, in the rain and tears…but she’s still my definition of beauty. If I was thinking now, I’d ask her to forgive me and walk away. I’m not a violent man.
She pleads as her new boyfriend and I square up. We’re not violent men.
She runs off into the night, body collapsing and twisting. Everyone has a limit. When she left me for him – a friend – I wasn’t at my limit yet. I understood, in my head at least, that it sometimes happens and that you can’t control people’s hearts. Tonight though, I’ve been pushed through that wall. Months of pain have just found an outlet. First-hate cuts deep. The alcohol and amphetamines don’t help, but even without them I’d still be mindless, soulless, and far from my centre.
The “fight”, if you can call it that, is over in a few seconds. It was a pathetic scuffle really. Neither of us knows how to fight yet; we’re not violent men.
Mutual friends pulled us off each other. The hardest punch of the night was landed on the back of my head by someone who claimed to know us, but was probably just drunk and wanted trouble. I went home, rocking and crying in the back of a friend’s car. My balls were up near my throat and I won’t sleep for days. I’m not a violent man.
The next day was my best friend James’ birthday and he was having a party as eighteen-year-olds are inclined to. My own was a few days ago – I am now officially a man…violent or otherwise. I celebrated the arrival of adulthood – what a joke – with the handful of people who stubbornly care for me, despite how I’ve been behaving lately. I got unconsciously drunk, as I did every night. A photo from then shows me skinny, shaven headed with a mad self-destructive look in my eye, with friends looking on not knowing how to help. It had been a bad summer. When not working in the Victorian conditions of an industrial corporate farm, I argued furiously with my parents, as they did with each other. Simply, I wasn’t happy. I missed her like the sky misses the wind, and needed to get the hell out of inbred-Dodge. Life in rural East Anglia, and with my disintegrating family, was already over. I needed to escape, I sought something…more…deeper…
Most of the people I’d met at sixth-form college found it hard to be around me now. I hurt and the only way I knew how to express it was anger. On my eighteenth, I didn’t want to remember the year before. We try and forget bad times, but sometimes it’s also painful to remember good ones – paradise thrown away.
Just months before – my seventeenth birthday – had been the best day of my life so far. She and I had had a beer with James, then we’d gone across the road to mine, watched TV till my parents went to sleep, then made love clumsily but wonderfully. Nothing special, everything special.
After that, things had gone wrong. We were kids and didn’t know how to stay together. I wasn’t ready to be happy. I didn’t know the value of what I had, above all, and a million other excuses and after-the-event rationalisations.
Now I was back at James’. I’d screamed at her new man the night before that I would finish things the next day, as I knew he’d be there at the party.
I talked to my dad before coming over: “I might have to fight this evening, dad.”
“Are you in some kind of trouble?”
“No.” I lied. “It’s just a point of principle.”
“Well…just keep going forward.”
Keep going forward…I wanted to tell him all about it. I wanted him to hold me and understand, to let my body give up, but we’d never had that kind of relationship. We didn’t even know a language to have the conversation we needed to have. A few years later, the roles will be reversed. He will be hurting from losing my mum and we still won’t know the language. It is so bloody stupid.
That evening he showed up and I showed up. Neither of us started trouble; we’d calmed down. We’re not violent men.
Late at night, I was walking across the road back to mine when I saw them arm in arm. They stopped for a moment in the moonlight, perhaps concerned as to what the staggering drunk wretch under the streetlamp would do. I realised through the haze that there was nothing good I could do, and I’d done enough wrong to these friends already. I held my bottle in the air to salute them, and stumbled to bed. He had the most wonderful girl in the world and I had a bottle of cheap alcohol.
That night I didn’t sleep. I‘d seen a side of myself that I couldn’t bear to look at. I’d also found despair, real black despair, for the first time in my life. I knew I wouldn’t be getting back together with her – ever. Loss has to be met with acceptance for better and for worse. I’d never felt this bad before. Blackness isn’t a colour – it’s a nothing you reach at 4am when you really don’t want to live.
I cried till the sun came up. The dawn looks different through tears, especially when you’ve been up all night and you don’t want to see it.
I heard on the radio that Princess Diana had been killed in Paris that night. I went back to James’ house, as people were waking up.
I told people the big important news about the person they’d
never met. I can only imagine how I looked, they must have thought I really liked ole lady Di. James knew the real reason I was upset and hugged me while I sobbed and cursed the world. Thanks James, I love you.
After that I was looking for wholeness. It took me some years to clean up, but I already realised addiction wasn’t the solution. For a long time, I thought it was about splitting up with a girl, but it was really about disconnection more broadly. Our lack of union had become unbearable. I became a seeker. First love and first loss had opened a door.
ANTI-SOCIAL DISEMBODIMENT
We live in a badly self-regulated, disconnected time. Basically, we’re lonely toddlers in Tantrum Land. Yes, me included on many days.
People buy crap that they don’t need, and do shit that hurts to fill a void that can only be filled by meaning and community. We are cut off from ourselves, others and the planet; as a result, we hurt all three.
At a conference I attended recently, the speakers almost universally agreed on this, despite coming from very different backgrounds, professionally and culturally. I noticed, however, that their proposed solutions were more or less individually focused. Is the answer to this endemic disease of disconnection an individual one? An expensive therapy most can’t afford, a technique you practise on your own, perhaps some new technology? Or is it something more social, more systemic and more fundamental?
What people are waking up to is that the disease we have isn’t an accident; it’s a set of conditions that maintain the status quo. We are not just feeling stressed; we’re stressed in the sense of pressure being applied to us. Stress is a verb too. We don’t just need yoga and meditation; we need social change. Applying band-aids, while someone continues to stick knives in us, is unhelpful. Yeah, we stick the knives in ourselves often, but make no mistake who benefits from the blood.
THE BODY OF PAIN
– A small town in the middle of nowhere, East Anglia, UK
I’m 6. My dad has come home drunk again. I run upstairs in our small house to avoid trouble. I cover my ears to stop hearing the shouting from below. I bury my head under my pillow and try not to cry. I clamp down my body and try not to feel. I practise this. Again. And again. I am not home.
A VICIOUS CIRCLE
Many of the horrors of the modern world are a result of numbing and can also be coped with through numbing. We numb to pain, but in doing so numb to pleasure too, and also to our internal ethical compass. We forget ourselves to forget the world, and in doing so turn off that which would drive us to make it better.
This disastrous coping strategy can be called disembodiment –
a forgetting of our most fundamental nature. Many of the ways things are set up – everything from ugly cities to ugly inequality – would be intolerable if people were inhabiting themselves more fully. Not feeling helps people cope with the major and minor atrocities of life…and enables them to commit them. And so it goes on.
Only the courage to gently take off the armour – by daring to sense, to “lick honey off the razor blade” – can break this cycle. Embodiment as a growing field is both profoundly countercultural – a stand against the current unfeeling madness – and an already activated swing back to sensate sanity.
Courageous ones, willing to be present: I salute you and would like to call you friends.
Welcome. Home.
SOME SCARY THOUGHTS
• Many of the features of modern life are deeply numbing
• The education of our leaders, teachers and doctors is one of systematic dissociation
• A disembodied world is a psychopathic one
SOME WAYS THE BODY IS POLITICAL
• By controlling how people move, you control how they think. This can be done by telling children to sit still in school, through military poses, subtle social shaming, fashionable restrictive clothes, etc.
• Shaping bodies shapes culture. The bodies and poses presented to us are not neutral, but serve a certain way of being.
• The postures commonly promoted in the media encourage aggression in men and weakness in women (though you’ll also find the reverse of this fashionably), and both are off balance. Limiting gender roles are enforced when we mimic these fashions.
• Technology forces us to bow our heads into postures of submission and depression; staring at screens makes our eyes hatefully tense.
• Bodily intuition and empathy undermine divisive ideologies (from both ends of the political spectrum) and the isolation needed for social control.
• If someone can feel their own values, they won’t merely live someone else’s; advertising and propaganda are most effective on the numb.
• We have had our ability to stand up for ourselves or to take up space (which are both very literal examples of embodied power) stolen.
There are many more. The term “body politics” is no accident.
DISEMBODIED SELF-ABUSE
Things that can be subtle forms of disembodied self-abuse:
• Eating and exercise habits (including seemingly healthy ones), when taken to extremes
• Overwork and busyness
• Choice of friends and intimate partners
• Not loving one’s own country or culture (which are actually part of you)
• Staying poor (long-term of when given opportunities for improvement)
Self-love is a lot more than taking bubble baths.
THE BODY OF HOPE
– Leeds University Sport Centre, UK.
I’m 18. It’s my first week at University. I’ve been drunk all this week of course, hiding my addiction in the celebrations. I’ve also been pleased to discover that I’ve coincidentally been roomed with other drug dealers. They’re from Liverpool and there are all kinds of good trades and mutual education happening. Business is booming. Under the party face, however, I’m just as suicidal as I’ve been since thirteen years of age. I’m slim from snorting speed, my head is shaved and my eyes are hollow.
Realising the potential hazards of my employment in the big city, I decided to check out a martial arts class. I’ve been searching for something for years and, on some level, I realise that learning to fight could be both practical and transcendent. I have already learnt that violence is within us all, and that no matter what a nice hippie you think you are, we all have a breaking point. “Follow your bliss” is BS, follow your pain.
I walk into the sports centre – bright lights and a mundane sterile decor – no Asian exoticism here, but what I see transfixes me. Men throwing each other around with grace and ease. Black and white uniforms flowing like spinning yin-yangs. I see the discipline I so badly need. There’s a sense of “rightness” in my whole body. Of coming home. Gravity feels like it’s holding me, not dragging me down. I see the father figures that I won’t admit to desperately wanting. I see initiation and possibility. I see a kind of hope that there’s more in my body than pain, and that love and power can come together. Aikido is an odd mix of harmony and force. It looks like dancing but there’s utility. There’s a seriousness to it, it’s not casual or ironic. It is…beautiful…a word I rarely dare think since Sally.
I take my shoes off and step awkwardly onto the mat, and a new world begins. For the next three years I barely miss a class. I am not a natural, but I persist. I cling to aikido like a drowning man to a raft, and it becomes my life. I do not know the word “embodiment” yet, but I start to embody something different, something that can’t be found in books or advice.
NOT STOPPING
Not Stopping
I do not notice
The raging river that I’m caught in
I perpetuate my own madness, and the cruelties of my culture
My body waits patiently, an ally ready to help
But I run on.
The daily tragedy of how I ignore her
And seek solace in cruel oblivion
Is lost on me.
MOVEMENT-PHOBIC CULTURE
We live in a movement-phobic society. Culturally,
we’re shackled and straight-jacketed. Most people spend most of the day sitting still, and any kind of free movement outside of prescribed places is taboo. The idea of special spaces, like gyms, being reserved for us to move in, is actually quite bizarre.
You don’t think there’s a movement taboo? Try practising yoga at an airport, doing pull-ups on a train, or start dancing in the street. I’ve been mocked, threatened, questioned by police and even told I should be forcibly taken to a mental institution (note “mental”) – just for moving my own body in simple ways. Just for moving my own body. Think about that.
The other side of this is that movement is strangely attractive. Dogs run up to you, tails wagging. Kids come and play (they haven’t yet been limited by this social conditioning). People stop and stare. Some take photos or want to join in.
Remember too, that movement and feeling are closely connected, so this is all about being fully alive! Many people deeply long for an embodied life. Some of these people resent anyone who appears to be living one. As you become more embodied, expect pushback, expect praise and treat these two imposters the same. Know that the cage door is actually open.
If you‘re reading this I’m guessing that you’re longing to come home, and I welcome you.
A GREY WORLD
Alone
Thoughts can justify anything
I stare out of the head-cage
At others.
The mind cuts, isolates and divides
I confuse it with myself.
Believing everything that I think
Others become objects, like me.
I use them.
I try and fill the void but am always hungry
The world is just a resource
I have forgotten what I love
And I have forgotten myself.
THE FIRST PLACE TERRORISTS WIN IS IN THE BODY (WRITTEN AFTER YET ANOTHER ATTACK)
Whatever the form, the purpose of terrorism is to produce a fight-flight state that perpetuates violence. Scared people hurt people, and hurt people hurt yet more people. This is the cycle: violence – hindbrain dominance – more violence.