Tag Archives: embodiment

Experience Matters More Than Facts

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The UK press picked up a recent study from Miles Richardson’s team at the University of Derby, which found that the strongest indicator of nature connectedness was spirituality. I was initially intrigued about this research, and then it started nagging at me. I had a felt sense that I was missing something here, but what?

Suddenly, the penny dropped: people have been writing about this reality for decades, so why the sudden interest from the press now? I wanted some context, so I pulled a couple of volumes from my bookshelf. Then more. I found a dozen books that explore the deep relationship between spirituality and nature connectedness—and this is just my collection. Clearly, it’s only the tip of an iceberg.

A pile of books about nature connectedness and spirituality

This increased attention is significant for two reasons. First, the UK press showed enthusiasm for the Derby research because it’s backed by statistics. There’s a lot of data here, so it’s seen as more scientific and therefore more worthy of our attention. The irony, however, is that the research showed higher levels of nature connection in societies that prefer faith over science. Second, despite decades of writing about nature connection and spirituality, there has been little impact. All those books, all those profound ideas, and yet our level of nature connectedness is falling.

Which brings us to a fundamental question: what motivates behavioural change? Environmental campaigns have typically used facts, and that hasn’t made much difference. I’m beginning to think that experiences matter much more than data.

The dramatic reduction in the use of plastic packaging didn’t come because people suddenly knew the facts about the problem. David Attenborough’s ‘Blue Planet II’ showed us albatross parents unknowingly feeding plastic to their chicks. Viewers had an experience, and there was a shift in people’s attitudes towards plastics. I recently overheard someone saying how important it was to reduce plastic packaging because it kills ocean animals. That may not capture the full complexity of the issue, but frankly, I care much less about that than the change in that person’s behaviour. Experiences matter more than facts.

it’s not what you know, it’s the way that you know it

I’ve long argued that the key to real change is embodied knowing; it’s not what you know, it’s the way that you know it. Another way of saying this is that experiences matter more than facts. Facts come into conscious awareness and occasionally shift our beliefs. More often than not, they get forgotten or re-interpreted to fit our pre-existing worldview. But experiences can create or modify embodied knowing, and that sticks.

If you want to delve into the fact and theory behind spirituality and nature connectedness, go to a library. If you want to experience it, go to the woods.

Should you trust your gut?

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Albert Einstein certainly did: “I believe in intuitions and inspirations. I sometimes feel that I am right. I do not know that I am” (1929).

Neuroscience supports Einstein’s conclusion. Antonio Damasio’s somatic marker hypothesis suggests that emotions are crucial in decision-making. Damasio suggests that the brain learns to associate our experiences with specific emotional states, creating a “somatic marker.” These markers guide our future choices.

This demolishes two wildly held — but false — ideas. First, many people still believe that reason and emotion are incompatible. Wrong. Emotion and feeling are “indispensable” to the reasoning process (Damasio, 2003). Second, our culture is still suffering from the pernicious notion that the mind and body are separate. Descartes infamously promoted this nonsense; he may be the stupidest genius that ever lived!

Portrait of Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia by Elizabeth Godfrey

When Descartes first claimed that the mind and body are distinct, the philosopher Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia challenged him. She highlighted the importance of the body in thinking. Sadly, she didn’t convince him, and we’ve been suffering from the consequences of Descartes’ influence ever since.

Somatic markers are sometimes outside our conscious awareness but can be sensed as gut feelings. When we pay more attention to our gut feelings, we can learn to listen to them and even dialogue with them. The philosopher and psychotherapist Eugene Gendlin describes “a body-sense of meaning” that he calls a “felt sense” (1981). Felt senses give us access to embodied knowing that may be fresh because “your body knows much that you don’t know” (Gendlin, 1981). I use my felt sense all the time, especially in my therapy work, by applying Gendlin’s Focusing technique.

Gut feelings are most reliable when we have experience to draw on, and there’s a lot of subtle information to consider. Intuition can spot patterns, while analytical thinking tends to get confused by all the data. Lie detection is a good example. We’re pretty good at using our intuition to assess if someone is telling the truth, but if we’re asked to think it through and explain our reasoning, we tend to get it wrong.

Financial trading is a perfect example of a situation with masses of subtle information, and the experts have much experience. Unsurprisingly, traders often rely on gut feelings instead of market analysis. Research revealed that “the gut feeling of financial lore” brought market success (Kandasamy et al. 2016). One trader describes this gut feeling as “like having whiskers, like being a deer … something somewhere just gave you a slight shiver, but you’re not quite sure what, but it’s something to be careful about, something’s around” (Vohra and Fenton-O’Creevy, 2014).

Gut feelings are subtle, but as Gendlin showed, we can learn to be more attuned to our intuition. Recent research suggests that enhancing our emotional intelligence can improve our intuitive decision-making.

So, should you trust your gut? The answer is an empathetic ‘yes’ if there’s a lot of subtle information to consider and you have experience of similar situations. Improving your emotional intelligence and learning Focusing will help you listen to your gut instincts and get better at knowing when to trust them.

Interoception: The Sixth Sense

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Back in the 1860s, a Russian psychologist called Ivan Sechenov noted the existence of an “obscure muscular sense” at the border of consciousness. He was probably the first to suggest that bodily sensations might be significant, but no one paid much attention. It wasn’t until 1907 that Charles Scott Sherrington named this internal sense ‘interoception’, finally giving a name to our ability to sense bodily signals like heartbeat, breath, thirst, hunger and muscle tension.

Although we’ve known about interoception for over 100 years, research into this powerful ‘sixth sense’ has taken off in the last few decades. Why the sudden interest? It’s become increasingly apparent that interoception is fundamental to emotional regulation and can play a crucial role in our wellbeing.

Interoception feeds a vast amount of information to the brain: While most of that input will remain outside conscious awareness, it all significantly impacts our emotional state and thinking. We all differ in how intensely we experience emotions, and the research suggests that this might be due to individual differences in interoception. People with greater interoceptive awareness tend to feel emotions more intensely, are more empathic and are better at emotional regulation. Conversely, research links a lack of interoceptive awareness with emotional disorders. In summary, listening through your body can enhance your emotional life and mental health.

So how can you learn to listen to your body? I asked Jennifer Tantia, a Somatic Psychotherapist and Dance Movement therapist. Many years ago, Jennifer “went on a quest” to find the answer to a vital question: “How am I going to teach people how to get into their bodies?” Jennifer explains that the body is “a gateway between consciousness and unconsciousness”, and she talks us through ways we can learn the path through that gateway. The key is to “really pay attention, start listening through [your] body”. You need to let go and be open to listening and receiving information “outside of what you think you know”. Meditation, dance, and Focusing can all help develop your interoceptive awareness; perhaps unsurprisingly, these three are embodied pathways of connection.

Mindful breathing and body scan meditation are especially valuable to developing your interoceptive awareness, and mindful movement can also help. Jennifer talks about a form of dance movement therapy called Authentic Movement: “It’s like putting your brain in the back seat and putting your body in the driver’s seat, and you really are in a different state where your body is moving”.

My conversion with Jennifer goes deep, and we identify presence as an underlying theme. You have to be fully present to listen through your body. Jennifer notes that it underpins meditation, nature connection and psychedelic experience. As our conversation ends, Jennifer emphasizes the importance of practice.

“You can’t just do it once and get it. It’s a practice; it’s tolerating your own frustration, it’s letting yourself be surprised until everything is a surprise. And that’s presence, right, and it’s worth the effort to practice”.

Learning to listen through your body takes time – and you need to keep practising – but the reward is no less than becoming fully human.

The Decade of Embodiment

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Two years ago I hosted a few sessions for the The Embodiment Conference 2018. I enjoyed that experience, especially the opportunity to facilitate a conversation between David Abram and Glen Mazis. So when I was invited to be the Manager of the Ecology and Research Channel for the The Embodiment Conference 2020, I jumped at the chance. I’d need to bring together and coordinate over 100 of the most interesting speakers in the world! Wow! But this was just one of ten Channels that brought together over 1000 presentations for the 500,000 people who registered to attend.

No-one has ever done anything on this scale before and over the last few months we discovered why! It was the most intense work I’ve ever undertaken and it was only by drawing on the embodiment practices I’ve learnt over the years that I got through it. There’s a beautiful symmetry here that illustrates how personal practise can serve a bigger purpose.

Our aim was never simply to get the biggest names from around the world. We wanted to find people doing great work on the margins, the people who’d never spoken at a TED Talk but whose voices needed to be heard. I know of a least one example where a ‘big name’ Keynote speaker reached out to Presenter whose work wasn’t widely known to say how inspiring it was. That’s very special, and brings me to a second insight: An event like this is all about the connections it can create.

Once I’d recovered a little from the long adrenaline powered days of the Conference, I began to wonder, ‘What’s next? Where does this go now?’ Although the Conference was extraordinary, it was a ten day event not a movement. What can it catalyze? I’m already in touch with people about articles for The European Journal of Ecopsychology and – dare I even say it? – I’m planning an online conference on embodied ways of knowing for 2021. This brings me to my closing thought: Overcoming cultural distrust of embodiment is a process we need to express in our everyday lives. Let’s make the 2020’s the Decade of Embodiment!