by Mark Walsh
6. We can take action and create only through movement.
7. Powerful, beautiful and loving movement is integrated and efficient. Power, beauty and love are one way of moving.
8. Powerful and beautiful movement is free flowing, without rules – including these ones.
9. Our culture and its problems with war, the environment and social injustice are a style and stagnation of movement.
10. Our history, the present and our future moves through us; the latter can be moved.
* These also amount to a definition of embodiment.
THE BODY OF PURPOSE
– The Green Line, Nicosia, Cyprus.
I’m 25. With me are a gaggle of Arabs, Americans, Serbs, Jews and other ethnicities from warring countries around the world. I lead this unlikely group out of the once luxurious hotel, now United Nations fortress, into the last of the afternoon’s sunshine. The dusty heat of the Cypriot day is settling into a serene evening. Most of the people with me I met for the first time a few hours ago and the conversation was…a little tense:
“I’ve been taught my whole life to hate you.”
“I almost didn’t come here, and I’m still not sure that meeting you is a good idea.”
“Don’t take my picture – if my neighbours knew I was here they’d kill me.”
Everybody’s checking each other out. We have different religions, cultures and languages and oh, most of us have trained for years to be lethal martial artists, capable of taking out a room full of people barehanded.
Walking carefully behind me are the Jordanians – making nervous jokes with some Israelis, which is a good sign. With royal panache and Queen’s English, the Amman group are easy to like. Another Arab group nearby look tired but cheerful. They’re earthier than the Jordanians – big, jovial and kinda square looking. They’re tired because they had to drive for 48 hours before they could get a plane here: “We drove around the country that wouldn’t let us in!”
The film director with us and his Greek-Cypriot camera crew pan around and catch Paul Linden right at the back. Like the director, he’s small and bearded, a humble man whose right arm trembles with Parkinson’s disease, but looks like he’s on a relaxed county stroll. He’s a master of embodied training and the Parkinson’s is one of God’s sicker jokes. He wise-cracked about it when I tried to ask sensitively what it was at dinner last night, “I’m here to shake things up!” He works through the body with trauma survivors, which is most of us here.
Walking out of the Ledra Palace Hotel, the British UN soldiers smile back under their sky-blue berets, with bemused, stubbled faces, but are professional as ever. They’ve been friendly all day, scanning us for bombs, checking passports and asking me to translate, “What your bloody Yank boss is saying?” The squaddies here are younger than me mostly, and have just come back from Iraq. None of them want to say more than a few words about it. “Difficult” was the answer when I asked an officer. The teenage privates used the words “fucking” and “horrible” when I asked them, and the aged sergeants just shrugged and looked away sadly. I can tell everyone’s relieved to be here in Cyprus.
As we walk out past the sun-winking razor wire, I remember coming into the Ledra for the first time last year. I’d felt like James Bond meeting my contact and being ushered into the decaying bowels of the once luxurious UN command center. Before the ’74 war, this was the fanciest hotel on the island – now it’s home to several hundred British soldiers – their drying underwear and football flags draping its lavish but battle-scared balconies, redecorated with bullets and rocket-propelled grenades.
I’m not here with the UN though, but “Training Across Borders”, the organisation I work for. Walking beside me now, is the project’s co-founder – Donald Levine, in his seventies and an eminent professor of the University of Chicago. He’ll become a mentor and see potential in me when there’s little reason to now. He’s talking quietly with the charismatic figure of Richard Strozzi-Heckler. It was the latter’s military connections that had got us into the Ledra in the first place, I think. Don is cerebral and leads from the head, but is also an aikido sensei and gesticulates with his hands in a way which reveals his Jewish background. Richard is as composed and impressive as ever in his bearing. Philip Emminger the red-headed project manager is with them, too. Phil is a self-made millionaire, pilot and company managing-director. He’s currently a hyperactive whirlwind, counting the participants that have arrived so far. I‘m basically his gofer-tea-boy-bitch, which is fine. I get the impression I’m learning leadership the hard way, but at least from some great teachers. I have one luxury that the other more experienced team leaders don’t have though – time. I don’t know yet how many doors this event will open for me.
Now we were quite officially in the middle of nowhere. Outside the Ledra was the centre of the no man’s land separating the North from the South. Called the “Green Line” after the colour that a British officer had hastily scrawled on a map in ‘74, it was part of a UN-policed buffer zone that ran the width of the island. It had only three crossing points and this was the main one. Cyprus – legendary isle of Aphrodite – had been torn in two, and left that way for 30 years. Philip and I had seen a young couple parting on the line a few nights ago. A Greek-Turkish Romeo and Juliet tearing asunder entwined vines of energy to go their separate ways. It was heart-breakingly beautiful.
Bouncing by my side is Tesfaye – a new friend from Ethiopia – all black muscles and white teeth. Don suggested I look after him – this being his first time in Europe. We’ve been sharing a room and manically making final arrangements over the last few days. It’s like having a sidekick, except he’s taller and better looking, which isn’t the way these things should work. This Cyprus adventure is the most mind-blowing thing I’ve done, and for him it must be even stranger. Don’s a professor of Ethiopian studies amongst other things and Tesfaye is the first East African to study aikido. Tesfaye is also part of a circus troupe that teaches HIV awareness. I’ll end up living with him there for a while and having many more adventures.
All the people walking through the Green Line now practise aikido. A few are relatively new to it; many are the senior instructors in their countries. Most of the top aikido senseis in the Middle East are here – meeting for the first time on neutral ground. There are others from further afield here, too. To my left is Jose Bueno, sensei from Brazil. The aptly named “Mr. Good” in Portuguese has a polished bald head, relaxed as a Sunday morning cuddle and carries a face full of Brazilian warmth. In a couple of years, I’ll be working with him, with kids in the favela slums of Brazil, experiencing much delight and getting traumatised in new and interesting ways. Jose is calling to Jamie Zimron, an American Jewish sensei and Miles Kessler. Jamie is animated and fun. Miles – along with Richard, seems the most serene – as well as an aikido instructor chiselled from years in the tough Japanese rural dojo of Iwama. He’s also a meditation teacher with endless retreats in Burma under his blackbelt. We all embody our history, but it’s the level of our practices that we settle to when it matters most.
Right now, I’m a shaken, stirred Molotov cocktail of emotions, enclosed in a bottle of concentrated alertness. I turn around – Jose’s clicking at something – and view the whole group for the first time. I’m guiding our strange group across to the other side and it’s a buzz…actually more than that, more like a flat sense of purpose. Of bodily “rightness” under the nerves. This is where I’m most alive, this is what I’m good at, this is where I’m meant to be. Hairs on my neck tingle and I can feel my heart pulse life, purpose and joy around my body. Between bombed out houses, where cats tread over landmines imperviously; our colourful group ambles forwards. I take a moment to beam with happiness and pride at the picture, as we approach the border.
MINDSET IS ACTUALLY BODYSET
The body is the mechanism for perception, action, emotion, relationship…It’s also the most direct way to change these things. “Change your mind”, is abstract. �
��Stand or move differently”, is more concrete and therefore doable. “We move through space like we move through life”, embodiment teacher Stuart Heller says, and the extension to this is that we can change our life through how we move, making mindset actually bodyset.
WE ARE NOT MADE OF FLESH AND BONE
We are not made of flesh and bone; we are made of love and loss.
The body is not meat; it is an autobiography.
The pieces of the body are pieces of the soul –
those that have touched us and those who have hurt us,
places we have been and people we have cared for.
The body is our values and history incarnate.
It is a sacred poem and a warm bloody world of possibility.
To know the body is to know ourselves and each other.
To be intimate with the body is to have your tongue on
the pulse of life itself.
When we cut ourselves off from the body with stagnation, technology
or addiction, we cut ourselves off not just from pain, but from joy.
Without the umbilical sensing body,
we are strangers to ourselves and others,
and violence becomes an inevitability.
My friends, I beg you, do not give up your birthright so easily.
Do not go so quickly into the numb night;
move, move, against the dying of your light.
Dedicated to the people of Russia and Ukraine, and somewhat in the style of my colleague Alexandra Vilvovskaya. And with apologies to Dylan Thomas for the poetry theft.
WHAT MAKES AN EMBODIED PRACTICE?
Any activity can be embodied, from surfing to gardening to knitting. My two criteria for a practice to be truly embodied are:
1 That it’s practised with body-awareness.
2. That its aim is developing oneself.
THE ROOTS OF EMBODIMENT
We can talk about seven major influences on embodiment as a field in modern times. These fields first came together in the late 60’s and early 70’s in places such as Esalen in California.
Each of the seven fields is huge and complex, and too large for any individual to fully study in a lifetime. While not a complete map, they form a useful orienting list:
• Yoga and meditation
• Martial arts
• Dance (both conscious dance9 and partner dance)
• Theatre and improvisational comedy
• Somatic psychotherapies (includes trauma modalities, dance-movement therapy and body therapy)
• Hands-on bodywork
• Western awareness arts (somatics)10
Some may prefer to organise this list differently. If I were to add a domain, I’d be tempted to add the arts generally as an additional one. Others could be argued for, but this is just an orienting perspective, and I’m keeping things simple here. The image below also shows that arts that may be considered embodied, may or may not be. Yoga for example, is just physical exercise in some instances.
Roots of the Embodiment Field
THE SCOPE OF MODERN EMBODIED PRACTICE
Almost anything can be done as an embodied art if we define this as something done with body awareness and with a focus on developing oneself. There are however a number of established disciplines, which I’ve tried to map out below, and while say, ‘embodied blindfold surfing’ may be a thing, it’s not systematised or widespread. The loose categories given can be named in different ways, relate in complex manners, and are sometimes differently titled in different places (for example “body therapy”, “dance movement therapy”, “dance therapy” and “somatic psychology” are not easily distinguished or categorised and regional naming differences exist11).
The image below is an attempt to map the scope of embodied practices today, though much here is open to discussion and it is not exhaustive. Many working within this field may not know that it has an overall name, but it clearly needs one now as embodied arts both have much in common, and increasingly meet as the “movement movement” grows. I hope at least the image will illustrate something of the wonderful diversity of embodied arts that now exists and inspire you to look into some of them!
Scope of the Embodiment Field12
Integrative arts and their biases
There are now integrative arts13, as different fields collide for the first time in the postmodern context. The dialogue between these disciplines is really gearing-up today, and many of the old silos (practices in isolation) are disintegrating – e.g. it is not uncommon today for a yogi to have also had therapy or to have practised salsa dance.
Note that these arts come with particular perspectives, cultural influences and flavours. Some are more social, more verbal, more creative, more authoritarian, etc. Some are Eastern and some Western. There are things taken for granted in an aikido dojo that would be utterly weird in a dance studio, for example, and vice versa. In working with any embodiment teacher, it is worth asking where their training and therefore their bias lies, and what they are omitting. If they think they don’t have a bias or that they include everything in their work, run a mile!
I encourage embodiment professionals to develop real expertise in at least two arts, to provide perspective, and reduce the negative impact of “drinking the Kool Aid”. Also to gain reasonable familiarity with all seven main influences on the field, and passing knowledge of all the many sub-branches as they all bring different gifts, and will be helpful to different students. Understanding the current range and complexity available within embodiment, and helping people navigate it, is a major theme of this book.
EMBODIMENT FIELDS ORDERED BY A SCALE OF COMPLEXITY
Simple versus complex arts
I find it helpful to order the fields of embodiment training from the most simple (solo, still, non-verbal and less physically challenging) to the more complex and interactive. This is not to say the “simpler” arts are easier of course, only that the focus is narrower and the conditions deliberately less complex. The more “simple” arts (like meditation), study finer patterns and build finer skills. The challenge here is that the simple (or we could say focused) arts are most different from life, so miss out a lot. Meditation takes out much of what makes life life, for example, so there is the risk that learning is not easily transferable to daily living. Simplicity however, allows for granularity. The risk of arts involving more, is in not seeing the subtle as it’s masked by challenge and complexity.
An ecology of practice
A practice reduces the complexity and consequences of life to focus on different parts of being human. If it didn’t, it would be life and not a practice. By understanding the differences between the scope and “magnification” of different activities, you can see what you are learning and what you are not, and develop an “ecology of practice”14 where you practise several arts to cover the various bases, perhaps all at once, or perhaps over time.
Note that, as things such as other people, deliberate stress, humour, sexuality and language are added into a practice, the finesse of what one may notice and may be able to control is reduced, but the ability to apply these embodiment skills to daily, noisy life, is increased.
I advise, over a lifetime at least, that people work at different points along this scale of complexity, as different skills will be built.15 At one time, one may also want to have some “range” for maximum learning. One of these practices does not replace others, and while for most of us it’s tough to do all of them at once, it’s possible to cover different points on the scale (for example by doing meditation, yoga and aikido) and over a lifetime to explore all of them.
A potential scale of the focus/complexity/“granularity” of different embodied practices could be*:
*You could argue the position of some of these fields and of course it depends on the style of yoga or whatever, and the teacher … but the point is to understand that a scale exists, with finesse at one end and completeness at the other.
Note: a larger colour
version of this image may be found at www.theembodimentbook.com
ALL ONE BODY
This year, I’ve been taking seriously a rather wild understanding: that the individual body contains everything and all of us. Yes: Everything, and all of us.
This is actually a pretty traditional, mystical/tantric notion: microcosm of the macrocosm; as above, so below; body of Christ, etc. However, it’s still a pretty huge, well…infinite…idea. No…somatic exploration, not idea. Meditation teacher Reggie Ray pushed me over the edge with this one, but it’s been nagging in my subconscious for a while.
As an embodiment teacher, the truth that the body is much more than is commonly thought, is not new to me, but the full extent of this is…well…waaayy out there. Also, I rarely speak of the deeper aspects of my work for fear of misunderstandings and creating barriers for those new to it. But the time is ripe.
It’s apparent to me that I have “picked up” parts of the cultures that I’ve spent time in. I’m sometimes mistaken for Slavic and can boogie a little Brazilian. I have my “taking up space” American side. In Israel, there are people who don’t believe that I’m not Jewish, because of how much of the culture there I can now embody.
At first, I thought this was just down to vicarious trauma and general somatic cultural influence. However, having done the trauma work and travelled so much, my sense now is that it’s more that I’m accessing the “group bodies” of those places. I’ve danced, fought and fucked more widely than most, and despite somehow avoiding diseases that perhaps should have killed me years ago, I am surely “infected”. After a while, it’s all one body, and all in my body.
I’ve long held the somewhat disturbing view that we essentially live in one another. My old aikido teacher, William Smith Sensei, once said: “We receive each other. We become part of each other when we train together. I in you and you in me.” He was dying of cancer at the time, energised by a practice with far healthier, younger men. He was not a man prone to hyperbole or esoterica.