Episode 71 - Embodiment

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mg: So yeah. All right, Mike, you're the ad guy. We got any interesting ideas for how we could communicate what's going on with this?

sm: Do you love the enneagram so much you wish that you could wear it? [Music] Well now you can with enneagram t-shirts from The Liturgists.

[laughing]

sm: That is a ridiculous thing.

mg: All right we got our t-shirts finally. And by finally, we did an Enneagram episode in August of 2016. Yeah and we started talking about doing t-shirts shortly after that. And people emailed and asked for t-shirts. And I look back in my tweets, I even told someone, in September 2016, we'd have t-shirts shortly.

mg: [laughing]

sm: T-shirts shortly. So--

mg: Depends on their perception of time passing. Maybe they're like yeah, that's about right.

sm: That's about right. That's on Liturgists time. We have these pretty amazing t-shirts now for the Enneagram.

mg: The Enneagram. It's worth the wait.

sm: It's definitely worth the wait.

mg: Because when we started, the ideas weren't as good as these. And now they're really good. We should just tell them a little bit. So every number has got your t-shirt.

sm: Yes.

mg: And a couple different designs actually.

sm: Yeah we've got like your just basic Enneagram logo, which is more like I guess a Liturgist-themed shirt. And then each shirt has like a slogan design.

mg: We should read some of them.

sm: So the Ones, your shirt says, "This shirt could be better" because you're a One.

mg: Two says, "Do you need my shirt?" I like that one.

sm: That was my favorite. I thought of Lisa literally with that shirt.

mg: Yeah, me too. Three is--

sm: You got a picture of a spotlight.

mg: Yeah and then, "Does this shirt make me look successful?"

sm: The four is a unicorn. "I wish this shirt was the only one like it."

mg: Ah, yeah. Five's--

sm: We got a camera, and it says I am the observer.

mg: Six. Is that the Honey Badger?

sm: That's the Badger.

mg: My friends have a shirt like this. It's like a badger wearing a shirt that's thumbs up.

sm: The Sixes have highly reviewed the Six shirt.

mg: Have they?

sm: Every Six I know said they really like it.

mg: Okay good. Sevens. Apparently our most popular so far in sales, because it's a real party shirt. It's like a big--

sm: Party hat.

mg: It says, "I'm having the time of my life in this shirt."

sm: You'll notice they're real meta. They're self-referential shirts.

mg: The Eight, a giant bold print is "Make way for me and my shirt."

mg: And then the Nine, which I can't wait for us to get ours, Mike, because I hope I see you wearing this one. This shirt is comfy. It's a television, showing a slice of pizza on the television.

sm: That's a very autobiographical shirt, I'll be honest. Very, very autobiographical.

mg: Yeah and then there's a couple other t-shirt designs in there. Coffee, then meditation, and then one that says, wipe the shame--

sm: "Wipe the shame off" is my favorite of all the shirts. That's pretty good. That was, it's just a Liturgist thing.

mg: So we had zero t-shirts on our website. And now we've got 27.

sm: Very Liturgist style, yeah. We do nothing, then we go real hard.

[Laughter]

mg: But we just wanted to let you know about it because a lot of us are having a lot of fun with these t-shirts. And you should join us.

sm: And a lot of you have asked us about t-shirts since, you know, Episode 1 of the podcast. So this is a long, long requested thing. And we had a lot of fun doing it.

mg: It'll be a good conversation starter for you to evangelize about the Enneagram.

sm: Because we know there are some real Enneagram evangelists in the world.

mg: And speaking of the Enneagram, we have released our videos.

sm: Oh my gosh, I love them so much. First, Annie Diamond is incredible.

mg: She's amazing.

sm: She's an Enneagram teacher that we asked to join us on the videos. And it really is like a whole season of the Liturgists podcast but filmed.

mg: It was a lot, it was--

sm: I mean--

mg: It's dense.

sm: It's dense.

mg: Yeah.

sm: You know I was - honestly, when we started thinking about online video courses, I was like that's not us, it's not who we are. But there's ideas that just don't fit in a podcast but you know really shouldn't be a book either. And this is something we're doing for that kind of middle space. And man, am I thrilled with how that Enneagram course came out. And people, now that the courses are out and we're hearing from people who've gone through them, pretty rave reviews from folks as well.

mg: Good. The meditation course was great too.

sm: Oh yeah. Yeah. I'm almost sad the meditation course is out though because the meta comments from people before it came out just when they had access to an empty video card were exceptional - really, really good. So someone said like, "I've completed this entire course in five seconds, and you know I'll be Buddha by mid-afternoon." Like, "At first, I was disappointed by the lack of content, and then I realized there is no content."

[laughing]

sm: I love you people so much.

mg: Oh man, yeah they're both, they're both, if either those topics interest you, they're a good dive into it, pretty deep dive. Like the Enneagram ones, we don't even bother trying to explain the types from a surface level, because we already did that in the podcast. So we like dive deeper. So we encourage you at the beginning to like listen to the podcast first, so you have at least a basic knowledge of the nine types. And then we really get in to some of the deep structures that - Annie is like an Enneagram ninja. She was able to guide us through some cool places.

sm: And in the same way, the meditation course, we kind of assume you've already are basically familiar with meditation through our episode on the podcast. And so we go much deeper into, you know, practice and schools of thought about meditation. And I go really, really, really deep into postures. And--

mg: I go into mind states. And we talk about, we talk about chakras, we talk about yoga, we talk about centering prayer, we talk about like 10 different kinds of meditations?

sm: It's a pretty broad spectrum. It's an East-meets-West meditation course.

mg: Yeah, I've never seen anything like it. And i'm really excited about it, proud of it.

sm: So what's really fun is you can find the t-shirts, you can find both courses, including a bundle of the two where you can save some cash by going to shop.theliturgists.com.

mg: All right, well let's get to the episode. mg: Hey everybody, Michael Gungor here. Apart from scoring The Liturgists podcast, I am a composer that does scoring work here in Los Angeles for films, commercials, even a trailer for the Justice League movie last year that I was excited about. [music] As a composer, it is my job to essentially support and even create the emotion of a scene, using music. And do you know where I learned to do that? Well, my friend, I will tell you - church altar calls. [Music] Seriously, 15 years of accompanying charismatic preachers as they taught me how music not just supports but fundamentally effects the message. Watch, I'll show you.

There was once a man named Bob. He lived in a house. He had a job. Bob had a job. Okay, now let's listen to that same clip with some music.

[piano music] There was once a man named Bob. He lived in a house. He had a job. Bob had a job.

Okay, now one more time. Same clip, second option for music.

[brass and percussion music] There was once a man named Bob. He lived in a house. He had a job. Bob had a job.

See? What by itself is an emotionless abstraction, a bland series of words, suddenly takes on color and depth. There's suddenly more to the words than just words. It's almost like putting music to something gives it a sort of body to live in.

[Music]

As I look back at my time as a church musician and worship leader, I wonder, was that what I was doing? Was I acting as some sort of conduit between the abstraction of mind and the physicality of body? It's hard to even imagine the faith of my childhood without the music. What's a revival without singing or dancing? What does theology matter if you don't have a way of feeling those ideas in your body? Isn't this the whole point of liturgy? Turning lifeless sets of words into song and chant, candles, stained glass, outreaches, bread and wine. Turning word into flesh.

As I've said before, art is the body's pronunciation of the soul. I still think that's true. So much of our culture and religions in mainstream society are based in a sort of disembodied sterility that we inherited from the enlightenment. But this is a reduction of reality. When you shrink reality like this, ideas become paramount and the embodiment, the feeling of those ideas, becomes secondary. I grew up you know trying to use music to give my disembodied religion a place to exist, a place to be lived out. But it wasn't enough.

I've come to see that there is a better way to live, a better way to practice spirituality. It doesn't have to be so disembodied, fantasmic. But instead involves the whole person, engulfs the whole person - spirit, soul, and body.

Today we are talking about embodiment. Today's hosts will be Science Mike, William Matthews, Hillary McBride, and myself. Welcome to the Liturgists podcast everybody.

[music] mg: How can a human body have a sense of disembodiment? How does that even make sense folks?

[12:54]

hm: I think the key is in what you said the sense of disembodiment that we are always embodied we can't exist without being in our bodies but we can sense living more in our heads or in our thoughts based on how our existence has been constructed through the language we use things like body mind split the flesh is bad the spirit's good all of those things emotions emotions are weak their weakness uh they're feminine they're going to leave you out of control so we learn to leave our bodies and they're obviously neuroanatomical correlates to that but I think we've we exist in a culture which actually encourage us to be disembodied it encourages us to leave the felt sense of being who we are as being more than just thoughts rationality insights there's this thing called the mind body problem um and it's it's the very strange phenomenon to unpack the original question that our observer in some way feels separate from our physical existence which is rather strange if you think about it uh and i've always correlated that to my understanding in neuroscience today that the prefrontal cortex is a lying bastard in that you have this part of the brain that is so good at lying that we thought its primary function was executive function like the brain's ceo or president but as we've learned more about neuroanatomy and had higher resolution and larger sample size brain imaging studies what we found is that the prefrontal cortex's primary role may actually be the narrator of your life it's telling the story from everything that happens in your body as processed by the systems in your brain it's like a marketing executive it's like a marketing executive telling and and it takes credit for everything oh I did that yeah that was me that was that was my call I chose to do that I chose to do that and that's starts creating a sense of separateness from the body and this is exacerbated in western civilization especially post enlightenment because what we've found is that the the very kinds of prioritizing rational and analytical thinking that hillary talked about especially at the expense of the emotions re-biases the function of the entire human brain toward the left hemisphere and more and more towards the prefrontal cortex I think a lot of the problems we have with embodiment comes down to elevating a part of the brain that already wants to be the superstar of consciousness and indeed arguably may be the seat of the conscious experience and encouraging everyone as much as possible to behave in a way that is rational and analytical and therefore literally creates pathways through the brain where more and more processing is coordinated through that little liar we call the prefrontal cortex it's hard for us to have a conversation about embodiment without also talking about consciousness because the phenomenological argument is that consciousness actually lives in the body and that we've been told a story that the consciousness that we experience is only located in our cerebral activity in our thoughts consciousness has always been in our body but the cultural narrative that we've been sold and how language impacts our lived experience actually causes us to be disembodied we should also probably have a conversation about how trauma impacts embodiment as well trauma often is felt and seen and lived in the body particularly psychological trauma so overwhelming experience fear and terror someone feeling like their life is going to be over or they're in a serious situation of threat particularly sexual trauma is really located viscerally and in the genital region often and so there are these massive amounts of nerve endings in our viscera and in our genitals that make it really acute the sensation of trauma that we're feeling in our body so you can imagine that if people have lived through trauma either microaggressions that create a sense of unsafety in their culture or something is as overwhelming and terrorizing as a rape that it would be really unsafe to stay in the body that the body would become a place that's not that's not fun to be in and what's fascinating about trauma is that when a certain part of our brain determines that we're in overwhelming terror we're going to get an endogenous opioid release and that endogenous opioid release is responsible for the shutoff of the communication between our thalamus and our cortex so we've got these almost two functioning brains at the same time we've got our thought life but then our body stays distinct and separate and they're not talking to each other which can lead us to feel dissociated or disembodied so there's an important conversation to have here about what it's like to live in a culture where there's pervasive sexual trauma around the corner for you know half the population just waiting and wondering the me too movement I really identified that that sexual trauma is everywhere and what we know with trauma is that just the threat of it especially if you've experienced it before is enough for you to feel unsafe and on guard and hyper vigilant so I think we've got a cultural narrative which devalues lived and felt body experience and privileges cognitive and cerebral activity as a the seat of our consciousness but then we've also got a culture which makes it really unsafe for us to live in our bodies and tells us that our bodies are bad or are dangerous for us i've heard it said that the body keeps score yeah um and I know different spiritual teachers have talked about the pain body um does the body store memories absolutely how does the body do that I think what we want to be careful of is to say that the body and the mind are not distinct from each other and the body and the brain are not distinct from each other and so your brain is recording and your brain body system is incl recording implicit memory always which is your felt sense memory that you don't necessarily have a time stamp to and your implicit memory often has a physiological component to it so a recording of the sensations in your viscera when you're thinking about something so people often have body memories of things that they don't have time stamps to particularly when they happen between three or four years old when the hippocampus isn't myelinated enough to record time or temporal components to memories so you can sometimes ask people what's what was your childhood like and they could say I don't know but I get this kind of sad feeling in my body and I want to kind of fold in on myself and that would be a body memory or an implicit memory of something that we don't really have a time stamp to it's normal at so many different points in our life to feel like something is getting in the way of being present or happy something stopping us from achieving the goals that we have for ourself or feeling connected to the people that we love betterhelp will assess your needs and match you with your own licensed professional therapist to help you work on all those things you can connect with someone in a safe and private online environment for that reason it's so convenient you don't even have to leave the house and you can start working with someone in under 24 hours when working with someone through better help you can send a message to your counselor at any time and get a timely and thoughtful response plus you can schedule weekly video and phone sessions betterhelp has licensed professional counselors who are specialized in treating things like depression anxiety navigating family conflicts and so much more they're committed to facilitating great therapeutic matches so they make it easy and free to change counselors if needed anything you share with your counselor is confidential so many people have been using better help that they're recruiting additional counselors in all 50 states start living a happier life today as a listener you get 10 off your first month by visiting betterhelp.com liturgists join over 1 million people taking care of their mental health again it's betterhelp h-e-l-p-com slash liturgists and for any of our listeners who may not be quite as nerdy as you and I what might we mean by myelination myelination is when a neuron is wrapped in a fatty tissue that allows the messages between neurons to be sent more quickly there's obviously all these physiological things happening in the body and the mind to a practical person that is just thinking of like what does it feel like to be like william and I are fives on the enneagram uh fives live in their head that's the kind of the main thing I was in my head sorry i'm not trying to come back but it's a funny thing even when I was learning about the enneagram we just did an enneagram video series and we talked about the different centers of intelligence um had heart and gut for different types of people and at first I pushed back on even using that as a framework to talk about the enneagrams like those are just they're metaphors we obviously all have bodies and brains and they're all functioning what do we even mean it's just a metaphor but just I think the feeling of living in your head the more we got into it I find value in the metaphor the feeling of living in one's head as a five I know in my experience it is a constriction of reality it is a narrowing of reality into an abstract set of thoughts words rather than a full-bodied experience so I remember when I met this guy who who told me about my type of person being a typically disembodied or a person lives in their head kind of person and he recommended like get a hot tub and I did uh I love he's like do you like like you like hot water or something oh yeah that's my that's my jam so like I got a hot tub it's like go on walks fine exercise find ways of getting in your body which meant to me like don't constrict your experience to the mental life in that way meaning like just abstractions of reality but actually directly experiencing reality as a human person with a human body it seems that it's hard for people to do that sometimes though because there's a moral judgment about being in the body too like it's uh weak or uncontrollable or less valuable in some way than or dirty yeah dirty where is that the flesh is sinful that's what I was taught right yeah whereas thought life has seemed to be more pure perhaps more abstract but actually more trustworthy yeah and so I noticed that when working with people who live in their head there actually seems to be fear and disgust about coming more into the body or just a sense that that would be less valuable where do you guys think that comes from I mean some of it obviously we inherited with our religion I inherited a lot of that with my religion it was taught to me and sure it's gnostically infused religion but it's by gnostic what do you mean the gnostics it was very it was about that like the the body is dirty the spirit is the pure the mind the and even it goes back to even maybe for that like platonic thought in some ways as like this form behind and the substance and the form there's there's something behind reality um that is more like the pure ideal form of it and reality is seen as sort of this gross less than expression matter physical matter is kind of like less than spirit and that a lot of that seemed to get inherited into early christianity and and especially when it came to like sexuality gender and some of that just was seen as like dirty less than the flesh calling it the flesh rather than the spirits of separating those two things and I think that was a big part of my religion as a when I think about even like discipleship growing up what was it it was kind of avoiding the passions of the flesh it was yeah not having sex not um drinking and doing drugs and partying and having pleasure orgies but instead to like move into the the pure disciplined mind of the spirit and the mind of christ and you know it was very clean but that is the west right I mean that's the gnostics lost and and any of their writings you know didn't survive as as being canonized in scripture but the early church was still hellenized yeah and the church almost died out uh but you know then became the religion of empire through constantine so now you have this combination of greco-roman philosophy now informed by you know pharaceutical moralism kind of amplified both ways and then becoming like the the normative or dominant way of thinking for a hemisphere's worth of people largely through physical conquest and violence and that's what I what I mean when I said earlier like that that in the west we have a bias towards the less hemisphere and towards the prefrontal cortex because it is endemic not just to one denomination of christianity but all of christianity and all post-christian western ideologies like secularism or atheism all of these things de-emphasize uh the value of the lived experience and and for good reason in some ways your embodied sort of intuitive experience is pretty terrible at particle physics I don't want people you know deciding their visceral or emotional reaction to that's how flat earthers right exactly that's not great but our embodied experience uh is great at telling us about other people it's great at telling like on paper a lot of times I do things that make a lot of sense based on uh timelines and deadlines I ignore my body saying too much too much too much which means I am frighteningly frequently physically incapacitated from trying to do too much in a certain period of time and my body has the intelligence to say don't do that but because I am a good westerner and a good protestant I ignore my body and I toil and in doing so find a sense of self-worth and value and it is an absolute plague in western culture especially when you think about how colonialism and the violence you're talking about is related to disembodiment even the idea of manifest destiny yeah being this sort of pure ideal that they had that could exist in the mind that could exist as this truth that that somehow transcended bodily lived reality so that they could do whatever they wanted to people's bodies and make it fit to the ideal mind form yeah I was listening to this lecture by uh an african american scholar I believe his name is dr jenkins uh but he was at fuller recently and he preached this sermon about the malformation of ideal of colonialism and how the idea that we need to bring creation and thus these savages to a type of maturity though unfortunately the maturity is a deformed maturity because what it did was it separated humans from their body and from the land and so he argues that particularly african spiritualities you know um south american spiritualities were more connected to the land or they saw themselves as connected to the land so they would never want to rape the land or steal its resources and how colonialism with its with its christianity brought a type of abstraction from the body and and also then those religions were squashed and those religions were treated as savage religions and and they were wiped out and um and not valued as uh I don't know contributing to our civilization and how we view the other and so I i think about that often with colonialism and how we've been robbed of a rich inheritance from eastern religions as well as uh indigenous religions that center us back in the body well I think you see like a struggle among westerners to try to reclaim some connection to the physical and the visceral I think that's why we love yoga I think that's why white popular culture is uh so frequently plunders the riches of african-american culture is because of its power to speak to the body I i know like in my own life i've constantly struggled to try to get more in touch with the part of my body that isn't my brain you know I have a real tendency to view my body as this very useful suitcase for moving my brain around you know it's kind of funny i've had i'm a pretty clumsy person uh I tend to to be injured more frequently than average and my approach has always been like if I break a bone no big deal it will mend and the only time i've had like a reckoning with my identity and self-worth was a brain injury i'm like well that's important I can't let my brain get injured and I remember right after the accident thinking like why couldn't I have just lost my legs which if you think about it it's a relatively minor brain injury hat it's it's it's ridiculous to think that like losing my legs would be less dramatic than having a couple of brain bleeds and vestibular system damage but uh it's the it's that degree to which I am centered around the cognitive as my primary way of functioning and why I am so often deeply confused by my emotional reactions to things not just confused but actively troubled you know well emotions live in the body that's where they're situated they're not these things that exist solely in our intellect they actually have physiological signatures that go along with each of them and so it's really hard to do emotional awareness emotional regulation it's hard to feel with someone and do empathy when we are disconnected from our body because emotions particularly the feeling of other people's emotions lives in our own body as well are we going to talk about the insulin oh oh my oh he all worked out hillary loves it the insular is always insulin or insular cortex yeah i'm a cingulate man myself so the insula and the insular cortex in the brain is a structure or a set of structures that helps us understand how we can feel sensations in our body and then make sense of them intellectually and do that thing that we're talking about which is the sense the felt sense of something in our body and what's fascinating is that the insula tends to be implicated in things like disgust so a this visceral response that there's something bacterial that we don't want to ingest it's protective in its function but the insula is also implicated in things like how we do empathy with other people because it accesses or it's it's part of the group of structures that are responsible for mirror neuron response when we see someone else's emotions and we feel them in ourselves like watching a video and seeing someone get punched in the gut and then going right almost imagining that it's happening to yourself and so insula and insular cortex are really responsible for some of the things that we're talking about here today and are valid and brain-based structures so they live upstairs in our head but help us make sense of what we're sensing in our body and feeling in our body I wonder if if that then is the role of good religion would be to help bring a language to that experience of what's going on in the brain and the body you know especially in ancient world context we didn't have that language or we didn't understand the brain well I think about good religion is actually helping us be more fully alive and if you're only accessing one dimension of human experience then how can you experience the fullness of life so there is so much life and vitality as it's situated in the body even things like sensation feeling touch having a taste of something in your mouth having energy course through your body in response to hearing something that someone says and you noticing in that moment that that feels really good there is more to experience than just thinking about ideas and actually letting those ideas resonate in your body and tell you something about what feels good and who you are you told us in the hot tub last night as we were being collectively embodied about in in therapy like sometimes walking people through emotions that they don't really know how to experience and actually showing them how that exists in their body like your throat yeah you're saying the heaviness and the throat or yeah as equivalent to sadness yeah yeah so people who experience dysregulation of affect or the inability to feel their emotions and do something constructive with their emotions and haven't actually been given permission to do that relationally often struggle with feeling like emotions come up really strong or they can't get in touch with them and the consequences of that being irritability or disconnection from people or from themselves or a reduced sense of self or suffering that they don't know how to respond to so in therapy because i'm connected to people because I care about them i'm really trying to get to understand their experience and i'm also trying to stay connected to myself and embodied I often feel in my body what they could be or are feeling in their body but for people who were never taught they often have difficulty accessing that and when that comes in extreme forms we call that alexithymia which is the inability to feel or name emotions and often the inability to experience them it can become quite extreme for people and then there are obvious consequences to falling in love or having appropriate relationships or communication when you can't access emotions so what happens when people are saying something is that they might have this emotive expression like tears coming to their eyes when they're talking about a sad story and i'll say what do you notice in your body when you feel that and they might say gosh I don't I don't know I don't I don't think I feel anything i'll say well you have tears in your eyes i'm wondering if that can help us understand more about what this experience is or was like for you and for people who've lived in their head or are cut off from their emotions or their body might have difficulty even locating what the sensation is in the body so because i'm hooked up to them neurologically and really attuned to them I can use my body as the way to help point them in the direction of what that feeling is like so i'll say I can see that you're sad and when you are sad I feel sad because I care about you and that sadness shows up for me in the constriction of my throat and then I want to pull inwards with my body and almost curl in on myself but also this desire to reach out and connect to you at the same time because your sadness isn't too big for me I can feel it in my body but I also want to be connected to you so as i'm telling you that just bring some attention to your throat and your body and tell me if you can feel any of that constriction in your throat or that wanting to pull inward on yourself and people often say wow yeah I can feel it there I wouldn't have known where to even start but now that you're saying that I can sense that and so then we learn together how to feel because emotion emotion lives in the body but emotion is actually a dyadic experience before it's an individual experience in a dyadic meeting two person in a dyad there's two of us so you actually learn through your attachment relationships how to sense your feelings how to stay with your body while you're feeling but again like I was saying if an experience is too overwhelming because that overwhelmingness is felt in your body often we want to leave our bodies and so we try to not feel we try to get away from the feeling because it's too much and we haven't been shown how to regulate that or stay with that so the process of therapy is helping to bring people back into their bodies to have a full experience of emotion so that then they can make choices about what they do in any situation given all of the information that's accessible to them [Music] explain this to me then if I experience trauma or really painful negative emotions I have a hard time crying like I won't cry but if i'm watching a really emotional episode of grey's anatomy i'm sitting on my couch or before grades it was parenthood or you know or one of those shows and i'm like not every episode it has to be a real emotional one you know it's probably like one a season for me personally and i'm like oh bailey dr bailey oh jesus you know like and i'm like whatever and i'm going what is wrong with me what is wrong with me because i'm crying this much well not because i'm crying this much but it's funny for me i've always and maybe because it's my fiveness I somehow weirdly can open my emotions up to a story like that versus the the thing that's happening right in front of me I can feel it in front of me but it won't bring tears to my eyes like i'm not that emotionally cold like I feel yeah uh but I do have a hard time showing that emotion in like in my life but then you get me on the couch by myself watching grey's anatomy you know some and it's like it comes I don't know what that is and when you're talking about that I just thought about that yeah emotion is meant to signal what's going on for us to our community of a belonging to tell them what we need so emotion actually has a social function it's pretty hard to feel okay feeling if we've been told at some point that we're not allowed to do that and so we can take in the messages that keep us defended against feeling our own emotion for ourself as a way of protecting ourself from experiencing the consequences of having someone see us cry and feel judged or shamed by them and so often what happens particularly in our significant attachment relationships is that we've been told at some point don't do that or don't cry about that or that's not okay or we don't do that here and so we actually have permission to cry for a story on tv because it doesn't involve us naming our pain and it doesn't ask anyone else to comfort us we're just living and experiencing the pain that we have inside vicariously through a tv show so there's a relational component to this too this isn't just you having a hard time crying for your own story it's what is crying for your own story meant for you in the context of your primary relationships and when has that been allowed or not allowed and how do we help you learn that it's okay to access all parts of you while being seen and connected to somebody else i've heard a quote often times in the black community we can be afraid to show emotions we're afraid to cry because I think it might have been in the james baldwin uh documentary i'm not sure negro he might have been talking about that at like martin luther king's funeral because he said oh that's exactly what it is he said if I cry the tears will never stop um and I think there is this collective sense of if I allow this to happen too much or if I give myself permission to feel in this community then we'll never stop crying the grief will never and maybe that's a lie or that's you know I hear that lots from people who have deep wells of pain that haven't ever been given the safe place and the permission to dip into that and then come out and so we're afraid that if we go in we'll stay in and we won't know how to get out of it yeah and then the other the context of that though is if we cry then nothing will get done and we won't be productive and we can't participate in society and so there's there's something about the diminishment of emotionality or the diminishment of affect that makes it seem like it would be useless or a waste of time to go into it and to continue to cry we also can't grieve something and be sad about it if we're in the middle of the trauma we have to be through it to be able to look back on be sad and and prove to ourselves and and know with certainty that it's over and I think although the civil rights movement was really successful in moving things forward the struggle in the black community is not over there is consistent racism and devaluation of people based on their ethnic identity all over the place and so are we ready to grieve no way it's still going there's still work that needs to be done [Music] it's hard to have a conversation about embodiment without also talking about consciousness and we tend to think of philosophy as being a really cognitive activity it's something that's situated in our thought life and yet there's been a stream of philosophy an existential stream particularly phenomenology which has actually led us back to the body to help us understand what it's like to be fully human and merlot ponte who is a french philosopher talked about these two different versions of the body saying that we both are a body and that we have a body but that we think about often the body is this thing that we have like you were saying mike it's the suitcase even by our language saying my body exactly are people saying oh my body's not performing today or frick my body is so you know just won't do it why can't it heal why can't it get better and and we also are our body though and that's an important component of embodiment and the phenomenology of embodiment is to realize that our lived body shapes our experience of our self our lived body influences what it means to be a self and to be human for example the experiences that you've had william as a black man shape your sense of identity and those would be completely different if your brain was plopped into somebody else's body how people treat you the words that they use how those different than how people might speak to me as a white woman all of those things shape your lived experience of yourself including you know ableism and ageism what can I do that I can't couldn't have done in the past what can I not do that other people can do and how does that shape who I believe myself to be so merlot ponti says we have a body but we also are a body that there is no me without my body that me doesn't exist outside of my my lived physiological experience or anywhere or anywhere and the body reminds us that we are intersubjective the the mind can be disconnected and often isolated from the world around us and in fact we can see that in such extremes we would call those you know certain kinds of mental disorders that the mind is so disconnected from reality but it's really hard for us to be isolated and alone when we live in a body because the body reminds us that we have needs like food and connection we feel close to someone when they touch us and so the body reminds us that we have limits but also access to other people and needs for other people I think rene gerard has this phrase he calls it interdivisional cool I love that phrase just to even bring us back into the body but also the body's connection to other bodies that we are not individual but enter individuals [Music] [Music] why does this matter politically the conversation about embodiment so the the disembodiment of western culture allows and perpetuates systemic violence and oppression but if you look at cultures that are more embodied or if you look at people groups that haven't had contact with modern civilization they're actually statistically more likely to die at the hands of a fellow homo sapien one thing I struggled a lot is kind of like the endemic state of both the kind of western post-enlightenment human experience or a more visceral more embodied experience is an extreme tendency to work towards the needs of the self and those closest to the self at the expense of others that happens most readily in uncontacted people groups through extreme tribalism literally like our small cluster of 50 to 150 individuals versus the world is a mentality and western civilization allows that to scale up much larger but then also allows all kinds of strange philosophically guided atrocities like manifest destiny and genocide and smallpox blankets and really strange things that would be unimaginable to other cultures but I think there's a there's a necessity here to use different modes of thinking to interrogate each other so to allow our humanity and our empathy to interrogate our actions when our philosophy takes us to strange places but also to allow our philosophy and our ethics to check our more visceral reactions to other people that can also lead to destruction into violence something that has stuck with me since our shame episode was the idea that how would the world be different if donald trump was in touch with his pain that's an idea that hasn't left me at all since then and i've been thinking more and more about the ways in which donald trump and I are similar in our disembodiment you know i'm the kind of person I had a pretty painful childhood because of bullying which i've discussed at length on the show and don't worry folks i'm not going to tell a story that makes you pull over your car because you're crying right now just I would say that i've had enough painful experiences that I definitely learned to distance my physical sensation and my emotions as a means of survival I kind of learned to do biofeedback to to analyze my body's state to actively subvert and work against it and to intellectualize problems which create an incredible relief because if you're analyzing your emotional states you really stop experiencing them and over time that became internalized as a self-policing disgust because if I could be disgusted by my tears faster than they could form I wouldn't cry and I wouldn't give bullies the ammunition to keep brutalizing me right but that created that survival adaptation created something pretty unhealthy and i've always had kind of an emotions switch I can just switch it off any feelings to the point that like oh as an adult I would go to the funeral for a family member or something really traumatic would happen I could only cry as a single sob I would just like sob out loud and immediately stop not not intentionally just this internalized behavior and so I had to go to therapy kind of back to something you were saying william about not being able to cry because I couldn't cry ever and my therapist worked with me for several months on crying so the first thing that happened is I could cry at movies and I started crying and like commercials and then I started to cry about things that affected me and then I cried all the time like like ceaseless crying that's where I am today let's just cry it's exciting I enjoy it but I learned to not judge sadness as being negative or weak and that led to a period in my life that not only do I experience a greater sense of emotional completeness or satisfaction but that has made me a better friend yeah a better father and a better husband uh and also is the animating energy behind all my public work the longer I do this the more i'm i'm not a balance between bill nye and fred rogers i'm mostly mr rogers that's what people come for it's like i'm not judging them and i'm feeling their pain right the pervasive backdrop of our modern politic is a disgust with perceived weakness a disgust with softness a lack of self-sufficiency and so our body politic is about avoiding the body and not acknowledging the needs of the body and therefore creates selection pressures in which those that we elect inhibitions of leadership don't demonstrate their humanity which creates a model so that as people seek to go for those positions themselves they do the same and well no wonder we have detached coolly disembodied discussions whether or not it's a good idea to make sure people in poverty can eat that's only possible in a state of systemic disembodied wow I think what I wanted to say to that too is you can't the more you avoid emotions actually the more they have control over you because your mechanisms of having to defend against them have to get stronger and stronger and stronger and so actually one of the ways to make sense of emotion mike just did the mind exploding gesture one of the ways to actually not feel controlled by emotion is to know how to lean into it and what to do both individually and relationally to meet the needs that emerge with each emotion the second thing I want to say is you can't numb selectively you can't numb the sadness without also numbing joy you can't numb fear without also numbing vitality and aliveness and passion and all of those are situated in the body and so we go to these great lengths to try to feel in control of emotions but we are the ones who suffer existentially and our loved ones are the ones who suffer when we can't feel close to them because we can't feel I cry all the time but half of that is I hear my daughter playing her ukulele and I cry or I drive to michael's house on a sunny day in los angeles and I cry and those are very wonderful tears that I would never like I would never have experienced until I learned to cry from grief yeah we have evidence that when we're feeling deeply and we're crying tears associated that with that that we're actually releasing toxins and there's some good evidence to suggest that that actually can be harmful and cause disease and rodents crying isn't something the tears can human tears can cause disease if they drink those tears yeah yeah yeah yeah I think it was done in vancouver actually but there's enough toxicity that when you cry not just tears of happiness but these really deep what gordon neufeld calls tears of futility where there's a sense of being overwhelmed and I can't take it anymore but those tears have enough toxicity in them that they could harm lice so if you think about the repression of tears and how much toxicity is in your body when you're holding that intensity from your pain and your sadness and it's not getting released you're actually causing illness to yourself so it's a health intervention for us to be able to make peace with our tears and be able to release them it's like sneezing your body is saying there's something in my airways that I want out and as much as we like to sometimes repress a sneeze we don't have shame or guilt or judgment about a sneeze we might not want to do it in the middle of a performance or at a funeral or something but we give ourselves permission to let something out and if we could do that with tears if we could do that with our sadness I would love to know what the implications that that had on a variety of health issues you know autoimmune issues and certain kinds of cancers have correlation with repressed traumas so can we can we cry can we release those things and see that actually is a health intervention for us and then I think about spiritual I hate saying progress but spiritual discipleship or however you interpret spiritual growth and for me in my spiritual journey I you know i've been a big meditator over the last eight years I guess as a as a five that tends to have these grand ideals and and live in the head I think so much of my practice for so many years was about getting my head clear about getting my mental constructs big enough when I talk about god is it a big enough mental construct even ideas like oneness for a while I think there was still some attachment in there to it being a clean beautiful idea as opposed to a bodily experience I always wanted to become a bodily experience but in my meditation I think there was often a a movement outwards I would look out and try to feel my oneness with everything feel my oneness with the stars and the sun and other people and and then a shift last year towards the end of last year for me I started doing a bunch of more meditations that were body focused and i'd done mindfulness and stuff but this was I don't know why this was specifically it was it was still tailored towards oneness and non-duality but it was going inwards um these series of meditations that I was doing and practicing a lot and moving into my body in that same way that I tried to like let go to my union with out there actually let go to my union within myself it's funny like that's the one of the last things that I did and then it was like the last how funny that one of the last things I could feel union with it was easier for me to feel union with a sunset than my own feet so but those embodiment meditations were a huge new step for me and and actually made my union with the sunset richer and more fully experienced it's not just an idea it's not just a clear emptiness but a fully embodied union with all that is and how much of the time is our bodies are like the last frontier for spiritual yeah development when it's so easy to like put our take care of the widows and the orphans and and out there to get our work done in the world however our religion pushes us and often do we like forget that our bodies are at the very temples of the spirit that that happens through I think that I think that's the message of the incarnation is that flesh and blood are good and this whole story of a god who would become human puts us squarely back in embodiment and into [Music] the wholeness of a being and I love richard roar because he says uh the incarnation was the redemption and he frames it you know he starts there he goes it wasn't the cross it ended there but it was it was this it was the incarnation god becoming fully human he was letting us know it was okay to be human and it was okay to be in your body especially how disrespected the body is by us like we disrespecting especially ancient world culture and how they continually disrespected the body ultimately even to killing jesus's body um but that was the message that flesh and blood are good and I think the whole communion thing too is paul missed that one paul missed it [Laughter] paul just focused on other things well I think paul got it too because he his supreme revelation right was that uh the new temple was the human body yes that that we are like christ in you the hope of glory that that this this frame though it's it's decaying in a lot of ways that this was the glory that to be embodied in this moment in history and time is worth it all uh at least when I look at the christian message I think that is the theme that I focus on the most and i've always I think focused on because I saw that as the most hopeful and especially for somebody that's detached right it's like I need to be embodied I need the the bread and the wine I need the the flesh and the blood because I want to abstract it all the way yeah even externalizing it into that is it harder to see the communion wafer in the wine as the body of christ than is to see your own genitals as the body of christ [Music] you couldn't have engineered a better sentence to cause people a strange mix of contemplation and profound discomfort that's what I try to do man [Music] i'm i'm really enamored too by the whole notion of the cosmic christ as well because here it is this whole all of creation is the embodiment of god and you know the rivers the seas the ocean the mountains the stars the cosmos that it's uh that this is god's dwelling and god's inflection like if christ is the head then we are the body like this whole this metaphor coming bringing back to us that we have a body we are in a body and that we are part of another greater body like you know using the ken wilber analogy of you know holes and parts like holland's and you know that that this is a part and we're parts and holes I know science mike doesn't just he just nodded his head like I like wilbur [Laughter] I like kenwood I like theory of everything and brief history of everything I love books uh but even that that analogy of it you know points to me back to the cosmic christ uh that that the christ is the the energy force that enliven the human body of jesus and therefore is of everything somebody even say that that's the same thing buddha was talking about amen and when I say someone I meant michael [Laughter] him alone only him [Music] what do you think disembodiment plays in this strange combination of touch averse and sexually predatory touch that we have in our culture i've i've seen studies that effectively humans as social primates crave and need frequent touch to be balanced and healthy but we're afraid to touch each other when we do we tend to do so in exploitative ways i've actually seen research that links a lack of touch in the west and especially in america to things like incidence of mass violence the sense of alienation required for someone to feel it's not just enough to end your life but you need to end other lives as you do so yeah what role is that playing and how can we can can reclaiming embodiment also help us to reclaim healthy touch and mutual touch I think that being disembodied with a constant threat of sexual predatory touch is a survival strategy if people are going to grab my body on the bus just because i'm a woman and that's going to be threatening and unsafe and scary for me what choice do I have if that's inevitable but to leave my body so that I don't have to feel the pain or the threat of that so I think that disembodiment is a survival strategy kind of like dissociation to get away from things that feel threatening but inevitable and that we need to make it safe to be in the bodies that we're in make it safe for other people to be in their bodies so that we can all experience the fullness of life and safety so that our brains can work properly we know that when we're feeling unsafe that the parts of our brain that are making the choices about what to do and what needs to happen tend to move away from conscious intentional and present thought towards reactivity and life-preserving impulsive reactions I think that there's probably a pretty serious consequence on our the fabric of our social relationships if we're having to leave our bodies to keep ourselves and other people safe I wonder if that also plays a part in even the people that are responsible for the non-loving non-healthy touch people that are and I don't say this as a way to like excuse any behavior or justify or anything but I wonder how much disembodiment is at the heart of somebody who doesn't know how to respect someone else's boundaries how at the heart of them no and impulse control and yeah but if so it's all one cycle in one system yeah so i'm saying like a person that doesn't have a healthy relationship with their own body yeah that feels present and loving of their own body would they be more likely to move into a dangerous cycle and a violent cycle that that they would not if they don't know how to respect what is their own body how how could they respect someone else's body yeah yeah and be fully embodied in their own body they're flailing out reaching out and causing havoc around them yeah I would say that it's definitely one component of psychopathology and unhealthy and non-pro-social behavior but among other things yeah yeah in a world that's constantly objectifying women's bodies in particular and and increasingly so men's bodies to be embodied is a political act to not participate in my own disembodiment by only viewing myself as an object from the outside but to see that my body is me and to take up space in my own body and to refuse to disappear in my body to really conform to the patriarchal construction of femininity that is a political act of resistance to stay embodied and to believe that my body is good and then it deserves to take up space and then I don't need to apologize for the things that I feel or sense in my body I think we saw that in black lives matter really strong was this uh radical embodiment of of of blackness that looked like black feminists taking their shirts off in the street and protesting uh as a sign of like disrespect and saying our bodies have been disrespected and it's disrespectful for us to be naked in the streets so let's do it and I i always saw those images as such a beautiful message of my life matters my body matters especially talking about police brutality and the devaluing of life uh to have people who I don't know would reflect that back on culture and I could see how harsh that looked to a lot of people and how the disgust comes up and the the shame and all the emotions that come up when those images are flying through twitter and the periscopes and it's going live and you're seeing you know like people with sagging pants or you know like shirts off and just protesting and I don't know if that speaks to the state of where we're at politically where it's this radical because of the disrespect is that is that radical yeah the body is the site of oppression and so the body can be our opportunity to resist and to re-engage politically to to dismiss or dismantle the oppression by being fully embodied and by owning that and not apologizing for the space that we take up or the color of our skin or our level of ability or our size and all of those and the ownership of those and the inner consent to enjoy and be fully embodied in those is a resistance to the disembodying and to the objectification and the oppression of the body power to the people then [Music] dear body i'm sorry and I love you dear body i'm sorry for telling so many lies about you I called you ugly a waste of space just that and just this I reduced you down and used words with you I would never use with others I told myself and others stories about you that were not true and I did not honor how sacred you really are i'm sorry for all the times i've hurt you both on the outside and inside i've starved you scraped you plucked pulled cut and burned you I scrubbed you too hard in the shower I filled you with food and then made you empty yourself I have celebrated when there was less of you and screamed at you and I thought there was even just a quarter inch more of you where there shouldn't be you never asked for this you never deserved it i'm sorry for the ways i've neglected and ignored you you told me so many times this isn't safe or this feels good or screamed at me listen to me but I silenced you I covered up your voice with distractions and the promise that maybe I would love you that maybe I would love me if you just stopped telling me things i'm sorry for how i've kept you stuck and small when you wanted to expand and be free and wild I sat there trying to be good but it cost you I told you we couldn't climb the tree instead we would sit with our legs crossed I made you think that you were better if you behaved and didn't challenge anyone's ideas of what it meant to be a woman i'm sorry for how I believed what other people said about you they said you were so many things they called the beautiful and life-giving parts of you bad and horrible names and I let them I said nothing and sometimes I laughed [Music] i'm sorry for blaming you for holding all the feelings I didn't know how to feel you have been so good at telling me when i'm in danger or when i'm alive or full of joy the hard things were too scary and just to get away from the feelings I tried to make you go away to be invisible to shut you up i'm sorry for putting you down just to fit in with others it seems that other people felt safer being around me if I told them that I hated you but I let you down i'm sorry for making you an object to use and be used and i'm sorry I felt better for a while when I let people use you I really thought I would be more lovable and when you told me you didn't like it I didn't listen i'm sorry I didn't know how to protect you from a world which told us both that you were for someone else's pleasure not quite enough of this too much of that bad ugly broken a thing a puppet not wearing enough the best thing about me or dangerous and i'm sorry for hating you when you did nothing wrong I love you for staying with me for never really leaving me even though I have tried to leave you you are there always and as long as I am there you are there here we are together and we can and will never be a part I love you for the ways you let me experience life through adventure through taste and smell and sound without you I would not know joy without you I would not even be alive I used to think my mind was safe and you were the one that was unsafe but now I know my thoughts told me lies but you never have I love you for allowing me to love others to hold close my dear ones to make love to grasp a hand to wipe the tear away from another's cheek it is through you that I can show and feel love and know what being connected really means I love you for helping me move taking me from here to there fast and slow with intention and sometimes without even knowing it together we have traveled the world and we see it all you will help me appreciate others and the uniqueness and beauty that each of us I love you for introducing me to time no one else will take the journey of life with me all the way from the beginning to end as you change I will remember what we have been through together when you show lines and marks it will be the storybook of what I have lived reminding me daily of all the times I have laughed chopped apples carelessly fallen from the swing set and squinted to see the beautiful day under a bright sky skin oh skin you tell me about what it means to be wise and joints you remind me that we are not permanent but I refuse to shame you because you cannot do what you used to [Music] I love you for teaching me how to rest you remind me to care for myself and have deepened my understanding of what it means to be present and still and teaching me how to rest you have taught me how to need and in needing I have allowed others to love me and give me parts of themselves through rest I understand the rhythms of life I understand that humility is a spiritual discipline and I do not have to do everything just to be loved I love you for helping me touch myself others the softest petal on the flower outside the front door and sand against the heel of my foot and the neck of my lover I love you for carrying life inside you have always had life inside of you even before you were born each month i'm reminded of this I plan my week what I will wear what activities I do or not because of this life reminder that you bring to my awareness and oh how this reminds me that we are connected to those who come before us and after us and you remind me always that i'm not alone even when I am alone we are together [Music] I love you for being a miracle on the inside there is so much to you I will never understand why you and I wrestle sometimes in the morning about when to begin the day or at night why you make that clicking noise sometimes and not others and why you seem to like it when I feed you some things you are a mystery to me and instead of frustration now I feel full of wonder and appreciation because I love you just as you are how do you know when you're embodied tell us a story about when you felt embodied or how do you become more embodied just imagining like is there a room that would have more difficulty with that question yeah exactly it's exactly [Laughter] you think we're experts in this I feel embodied now what tells you that I literally can feel my body i'm not caught in a mental loop yeah to me when i'm disembodied i'm caught in narrative i'm caught in a string of abstraction of thought your awareness your sense is distributed into the sensation in your body and not just in your head yes yeah music and dance brings me back to embodiment I i feel present and centered when I allow myself to let go and to feel rhythms to move my body and to enjoy that like there's an enjoyment and maybe it's I don't know it's the adrenaline it's the whatever but I feel most alive when i'm singing performing or dancing like I feel most embodied in that moment I think music saved my life in that regard and I think a lot of musicians feel that way in terms of that release that music gives you that release of your sadness of your pain of your even your joy a release for all of that and you can what you know through playing and singing you can let go of everything that feels locked up on the inside of you and it gives it like a approved channel to be released uh and and one that it can be resonated with from other people and it's that energy is coming back to you and you're giving that out and that's interesting seeing art as a form of embodiment yeah even though you might be imagining with your mind while you're painting or whatever it's it's giving it physicality it's giving these ideas a place in the world yep writing's that way too uh songwriting peace writing like to give language to the inner chaos of the soul is one of the ways in which I feel we help bring order to it and bring stability to it all uh gastroenteritis makes me feel very embodied yeah deeply embodied I had no narrative uh the last two days I had no abstraction I was simply a continuous stream of sensation and instinctual response to sensation occasionally I could boot up a higher loop for sanitation rituals to try to keep in my house from getting sick but I was deeply embodied and that reminded me why I used to love long distance running so much was because about 10 miles into a run I never went into my head it was I just stayed in my body the whole time I am not a naturally embodied person one of the things I look for in meditation is embodiment but the times in my life i'm the most aware of my body are the times in which I am reaching its limitations what about you hillary well I was going to say in response to that we've got a few phenomenologists max van maanen and merlot ponte who would say that for those of us who live in a disembodied life it is actually illness or pain that reminds us that we are a body it reminds us of the limits of our self and life and existence and so it's pain or illness that reminds us that we feel we take the body for granted until we can't ignore it anymore I think for me I lived my life my whole life disembodied up into a certain point maybe not my whole life but particularly um as a child it's really easy to stay embodied we haven't learned to leave our bodies yet so when people talk about freedom in the body often they talk about these really useful youthful experiences so running down the street and feeling like your legs are going so fast that you can't even keep up with them and there is this flush in your chest on a summer's day when you're playing tag with a friend or you're climbing a tree and it feels so good to feel your hands on the bark and know that you're grabbing onto the trunk so these embodied experiences are often really youthful and early in our development and then we learn to be disembodied and that was my experience so my journey recently of becoming embodied has been to find moments both of movement and stillness and to locate sensation in my body and to track with that and to try and keep these dual tracks of awareness running at all times that there's a thoughtfulness about the sensation while also a sensing of the sensation and doing that especially while i'm in therapy or when i'm doing something that feels really joyful to actually expand and savor that moment to help my brain learn to attribute more resources to that sensation of joy or pleasure so that it takes up more mental activity and and that I can go hang out there more often so i've been taking in embodiment classes which just really looks like sometimes they're called authentic movement this totally free dance where you're giving your body over to music and giving it over to the body of the earth and movement I want to give my body over to the earth like when you think about religion all of me loves all of earth when you think about religion and how much of our western yeah especially protestant christianity for those that identify with that is totally disembodied yeah it's you go in and you listen to somebody talk you sit in an uncomfortable wooden pew or some equivalent and listen to information spewed at you and maybe there's a little bit of uh grease for the gears with the music at some point really let the let the words come in and have a clean cleaner slate that's white church though yeah I was like speak for yourself that's most western church I feel like yeah I hear you there can be a lot of speaking oriented but but even in you know in black church is a participatory element to even the speaking that it isn't purely I sit yeah it's more about it yeah it's way more embodied um and actually the audience is look is crucial and necessary otherwise the whole thing doesn't work yeah uh at least in in our context and so why I partially agree with you in terms of that format I think uh black church reflects that very differently um and it is far more embodied with I mean people will run in the middle of a sermon just get up and run that's amazing yeah like or stand up and clap and shout or fall out or you know like i've seen home meetings derailed like in the middle of a sermon because the audience is like feeling what's happening or the spirit and next thing you know you know it becomes something totally different you know that's what we say oh the spirit came and the spirit said oh church was good today spirit came and you know we just and the music and all of it like it's I don't know it's a celestial spiritual dance that happens in that I was kind of the head of that direction because we went that's what we went a couple weeks ago we went to a black church and that's a big part of the reason that I wanted to take we don't go to church then our daughters are never in church and I thought maybe fun to give him a little church experience but I didn't want it to be a disembodied white church experience so I took him to a black church and it was great lucy was dancing all over the place the lady behind us was like handing her cookies so she was we were the only we saw I think maybe two white people there and it was it was amazing we were looked at funny our family didn't didn't belong we told you actually we look like we felt like we didn't belong there and you're like you didn't you didn't especially the one you went to I was like I wouldn't have gone to that one but it was great oh I loved it you didn't belong because your bodies tell different stories about what it's like to be human [Music] yep it's pretty hard to have an embodiment conversation without also talking about social oppression and the oppression of certain people groups based on the body right a classic example that's used in neva paran's work she's a scholar of u of t who researches embodiment as a health intervention particularly as an eating disorder treatment intervention talks about how if you've got a a woman in delhi a south asian woman who feels totally at home and like she's part of something and then comes to l.a maybe not la let's say something like port portland or seattle and just because of not only the surrounding of place but because her body looks different than other people's bodies gives her a felt sense of devalued or a lack of social power because her body tells a different story about what it means to be her and how that fits in with other people so the three components of embodiment that create a sense of joyful embodiment our social power critical thinking and freedom in the body so free physiological experiences but can I think critically about the way that bodies are constructed socially and what has value or not but then also what kind of power do I have in my experiences around me based on the body that I live in and simultaneously you could have the opposite of these three things which lead to a disembodied experience which is the lack of social power the inability to question and think critically about bodies and then a corseted body experience so if you think for women who've been told your whole life sit with your legs crossed and don't speak unless spoken to and the boys can they can go play out in the yard but you can't there's a restricted social there's a restricted physiological experience of the body where it's corseted and pulled in there isn't a felt sense of freedom and joyfulness in the body but then there's also perhaps a sense of compliance as a way of assuring social belonging that this is not what we do here and that's not what you do but then also the social power component to it and perhaps she sees that the boys are given more opportunities in certain spheres than she is and all of those simply because of the body she's in create a sense of disembodiment and fragmented embodiment which lead to all sorts of mental health issues but also existential suffering if the body is us and the body has been something that's not been safe or good or valued or free then how can we be free [Music] it's wild how those two experiences can situate next to each other like you can have the the feelings of disembodiment and then have avenues and outlets for embodiment and and how you can move seamlessly in and out of both experiences at least in our american context so even using the black church thing it's like yeah I can feel that in this setting but then once I get out of that setting i'm back into disembodiment again in a lot of ways or and and I think like you explain the experience of being female uh you can move in certain spaces where you do feel empowered socially and you can think critically but then you move back into maybe you go into an education school system that says you can't do math and bam you're back into disembodiment um and the push and pull that those have on us so to become more embodied we need to become aware of when we lose our embodiment so noticing wow i'm in church and I feel really embodied in this black church and then I leave and all of a sudden the way that I walk changes and the way that I use my voice and the way that I move my arms and how I feel in my body in this moment what kinds of things i'm aware of my sensation all of that I lose that and to become aware of the loss of embodiment I think would be a preliminary step to retaining embodiment yeah noticing when we lose it and then making choices to try and stay in the space of embodiment I think that is exactly what beyonce is talking about in her song formation yeah like she did it at the super bowl a couple years back right and it was she was in black panther uniform but the whole song is her describing her lived experience of people saying part of the illuminati obviously i'm not those are haters you know and then she talks about where she's from the the place she's from then she talks about how she likes black men she goes you know the nose you know like jackson five nostrils she's saying uh she's talking about a live black experience but also giving permission to black people to be who they are in public and and you know snl did that whole skit like oh my god beyonce's black we didn't know right like it became this whole like talking point of like oh we never really saw her as a black artist and then she releases this song you know that you know has a you know has a bit of the country and the ratchet and and it's very black and she's on top of a police car that's sinking in in new orleans you know and and then you know the police officers with the little kid like like all the images of the video mixed with the uh the lyrics of the song speak to this like okay now it's time to get in formation like now it's time to be embodied to be in the world to be present to ourselves and to like and and in the capitalist system like now it's time to make that money like I just might be a black bill gates in the making you know she kind of says and you know like I work hard I grind until I own it and so even that messaging is you know in its own convoluted way it's still a message of embodiment of like be who you are acknowledge yourself acknowledge your culture your pride where you come from and your history and bring that into the world and what you like into the world and don't be disembodied like that's what I hear when I hear that song that's it puts me back in my body like music only can do but also it's giving this other message too of like black subversion like hey subvert the system you don't have to be like the system we need a second microphone for william for his claps [Laughter] sorry I got real black with the club we show up black people have always demonstrated embodiment white terror and the ever-present fear of it was inflicted on our bodies from the beginning and still has yet to relent we the descendants of slaves those who are labeled property have never been able to see ourselves as detached from the socioeconomic and political implications of our bodies in this we are defiant blackness as a way of being is a social and political act of resistance the way black bodies move and sing are unique rhythms of grace that beautiful ease and swag by which all of our blackness breathes the way black hair moves in the summer breeze and the way our full lips and proud nostrils and varying thickness defies the status quo we do not belong here yet we are who we are and our being or how we be is not an abstracted notion of self that's shallow wisdom of man but a bodily wisdom similar only to that of a mother's intuition our vision for healing integration oneness and unity and wholeness in the face of plunder and trauma is what makes us strong and resilient and full of magic what we know is this to be alive is to inhabit the body every curve nook and crevice is sacred every wrinkle vein and organ is holy every human shade and melon is a mark of divinity we are prophetic signs and terrifying wonders to every system of power that distorts the truth of our embodiment our ingenuity and cultural creativity breaks the mold at every turn whether we choose to reflect heteronormativity or queerness we embody love in the alternative families we make for ourselves whether we choose to portray industry beauty standards or subvert them with our bees braids cornrows locks and natural hair choices we still define culture and determine what's hot we know our embodied lives make you uncomfortable and we refuse to apologize for that our resistance is resilient so when you see us take us all the way in take in these magical bodies effortlessly dancing in between time and space take in our delightful interior complexities and wonderful paradises whether we kneel at a football game or protest shirtless in the street or whether we're going in at church or at a solange council or whether we're just at a checkout line buying groceries or purchasing a subway ticket I want you to see us I want you to see us radically loving and affirming ourselves our bodies and each other and when you see us doing this let it be assigned to you but we're not here to subjugate you as your ancestors did to us no no no we are simply here to teach you the embodied truth of love love of self love of community love of creation love of god and though there may be more trauma ahead for us we always know that there will always be more embodiment and freedom for us our resistance is resilience [Music] let's end this am I going to go we're going to go dance let's go in the living room and turn on hey alexa play beyonce i'm not too bad lucy's not here she is here now oh she she's not asleep let's see she's probably not asleep yet let's let's do a dance party with lucy all right she'll love it see you later everybody well that does it for our episode on embodiment and we hope that you've enjoyed it and if you'd like to connect with other people who've listened to this episode you can go to liturgist.com podcast and find the episode called embodiment in their comments section where you can discuss this episode with other listeners of the liturgist podcast if you'd like to connect with the people that produce the liturgist podcast as well as its posts you can do so on social media just go to facebook.com the liturgists or search for at the liturgist on twitter and instagram we'd like to thank all of our patrons who make this show possible if you're interested in the second podcast that mike and I make called the liturgist conversations otherwise known as the robot an alien uh you can go to the liturgists.com as well to find out how you can support this show get weekly meditations and all sorts of other bonus things that patrons get this show is produced by myself and greg nordin thanks to corey pig for project management mike mccarg mike mccart for being managing director and we'll see you in two weeks on march 22nd for our next episode on body image which we are incredibly excited about and think will be helpful to many of you thanks for listening everyone you