Tag Archives: embodied knowing

Spiralling back to ‘Sacred Ecology’

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I gave my presentation on ‘Sacred Ecology’ at the very first international conference on Pagan Studies in September 1994. Over thirty years later, I found myself quoting from it at an interdisciplinary discussion on ecosophy organised by Interstices: Center for Transversal Thinking. Ecosophy is a term coined by Arne Naess, and further developed by Félix Guattari, to describe an environmental philosophy of ecological harmony.

Environmental philosophy has been around for half a century and I created a website called The Green Fuse to try to make sense of it all. I was rather unkind about environmental philosophy in ‘Sacred Ecology’, claiming that it’s fixed in a philosophical tradition that’s at root of the ecological catastrophe. Is that fair?

Pile of books about environmental philosophy.

As I prepared my talk for Interstices, I began to reevaluate Naess’ Deep Ecology. I found clear parallels between his concept of ecological ‘Self-realization’ with my experiential iceberg model. For Naess, self-realization involves a “deepening of the self” that enables us to “see ourself in others” (Naess, 1988). He contrasts this wider self with with the egocentric “ ‘narrow’ self” (ibid.). I was delighted to see parallels between Naess’ ‘narrow’ and ‘wider’ self with my ‘shallow and ‘deeper’ self. In both cases the deeper, wider self is “conscious of our intimate relation to something bigger than our own ego” (ibid.). Had I been too dismissive of Deep Ecology all those years ago?

The whole point of the Interstices gathering was to explore across disciplines. Exploration typically involves challenge and discovery; I had plenty of both! Several participants provided an Indigenous perspective and it became clear to me how very Eurocentric Naess’ work is. His understanding of ‘nature’ goes back to the Ancient Greeks at least, but it isn’t self evident. Like many other Indigenous peoples, the Inuit don’t even have a word for ‘nature’. Furthermore, Naess’ core principle that we will care for ‘nature’ if we widen our sense of self seems strangely individualistic: The “protection of free nature is felt and conceived of as protection of our very selves” (ibid. My emphasis).

Comparing Naess’ Deep Ecology with Indigenous animist principles will make my point clearer. Animism recognizes that human primates are part of a wider community of beings. It isn’t about identifying with the other than human, but acknowledging relationships. Relationships emerge between beings and entail gratitude and reciprocity. As Robin Wall Kimmerer notes, many Native peoples have something fundamental in common: “we are rooted in cultures of gratitude” (2020).

Animist thinking offers a profound challenge to Naess’ Deep Ecology and Western environmental philosophy in general: I’ve concluded that these philosophies are, after all, tied into the roots of our catastrophe. Where does this leave my experiential iceberg model? I’ve identified clear parallels with Naess, so is it also tainted? The experiential iceberg is a powerful model of Western consciousness, so perhaps it’s no surprise that it reflects Naess’s work. However, it’s very flexible and can help us understand animism.

All of my thinking is influenced by the very Western ideologies I critique, but I believe that the kind of embodied knowing I extolled in ‘Sacred Ecology’ offers a radically different perspective. Therein lies hope.

‘Inner Healing Intelligence’; an embodied therapeutic process

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Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy is already an accepted approach in some parts of the world, and several influential treatment protocols suggest that its healing power is rooted in an ‘Inner Healing Intelligence’ (IHI). The idea of an Inner Healing Intelligence is fundamental to the MAPS protocol for MDMA-Assisted psychotherapy, and the principle is echoed in the draft rules on how to prepare clients for a facilitated psilocybin experience issued by the Colorado Office of Natural Medicine. The rules state that preparation should include a discussion of “the concept of trusting inner guidance”, which may include references to Inner Healing Intelligence, Wise Mind, Soul, etc.

Although the idea of some kind of inner healer is widespread in psychedelic circles – and quite common in psychotherapy – there’s no agreement on what it actually means. Nese Devenot frequently rails against the whole concept of an ‘Inner Healer’, and in a recent article, Jules Evans and Sam Woolfe identify numerous problems with the notion.

Many perceived problems with the idea of an ‘Inner Healing Intelligence’ emerge from the name, as describing something as ‘intelligence’ sets the stage for confusion. It would be far better to talk about a therapeutic process. My PhD thesis identified several processes that helped environmental activists deepen their connection with the more-than-human world and supported their wellbeing (2008). I subsequently realised that the same processes are used in therapy. These processes, which I now call the Embodied Pathways of Connection, are therapeutic because they all enable greater access to our embodied knowing.

Eugene Gendlin was a philosopher and psychotherapist who researched Rogers’s non-directive approach extensively. Gendlin has much to offer to the conversation about IHI, and his somatic experiential model points to that process. Gendlin writes that “your body knows much that you don’t know” (Gendlin, 1981). Those embedded in the Western cultural tradition often baulk at the idea that the body might ‘know’ something. The absurd Cartesian split of mind and body is surprisingly resilient, and Western philosophy is grounded in what Grosz describes as a ‘profound somatophobia’ (Grosz, 1994). However, evidence of the importance of embodied ways of knowing can be found in a diverse range of disciplines, including anthropology, business studies, cognitive neuroscience and religious studies (Harris, 2024).

Psychedelics can facilitate the kind of embodied experiential knowing that I’m talking about. Mat, one of the participants in the first Imperial psilocybin trial, explains:


“Talking therapy helps you believe something to be true. Psilocybin helps you know it to be true. And I think that’s why I felt, in my case, psilocybin worked well for me, because it showed me so much that I now know to be true.”

(Eastall, 2021).

Recent discussions support the idea of IHI as a process that facilitates embodied knowing. In their recent paper on IHI, Peill J, Marguilho M, Erritzoe D, et al. conclude that it can be partly understood as a process “where ordinarily occluded, suppressed or compressed information arises into conscious awareness” (2024).

Jules Evans and Sam Woolfe (2004) invited several therapists to comment on IHI. Dr Inna Zelikman echoes Mat’s experience, stating that psychedelics give “people access to their unconscious material”. Dr Ingmar Gorman, commented that IHI is sometimes called “intuition” or “inner wisdom”. He concluded that we should understand it as “a psychotherapeutic process”. Dr Max Wolff believes we can make sense of IHI within “a coherent scientific model of psychological change” and relates it to the actualising tendency which underpins the Rogerian approach noted above.

I propose that ‘Inner’ more accurately means ’embodied’, ‘healing’ is more precisely rendered as ‘therapeutic’, and the word ‘intelligence’ actually refers to a process. While referring to ‘Inner Healing Intelligence’ may prove to be useful in our conversations with those being treated using Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy, calling it an ’embodied therapeutic process’ is more accurate and facilitates scientific validation.

The Power of Ritual

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How did your holiday celebrations go? Whether you marked Hanukkah, Yule, Guru Gobind Singh’s Birthday, Christmas or something else, ritual played a key role. Even those who count themselves secular have their rituals around this time. It could be decorating the Christmas tree, baking a special cake or lighting a candle. 

Rituals include a wide range of practices from the everyday to the esoteric. They’re a fundamental part of human culture and one of the embodied pathways of connection. But how do rituals work? More importantly, why do they sometimes fail? Most of us have endured an ’empty ritual’, an old tradition that’s lost its power. A graduation, wedding or funeral marks a transition, and such rituals function as social markers however the participants experience them. But the real work of a ritual lies in its impact on us. Did the wedding serve to change the new couples’ perception of themselves? Did the funeral contribute to the process of grieving? Such changes happen below the level of conscious experience, changing the what or how of our embodied knowing.

This is the aspect of ritual that inspired me to study embodied knowing. Through my ritual experience, I came to “a deep knowing of the sacredness of the Earth that is more than just an intellectual awareness of the facts & figures about species decimation & habitat loss” (Harris, 1995). By allowing us to think “through and with the body” (Raposa, 2004: 115), rituals can provide access to what I call the ‘deep body’, a level of awareness where embodied thoughts and thinking function.

We create new rituals all the time, and if we do that with thought and clear intentions, they can be transformative. The transformative power of ritual is part of the inspiration behind a project I’ve just launched. 

The Element Festivals logo. Graphic representation of Air, Water, Fire and Earth.

The Element Festivals

Many people use the classical Greek Elements of Air, Water, Fire and Earth in their spiritual or psychological practice, and our lives depend on them. The Element Festivals provide an opportunity to celebrate these archetypal forces. Each Element has one day a year dedicated to it, a time of honouring and celebrating its power and our relationship with it. Individuals or groups will mark each Festival with rituals, creating artwork, having a party or simply enjoying that particular Element. I’m especially encouraging people to bring an environmental dimension to their celebrations, but even if participants choose not to explicitly do something to help the planet, the ritual of celebration will help deepen their connection to nature.

Embodied Animism

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Last year I gave a presentation on ‘Embodied Imagination and New Animism’ at a seminar organised by The Alain Daniélou Foundation. I was inspired by this topic and took the opportunity to develop my presentation into an article for Transcultural Dialogues, the journal of the Foundation. I had more space to develop my ideas and my article – Embodied Knowing, Imagination and New Animism – took my thoughts in a new direction. I begin with a critique of the disenchanted world of Modernity, the dominant worldview of the Global North. Such critiques are common, especially as we face the growing climate emergency, for this is the worldview which has ushered in the Anthropocene Epoch.

Some of those seeking an alternative turned to animism for inspiration. David Abram is a good example. David spoke at the same seminar I attended, so while I drew from his work for inspiration, I needed to take a fresh perspective on animism. My PhD research into embodied knowing (2008) has proved to be a deep well of inspiration, and again it nurtured my thinking. I mentioned animism in my thesis, noting a relationship between embodiment and animism but I didn’t follow the thread. Curiously, animism kept cropping up in my subsequent work. The spirit of animism was stalking me, appearing like a shadow glimpsed in the forest that vanishes when the sun emerges from the clouds. Animism features in Embodied Eco-Paganism (2013) and crops up again in The Knowing Body: Eco-Paganism as an Embodying Practice (2016). It’s also a theme in my conversation with the improvisational movement artist Stephanie Gottlob (2022). But in all these previous engagements with animism, I’d missed a profound insight: “Animism isn’t about what is believed but how the world is experienced”.

bare trees in the early morning mist

The idea that animism is a belief system comes from Edward Tylor, an anthropologist working in late 19th century England. Tylor invented the term ‘animism’ to describe a ‘primitive’ type of religion, a childish and mistaken worldview that confused inanimate matter with living beings. Tylor couldn’t have got it more wrong: what he called ‘animism’ isn’t a primitive religion and certainly isn’t confused! Most importantly, animism isn’t about what you believe; it’s about how you relate to the world. Tim Ingold characterizes animism as “a condition of being alive to the world, characterized by a heightened sensitivity and responsiveness, in perception and action, to an environment that is always in flux” (2006).

I concluded that it “can best be understood as an embodied way of knowing that underpins how people live practically in the world; hunting, farming, navigating etc.” (Harris, 2023). Once we grasp that animism is an embodied way of knowing, our perspective shifts 180 degrees. Tylor wasn’t capable of understanding animism because he was blinkered by the intellectual framework of 19th-century England. There’s a lot to value in that tradition, but like any viewpoint it’s restricted, which brings us back to my critique of Modernity. My main issue with Modernity is that it believes it’s the only framework that can make sense of the world, so it literally can’t see any aspect of reality that doesn’t fit within its confines.

Animism helps illuminate many of the themes I’ve explored in this blog: ecopsychology, ecosomatics, embodied ecology, the power of place, psychedelics, activism and more. It offers a powerful alternative to Modernity and if we can drop into an embodied animist way of knowing we may yet find our way through the Anthropocene.

The Embodied Pathways of Connection: A Presentation

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The Embodiment Conference was a huge online event that took place in late 2020. I was the Manager of the Ecology and Research Channel and I also gave a presentation about the Embodied Pathways of Connection. While there have been a few days of free access to the Conference recordings, most of the time they’re behind a paywall. Fortunately, I’m able to share my presentation here. Although you can read an introduction to the Embodied Pathways of Connection in a couple of my blog posts, this 50-minute presentation allows me time to go into more depth. I refer to some of the other presentations from The Embodiment Conference, but you don’t need to watch those to understand what I’m talking about here. However, the Conference organisers will be delighted to sell you lifetime access to all the recordings if you’re keen!

In this presentation, I’m proposing that there are numerous ways of altering consciousness that can enable us to access our embodied knowing and awaken from what Thich Nhat Hanh called “our illusion of separateness.” These are the Embodied Pathways of Connection (EPoC). I talk about several of them in this presentation: mindfulness, psychedelic experience, nature connection, dance, ritual and Focusing. These are the EPoC that I identified when I was doing my PhD research, but are others I haven’t explored yet – art and sex are probably the most obvious.

Since I gave this presentation I’ve been working on a book about the EPoC and my ideas have developed a lot and changed in some ways. I’ll say more about that in future blog posts, but for now, I hope you’ll enjoy this. There’s a short introduction to the Ecology and Research Channel and I open with a reference to a quote from Thich Nhat Hanh: “We are here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness”.

The power of place revisited

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One of the key ideas in my PhD (2008) was that we think with place; different places enable us to think in particular ways. Based on the research of people like Andy Clark and Christopher Preston, I explored how spending time in nature can profoundly change how we make sense of the world. I spent weeks trawling through books and papers on embodied knowing and situated cognition, but there was always more. I now know just how much research I missed, because science writer Annie Murphy Paul has written a fascinating exploration of the extended mind – how our thinking extends beyond the brain (2021). I’m keen to see what Paul has found that I missed and to find out what emerges when I revisit my work with all this new information.

Many thinkers have suggested that we think with place. Gregory Peterson surveyed the field in 2003 and concluded that trying to understand “the mind/brain in isolation from biological and environmental contexts is to understand nothing” (Peterson, 2003). David Abram rather more poetically suggests that a heavy boulder might lend our “thoughts a certain gravity, and a kind of stony wisdom” (Abram, 2004).

The bottom line is that there are thoughts you’ll have in a forest that would be literally unthinkable in a shopping mall.

trees in mist

My research was focused on environmental campaigners, many of whom were living on protest sites in natural spaces. I found that spending months living close to nature often changed how people made sense of the world. Rob Greenway used the term “the wilderness effect” to describe what happens to people on a multi-day trek in the wild. People would talk about how their minds feel ‘open’ and ‘airy’ in the wilderness, in contrast with ‘turgid,’ ‘tight,’ and ‘crowded’ in urban culture (Greenway, 1995). Those who live on road protest sites often feel something similar. Jon Anderson wrote: “I get a slowed down, rhythmic feeling in the woods and on the meadow, relaxed” (2004).

Once you’ve experienced that feeling, it’s easier to notice how different our thinking is in an urban environment. Barry Patterson is concerned that the city can easily become “a space built from symbols, a virtual reality, rather than physical structures & patterns of relationship” (Patterson, n.d.). Barry told me that such places can feel like a “sensory desert”. Rob, another activist I spoke to, explained how he finds it difficult to cope in cities partly because “in an urban environment everything is constructed, everything is based on ideas”. In a more natural environment, Rob’s thinking is very different, and he can “feel the energy flowing through me and I have that connection”.

Living on a protest site – or wilderness trekking – can free “energies bound up in habitual deformations of posture or movement” (Jackson, 2006).

Annie Murphy Paul explores a different and wider range of topics, but similar themes emerge. She explains that although “our sense of self may feel stable and solid, it is in fact quite fluid, dependent on external structure for its shape”. That makes perfect sense given what I learnt from living on a protest site for several months.

Paul draws on the latest research to illustrates how “physical places influence our thinking and behaviour far more than personality or other factors” (2021). She tells us about the work of the psychologist Roger Barker. Barker and his team carefully observed the behaviour of a group of children from first thing in the morning to last thing at night. A clear pattern emerged, but it had more to do with place than personality. Barker concluded that the “behaviour of a child often changed dramatically when he moved from one region to another, e.g. from classroom, to hall, to playground, from drugstore to street, from basketball game to shower room.”

There’s much richness in Annie Murphy Paul’s book and it’s very useful for the kind of embodied, nature-based work that I do with my clients. This is the book on the extended mind that I’ve wanted to read for the last couple of decades and it’s well worth the wait!

Embodied knowledge

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‘Dark matter’ is estimated to account for 85% of the matter in the Universe but we can’t see it. Embodied knowledge is a bit like that; although most people have never heard of it and it can’t be put on a page, it’s fundamental to our everyday lives.

Michael Polanyi, a scientist and philosopher, unpacked the difference between what we know explicitly – that Paris is the capital of France, for example – and the ‘know how’ or knack that is tacit knowing. Polanyi pointed out that “we know more than we can tell” (1966) because there’s some things we simply can’t talk about. Riding a bike is a good example, When I ride my bike, I don’t think though every movement. This is especially obvious when I turn a corner: If I were to try to think through each subtle movement as I adjust my balance and turn the handle bars in just the right way, I would fall off! I don’t play golf, but research suggest that when a player ‘chokes’ – fluffs a simple shot because of stress – it’s because they’re thinking too much (Beilock and Carr). At the tacit, embodied level, the pro golfer knows how to make the shot, but if they start trying to think about it, they’ll blow it.

I can give you examples of embodied knowing from fields as diverse as anthropology, business studies, neuroscience, teaching, sport and many more. For now, I’ll offer a few highlights to give you some sense of the power of embodied knowing.

Shoshana Zuboff spoke to workers who’d relied on their embodied knowledge. Until comparatively recently these US paper mill workers would sit alongside the machine, sensing how it behaved as they adjusted the controls. But after computerization they had to work from a remote monitor. Many found this transition really hard. They’d been using a “knowledge that you don’t even know you have” that they called a kind of ‘folk medicine’. They had an embodied understanding of how the machine worked, the sound and feel of it when it was running right. Suddenly they had to learn explicitly how to keep it running properly (Zuboff, 1988).

Hui Niu Wilcox uses her understanding of embodied knowledge in science education and social change (2009). Her approach is explicitly political: “through integrating embodied ways of knowing into our work, we have honed our critique of the Eurocentric and male-dominated system of knowledge production in the Western academy” (2009). The results can be transformative: Students on a Women’s Studies course she taught “spoke passionately about their leap from academic theories of race and white privilege to an embodied understanding of how white Americans unconsciously perform privilege and whiteness”.

Wilcox and her colleagues from the Ananya Dance Theatre also use embodied ways of knowing to help people understand the impact of the climate crisis on marginalised communities.

Embodied knowing plays a vital role in psychotherapy. Daria Halprin, an expressive arts therapist, says the body is “like a treasure chest … full of our life experiences, contained in a deep and accurate way” (2002). Embodied therapy can help us access that treasure and so bring healing to the bodymind.

Embodied ways of knowing are multifaceted, complex and marginalised. Sociologist Ian Burkitt claims that all knowledge is embodied (1999). I’m not sure I’d go that far, but in this short post you’ve read of how embodied ways of knowing can help us tackle racism, understand the climate crisis and nurture our mental health. That’s why I’ve devoted a big chunk of my life to trying to understand the power of embodied ways of knowing.

A graphic map of embodied ways of knowing
Mapping Embodied Ways of Knowing

I recently completed an initial sketch map of different models of embodied knowing. Although I’ve tried to keep it accessible, it isn’t bed time reading! If you’re curious, take a look and do please tell me what you think: Embodied Ways of Knowing: Mapping the Territory.

David Abram

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David Abram’s first book, The Spell of the Sensuous, (1996) has influenced pretty much everyone in the world of ecopsychology and environmental philosophy. Its themes are summed up in the subtitle: Perception and Language in a More-than-human world. By way of introduction, I’ll touch on each of those themes.

Perception
Abram is more than just a philosopher; he’s also an ecologist, anthropologist and slight-of-hand magician. That unusual combination gave Abram some unique insights about perception:

“The task of the magician is to startle our senses
and free us from outmoded ways of thinking.”
(Interview with Scott London, 2018).

Abram’s interest in perception led him to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and he develops that into an embodied environmental philosophy. Abram challenges conventional ideas about subject and object, inside and out. He reveals that our perception is always participatory; it involves “an active interplay, or coupling, between the perceiving body and that which it perceives” (Abram, 1996). Thus he comes to understand the body as “a sort of open circuit that completes itself only in things, in others, in the encompassing earth” (Abram, 1996). There are echoes here of Eugene Gendlin who understood the body as extending beyond the skin into “a vastly larger system” (Gendlin, 1997).

Language
It’s not only humans who have a living language. Abram suggests that “various animals and other natural forms today speak in their own unique dialects” (Abram, 1996). Oral cultures fully appreciate this reality; they’re aware that we’re “corporeally embedded” in a “living landscape” (Abram, 1996). But the influence of writing has led us into a “more abstract mode of thinking” that conceals our sensuous, embodied relationship to the more-than-human world (Abram, 1996).

Wentworth Falls. Australia.

A more-than-human world
We are part of a more-than-human community: “the animals, the plants, the trees, even whole forests” (2018). Every member of this wider community has its own wisdom and way of being.

“Each place has its own mind, its own psyche. Oak, madrone, Douglas fir, red-tailed hawk, serpentine in the sandstone, a certain scale to the topography, drenching rains in the winter, fog off-shore in the winter, salmon surging in the streams – all these together make up a particular state of mind, a place-specific intelligence shared by all the humans that dwell therein … ” (Abram, 1996).

Abram was one of the first to recognize the importance of animism for ecological thinking. Animism had long been dismissed as a primitive error, but by the early 1990’s Religious Studies scholar Graham Harvey had identified it as a powerful influence amongst Neo-Pagans. Abram was on a parallel track to Harvey, following the thread through older, indigenous cultures.

Abram continues to explore these themes in Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology (2010), another book I highly recommend. It’s important to note that Abram is a practical philosopher and his work with the Alliance for Wild Ethics is perhaps as important as his writing.

I’m delighted to say that David Abram will be joining me on the Ecology and Research channel of The Embodiment Conference. This on-line event takes place from 14 – 25 October and it’s free to join.

In my next post I’ll introduce philosopher and poet Glen Mazis.

How to Save the World: Embodied Ecology

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The UN message is clear: “Climate change is running faster than we are – and we are running out of time.” Most of us know climate change is an unfolding disaster, but we still don’t change. Why? It’s not what you know, it’s the way that you know it. We know the facts and figures in our heads, but don’t – or can’t – engage on an embodied, gut level.

I first explored these idea in Sacred Ecology and it’s still my most popular publication even though it’s over 25 years old! I wrote about ‘somatic knowing’:

“Besides the cerebral knowledge we all possess, the words & ideas stored in our heads, there is a deeper knowledge held within the tissue of our bodies. It is a somatic, physical knowing which comes from direct experience. This is the knowledge of faith, of emotion, of the gut feeling”.

Maori sculpture in Aotearoa.
Maori sculpture. Aotearoa.

Fast forward a quarter of a century, and I’m still exploring the same territory. I’ve found many allies in that time, people like David Abram, Glen Mazis, Charles Eisenstein and Philip Shepherd. You may not know them yet, but trust me – these are some of the key thinkers in what we might call embodied ecology. You’ll be able to hear from these four – and many others – as part of the free on-line Embodiment Conference in October. The conference will include over 1000 speakers from disciplines as diverse as yoga, coaching, meditation and therapy.

The Embodiment Conference takes place from 14 – 25 October. It’s free to join, but numbers are limited so sign up now if you don’t want to miss it.

In preparation for the event, my next few blog posts will introduce some of the thinkers featured at the conference. Next up will be David Abram, cultural ecologist, geophilosopher, author of ‘The Spell of the Sensuous’ and a source of inspiration for many!

The Intuitive Therapist

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If you’ve ever watched a filmed therapy session or heard Susie Orbach’s In Therapy, it might seem like there’s not much going on. The client says something and then the therapist says something. What you can’t sense, unless you’ve been there, is the deeper process going on throughout the session. As a therapist I want to be 100% present in the moment and sensitive to every nuance of our complex interaction. I also want to be aware of everything the client has ever said to me, how they might be feeling and how I’m feeling. I need to consider if, based on half a dozen theories of therapy, there’s any pattern in all that. If there is a significant pattern, I need to decide when and how to say so.

When I was training to be a therapist I despaired of ever being able to process all that and stay present with the client. I was so busy thinking about what they’d just said that I kept missing something crucial! It seemed impossibly hard. And I was right; trying to consciously think through the complexity and depth of therapy is impossible.

Most of the vast bulk of Uluru lies below ground

I’d assumed that I had to think everything through consciously, but actually about 95% of our cognitive processing happens in the other than conscious mind (Thrift, 2000). I talk about this a lot in my PhD thesis on embodied knowing, but it took me a while to appreciate how this happens in therapy. In therapy – and in everyday life – my “body senses the whole situation” (Gendlin, 1992). The wisdom of the body draws on sensory perceptions, emotions, memories, past experience and much more to decide what to do next. It’s a massive understatement to say that “your body knows much that you don’t know” (Gendlin, 1981).

Malcolm Gladwell talks about this “power of thinking without thinking” in Blink (2005). The book is full of wonderful stories about people who know intuitively what’s going on in very complex situations. There’s the art expert who can unerringly sense a fake but can’t tell you how, and a fire chief who’s gut feeling saved his entire crew from disaster. In each case the ability to correctly intuit what to do emerges from a powerful embodied knowing that’s been developed through training and experience.

In a typical therapy session I’m not constantly pondering what the client had just said: My focus is on staying present. Meanwhile my embodied mind – which has a huge range of input and a vast capacity to process that input – does the work. Drawing on this embodied wisdom is the essence of Focusing Orientated Therapy.