Embodied Philosophy & Spirituality
There’s something a bit intimidating about words like philosophy or spirituality. They evoke the image of deep thinkers using fancy words. So, I like to bring the discussion down to earth and look at it from an embodied perspective.
Embodied
“Embodied” means related to the body and has practical applications. All of this is inseparable from life, so we are not talking about stuff in a musty old library.
The opposite of “embodied” is “disembodied,” which usually means dead. If the only source of wisdom is the disembodied sentences in a book, then this is dead wisdom. I am looking for wisdom in the flow of life, not in a mausoleum.
Life is flowing, and it happens moment by moment. The idea that you can escape life to write eternal truths is a fantasy.
Moment by moment
Embodied philosophy and embodied spirituality are not abstractions. They are the story of my life as it manifests today in my body, my thoughts and feelings, and everything I do.
Any given moment has the potential to reorient my life. Every moment involves some action (including deliberate inaction) and some risk. I am the result of all the choices I have made so far.
Whether consciously or not, each choice I make can impact the rest of my life. I stand outside my house, deciding whether to go to the right or the left. From then on, my path is impacted by that.
An emerging quality
There is an emerging quality to embodied philosophy. It’s not something separate from life or something we create once and for all. It’s something that progressively emerges when we take the time to allow it to come up to the surface.
Being in touch with this something does not mean thinking up abstract principles. It means getting a felt sense of the implicit principles that guide my life, whether I know them or not.
So, I am not talking about abstract philosophical concepts; it’s more like self-discovery. That is, discovering who I am and becoming more aware of the largely implicit assumptions guiding my life. Why do I do what I do? How do I do what I do?
A different sense of self
Such a process cannot happen without a connection to the self. That is curiosity and intentionality about getting in touch with how and why I do what I do. I feel deep satisfaction when I experience a connection between my sense of self and what I do.
All of this is happening within the context of life as interaction. We are constantly responding to life’s situations.
This is not true only for human beings, and it’s not just a function of having a big brain. Of course, we use our brains to make logical decisions. But responding (or reacting) to situations is something that all life forms do.
The sunflower does not have a mind in the traditional sense. But it is very adept at responding to the sun’s position. We have a very sophisticated version of the sunflower mind. In addition to organic, bottom-up processes, our repertoire includes responding to situations with emotion or logic. But we essentially do the same thing as the sunflower: we respond to life.
Separateness
In this context, I need to revisit the phrase I used earlier: the discovery of the self. It is potentially misleading if it implies that I am discovering something that has a separate existence. I understand who I am as a person, but it’s always self in interaction. I am observing the various ways I respond to situations.
The notion of observing implies a certain degree of safety. In life-or-death circumstances, we do not have the luxury to observe. The more drastic the situation is, the more our nervous system shifts into survival mode, fight-or-flight. There is an all-or-nothing sense: survival is at stake.
When the situation is safe enough to allow the mindful part of the nervous system to engage, we can observe. We can see things we can’t see when we feel a sense of urgency about survival.
The more extreme the fear, the more intense the perception of danger. And, of course, this heightens the fear.
In relative safety, there is much less of a sense of urgency. We have the time and space to observe our knee-jerk impulses without having to act on them immediately. Even when the pause lasts only briefly, there is more of a sense of contemplation than madly scrambling for a reaction.
Narrow vs. spacious
However briefly, the experience of slowing down and being able to contemplate the situation is very different from the narrowness of having to respond immediately to clear and present danger. There is more of a sense of spaciousness.
The experience of fear is a narrowing of our field: we feel small and isolated against a threat that looms large. In contrast, when we are in relative safety, we feel part of something larger. We experience the interaction as a dance where we are not passive victims. We can observe how the dance dances us and how our moves change the dance.
If we equate the experience of self with the narrow experience of being in danger, then it might feel like there is no sense of self when observing the dance. Of course, there is a sense of self. But it is not an isolated, threatened self. The experience of how I dance in the dance of interaction is the experience of self.
A spiritual perspective
One could call this idea a spiritual perspective. It has nothing to do with traditional spirituality and the belief in spirits interceding for you. It is spiritual in the sense of experiencing being part of something larger.
There’s something very freeing about this perspective. It is not a narrow focus, as in: “I am all alone against this dire threat, and I have to develop a way to fight it.” Instead, it’s a sense that “I am in a dance.”
In the interaction, a lot is happening below my consciousness. I observe my responses to the dance, noticing what happens to the dance and what happens inside. I am not in survival mode, so I don’t have to figure it out urgently. There is more room to follow my organic impulses, just like the sunflower.
There is something very freeing in feeling the continuity between us human beings and other life forms, including the sunflower. This is the process of life. I have more options than the sunflower, but there is continuity: life is interaction.
Another way to say it is that it is an illusion to seek safety by avoiding interaction. Interaction is not a scary moment; it is the very essence of life.
Being alive means being part of the largely unpredictable dance of interaction. We cannot observe the dance as if we were outside of it; we can only know ourselves as we are in the midst of it.
What embodied philosophy feels like
To me, embodied philosophy refers to our ability to experience the interaction process, which allows us to tweak it.
Embodied philosophy involves emotions. There is curiosity about the situations that life presents to us and how we respond to them. There’s a hopefulness about the possibility of developing better responses. There is a sense of engagement and connectedness with the dance as something larger than the scared, isolated self.
We can affect the dance as we dance it. This sense of agency comes with humility; it is not the omnipotent fantasy of imposing our will that comes with the experience of fear. Living in interaction means there is so much we cannot control, including ourselves.
With this humility comes a deep appreciation for the process of life as a dance.
