What is Embodiment?
TEPP offers a unique definition of embodiment
"Embodiment is a state in which the whole of your intelligence comes into coherence with the present.”
There are a few aspects of that definition that bear worth looking at more closely. First of all, the way our intelligence is generally experienced – often without our realizing it – is in discrete compartments. For example, we can think reasonably with our heads; or in a tender moment we might experience the knowing of the heart; and then there are gut feelings, which are distinct yet again. In the course of a day, we might flip-flop back and forth amongst these different ways of knowing the world – but it remains an either/or choice. We generally don’t experience our intelligence as a coherent unity.
Inclusive Intelligence
The body’s intelligence is holistic and inclusive. It is also a bottomless resource that, in our head-based culture, we tend to forsake. The body processes over a billion times more information than we can be consciously aware of. When we rely on the dissociated intelligence of the head, we are relying on a mere fragment of our intelligence. To be sure, it is a brilliant fragment with many gifts to offer, but it’s a fragment nonetheless. Our reliance on it is encouraged by the way we confuse ‘mind’ with ‘brain’, believing them to be the same thing. But the truth is that every cell in the body participates in its thinking. Mind suffuses the whole of our being. It is possible to face every question with the whole of your being, to speak from the whole of your being, to listen with the whole of your being, and to think with the whole of your being. That is what the state of embodiment makes possible.
There is another point of confusion within our culture that also inhibits embodied thinking, and it has to do with our word ‘being’. We think of our being as something personal, something contained within our skin. But our being is held by a web of relationships; the ‘self’ is inseparable from its relationships with the world. It is defined by them. Your being, then, is what you discover when you are fully present. You are not independent of the present – you are illuminated by it.
Embodied Intelligence
And that brings us to the second part of the definition above: “when the whole of your intelligence comes into coherence with the present.” The head-based intelligence likes to stand apart from the world, as though the thinking self were a private computer in the cranium. By contrast, embodied intelligence thinks hand-in-hand with the world. What the body most deeply feels is the present; what it most deeply understands is its kinship with the world around it. The present is carried forward by a deep harmony, and the body attunes to the river of the present with a sensitivity that is exquisitely informed by every little current running through it. True embodiment brings us into an intimate relationship with that harmony. It opens us to a clarity of being that is not of our doing. It is the result of participating in a deeper coherence – one that doesn't belong to us, but rather to which we belong.
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What is Embodiment?
If you'd like to learn more about TEPP's approach to embodiment, please enjoy this video. In it Philip Shepherd shows that disembodiment has been part of Western culture for so long – since before the time of Plato – that we no longer understand what true embodiment is. Philip brings clarity to that issue as he addresses six questions, and then offers a simple embodiment practice. The hour closes with a Q&A with participants.
The questions Philip addresses are:
- Why do we need to talk about embodiment?
- What is embodiment?
- Why does embodiment matter?
- What are the characteristics of disembodiment?
- What are the characteristics of embodiment?
- What are the two stages of embodiment?
The practice Philip shares is called The Goldfish Bowl.
What is Embodiment?
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