Thinking through the Body: Walking, for example.
Everybody knows what a body is. But what is embodiment? Doesn’t it mean just ‘having a body’?
Let’s dive deeper to get some perspective. What if we see the human body as the sum total of our evolutionary learning? The so-called ‘wisdom of the body’ is in accumulated knowledge: the elaborated and concentrated learning of more than two million years of human life on earth. It is creative adaptation time after time, terrain after terrain. Like animals, birds, insects and fish, we humans are vivid examples of intelligence-in-action, embodiment-as-functional-form.
Our human bodies are a microcosm of the interconnectedness of all life forms. This includes organismic regulation via bacteria, hormones, neurotransmitters. It incorporates, for example, the co-ordination of lung, mouth, breath, oxygen, environment. This microcosm is shaped by the micro-movements of human relating – a smile, a sigh, the raising of an eyebrow - which in turn occur within the crucible of our cultural embeddedness. And all these aspects are interwoven. Thus, our bodies are always in flux, always becoming.
And yet they are also always remembering. The body remembers through repetition and patterning that is complex and multi-layered. We have learned not just to walk, but a particular way of walking that has involved many surfaces, kinds of footwear, role models, injuries, motivations and explorations. Walking is a technically challenging orchestration of weight, shape, rhythm, energy and intention. Babies typically follow a sequence of reflexes which involve transitions from lying down, to crawling, standing and then the first wobbly steps. The emotional environment is as critical as the physical one. Are kind hands supporting or is there a desperate unaided lurch into autonomy? How we walk carries the subtle imprint of repeated relational experiences.
Great strides have been made in understanding embodiment as a process involving all the bodies systems and how they interact with each other and with the world. Even an action as basic as walking is incredibly complex: its precursor is the lateral movement of fish as it propels itself through water. You can still see that side-to-side motion in the sway of the hips that is one element of walking. Yet to go into deep detail of what enables and constitutes walking – robot engineers are struggling mightily with it - would still not convey the notion of ‘embodiment’ as a qualitative experience of sensing and doing and feeling and knowing.
Imagine you are walking down a street. Is it busy or empty? Are you walking in a familiar or novel environment, alone or with others? How does this influence your movement? What is your attention drawn to? Is it outward, perhaps taking in new smells and colours, a particular architecture, a conglomeration of voices? Or perhaps you are more preoccupied with your thoughts and feelings, mulling over a problem, regretting a sharp exchange, or anticipating with excitement the person you are going to see. In this moment, your embodiment is shaped by a plethora of contextual, structural, biochemical, historical and emotional factors. And perhaps none of this is consciously in your awareness. But if you choose to notice your sensory experience, your state of mind or reflect on what you are feeling, you are closer to noticing the process of embodiment, as opposed to the mere fact of it.
Embodiment is sometimes equated with physicality – the satisfaction of a good run, an invigorating swim, chopping logs, dancing till dawn – but it is more than that. In psychotherapy it’s used to describe the capacity to feel aliveness emotionally and experientially. That may mean allowing the sensations of excitement, or love, or anger to flood your body. Or it may be an awareness of being – tasting the tranquillity of a summer’s day in the garden; or doing – having a sense of being on an adventure or learning a new skill; or relating – getting to know somebody new and feeling shy-hopeful-tentativeness. It is the sense of inhabiting our bodies in a meaningful way: embodiment as lived-and-felt experience.
Elena is dealing with financial, health and work crises on the anniversary of her father’s death. She dreams of floods engulfing the family car, and of being suffocated in the dentist’s chair. I can see she is barely breathing, her chest tight and her face strained. I encourage her to breathe. “I have been avoiding thinking about the anniversary. I can’t cry. I’m just very worried,” she says. As we talk, I use the word ‘hard’ several times, and, on a low steady note that matches the gravity of her situation, ‘unbearable’.
After a pause Elena says she has been behaving strangely – she went for a walk in high winds up onto a cliff top and sat there on a bench in the unrelenting gale. Then she walked to the other side of the bay and again up and into the buffeting wind. I am struck by the unconscious intelligence in her choice to go out in the squall in an uphill walk that demands so much effort. “Perhaps you needed to put yourself up against the elements. Going out into turbulent weather is a way of processing the turmoil you feel…”, I suggest. She is looking at me now with the stirrings of curiosity in her eyes. I continue, “Climbing. Feeling the impact of the wind pushing you. Surviving it, facing it, just as you are facing very difficult issues”.
The crises she is dealing with involve institutional forces that are bigger than her, and they cannot be solved by thinking alone. Feelings of anger, fear, despair and sorrow have become log-jammed within her. They create stress, tightening her body. Walking hard against the wind as it stings her face means breathing deeply, means awakening the energy in her muscles. I ask more about what it felt like being on the cliff top. In a gesture that combines shaking her head, pushing her hands away and breathing out with intensity, she conveys her struggle. “I think sitting up there with the wind howling is you grieving,” I murmur. Her tears come, and I repeat gently, “this is you facing things.”
Context is always important. Some people choose cliff tops when they are feeling suicidal.
Elena thought it was unwise to go out in the winds when she was feeling ill. I knew her as a woman who swam and walked a lot, in order to allow thoughts and feelings to work their way through her. I knew this push in her, this courage to persist. In my witnessing of her I was highlighting the embodiment of an active process, conveying my sense she was already summoning ways to move-feel-think her way through this.
Mourning is a process that has evolved in human culture over centuries: in rituals, in stoicism, in tears, and in conversations with the dead that involve rage and protest and craziness. Battling misfortune and injustice is also a long-honed skill. We come equipped – and we develop ways - to tackle difficulties with actions, gestures and attitudes that contain cultural and emotional densities. Sometimes these need unpicking and re-working.
Embodiment is more than physical: it incorporates the soil and climate that nourishes (or poisons), our lifestyle and its technologies, our relational history, acquired identities, defences, capacities and even what might be called pathologies. Despite the habitual Western assumption that mind and body are separate, all the sciences (even robotics) are moving towards consensus on this: we need a body to think with.