Embodiment

I can’t help but think I’ve been substantially misled by the environment I grew up in when it comes to how I think about the body. 

I feel like a general message I came away with in my childhood was that cultivation of the mind is more important than cultivation of the body. That may be generally true and especially incentivized in this economy, but that way of framing it as a comparison privileges mind over body as if they’re two separate things, and they’re not. They’re just not. 

And I understand how that kind of thinking made me and helped others feel better for not having cultivated their bodies, or for the real health struggles many face that make it really difficult to cultivate the vitality of the body. But at the end of the day, the psychological programming that led me to neglect my body also weakened my mind. 

An integrated approach would acknowledge that how the body works has an effect on the mind. This would mean that what (and when) you eat and drink affects your mind. How you move affects your mind. Your sleep, breath, the drugs you take (including caffeine, nicotine, sugar, etc.), and your interactions with people affect your mind. The exercise that you do or don’t affects your mind. 

The integrated approach acknowledges these things, and then asks, so what should I do in order to become satisfied with my body and mind, so that I’m not falling into any psychological traps like unnecessarily comparing myself or physiological traps like being incapable of doing what I strive to do. 

Everybody may have different standards for the strength and flexibility or knowledge and mental acuity they want to have, but that’s not necessarily what I mean. Satisfaction doesn’t come sustainably by reaching goals when it implies dissatisfaction with the current state, i.e. the state of not having reached a goal yet. That kind of striving makes satisfaction contingent on reaching a goal and, having achieved something, tends to make continued satisfaction contingent on reaching yet another goal. 

The sustainable way is to find satisfaction in the process of striving. But that also means that there is no fixed end-goal, only a process. Rather than deciding you’ll be happy when you reach a certain weight, career, or educational degree, it becomes about being at peace with where you are now, submitting to the process of being alive, and improving from where you are at. 

This means that temporary diets that have narrow aims (like weight loss or muscle gain) generally become replaced by an approach to food that integrates all of the ways food affects the organism. Instead of sacrificing general health and performance for weight loss (like the keto diet), it prioritizes health and performance in a way that constantly builds upon these with no apparent end (though maybe some lapses). Becoming healthy, strong, knowledgeable, or skillful isn’t something you do and then stop doing; it’s a choice you are constantly making, so it’s less a temporary diet or training and more a lifestyle. 

My mind often thinks of the Elric Brothers, how they made a sacrifice (their bodies) they weren’t ready for that bore only horror and went searching for an answer (a way to get their bodies back) they didn’t know was there.

The Elric Brothers in Fullmetal Alchemist, Edward and Alphonse, search for the philosopher’s stone to restore their bodies after a failed attempt to bring their mother back to life using alchemy, which in this universe, operates under the law of equivalent exchange: for something to be gained, something of equal value must be lost.

I think that I sacrificed my body for an excess of something that I thought was valuable (knowledge). The result was a chronic illness that debilitated me for a few years, a high level of educational achievement, and a low level of actual knowledge retention. I overloaded in classes constantly, and I paid the price for it. 

My Watson year outfitted me with a blueprint for how to treat my body and mind so that they engage in a process of healing and improvement. Like the Elric Brothers, I’m on a journey to get my body back. 

Aspects of my year abroad established that a) physical strength, flexibility, and general looseness, mobility, and relaxation are worth striving for, not instead of but in conjunction with knowledge and understanding, and b) many steps in the development of deeper understanding are facilitated by putting the body in order. 

When Eugenio Barba went to India and encountered Kathakali, he was struck by the ethos of the boys at the Kerala Kalamandalam school of Kathakali, who got up every day at dawn to do their exercises for hours in silence. Their ethos sprung from the discipline, meticulousness, and humility with which they learned the demanding technique of their tradition. The act of doing theatre was encapsulated by their submission to the process of it. This embodied ethic, a craft’s foundation, is a popular ethos in traditional Asian theatre, and an ethos which under the Western separation between mind and body, muddling of the meaning of spirituality, and linking of work put in with the product that’s supposed to come out, is often absent in Western theatre. Étienne Decroux sought to achieve it in Corporeal Mime, and Eugenio Barba has sought it in training itself.

Eugenio writes, “All the physical exercises are spiritual exercises which relate to the entire development of the man [person], his way of making all his physical and mental energies burst forth and be controlled”; “training does not have a utilitarian goal. It is the amplification of the life of our body.” The training at the Odin Teatret varies widely from actor to actor, with most actors having developed their own individual training over time. What is shared universally is that all the training works on the body, voice, and mind, and is rigorous and consistent. Training is more than a career-motivated goal; Eugenio writes, “the mastery over this technique becomes a personal process which makes the actors discover their own interior flora and fauna, introducing them to the shared territory of their collective imagination… the training and the work on the performance become essentially the work of the actor on him/herself, also as an individual.” Since Eugenio encountered Kathakali, his tenet has become to let roots grow out of the need not to belong in any one place but to shape an ideal homeland made of values without borders. He calls this “to sink roots in the sky.” He writes, “There are people who live in a nation, in a culture. And then there are people who live in their own bodies.”

I speak of theatre because it is embodied philosophy. In The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding, philosopher Mark Johnson writes of the embodied mind that “Our task is not to supersede the body but to embrace it, to learn how it allows us to have meaning, and to nurture it as the locus of our world” — because it is through our bodies that we experience the world. And when we view the mind as embodied, then meaning, imagination, and reason are embodied; reason and emotion are not separate but linked; and spirituality, too, is experienced through the body. The meanings we derive about the world therefore become grounded in our bodily experience. The concern of a world without a God was that there would be no inherent meaning. But by noticing our own experience, I think we can come to appreciate how we create meaning for ourselves individually through our experiences, and collectively through interpretation of our experiences. We can start to build that appreciation by becoming aware of, and learning to cultivate, the organism through which we experience life.

My research has largely been about seeing, and in particular, seeing people in their art. I could not see people until I could, at least partly, see myself. Something which has become abundantly clear is that we live within several different ways of knowing how to live, and these ways affect us, and influence our expression. I am not saying that art directly represents the inner state of the artist, but that it gives us a glimmer. Just as we are what we eat, we produce based on the lives we live, and where, and how we live them. I am not surprised that in the past my default expression was of suffering, nor that in the present it is of bliss. Suffering was my pattern of feeling then, bliss is my pattern of feeling now. What I created, listened to, read, watched, said, thought, was guided by how I felt, and how capable, or incapable, I was of separating or aligning myself with my feeling.

Our bodies are representations of how we live. When we move, we therefore represent our strength or weakness, our security or insecurity, happiness or unhappiness. If we’re not to fake who we are, then projecting the person we want to be is a matter of becoming that person emotionally, intellectually, and physically. If we’re not to live stuck thinking about the future, then we should do this wherever we are in the process with less interest in what we will become and more in what we are.

If I for a moment adopt an evaluative lens of my physical progress, I’ll say I’ve overcome the chronic sickness cycle that was holding me back and the lingering cough that was keeping things unpleasant. I can touch my toes now, but in the context of what’s possible for me in the long run I’m still inflexible. My pranayama breathing ratio averages 12 seconds (in) 24 (hold) 24 (out), but in the context of pranayama training and the yogic path this is a beginner ratio. I weigh 136, which is still slightly underweight for my height (6 feet). I ran my second half-marathon this week (the first one in Denmark in July), but my time (2 hr 40 min) is still slow and I have a long way to go before I’m ready for longer distances. I’ve built a lot of strength throughout my body, but I still have a lanky physique and have a lot of strength to build throughout. To get to where? I don’t know. My evaluative lens has standards. I try not to listen to it so much, because wherever I’m going, the journey’s amazing.