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We live in a time of rapid environmental degradation, and, in many regions, social, cultural and personal upheaval, stress, and suffering. We know what is happening very well, in fact, we’ve never monitored the global environment with such intensity. Yet we spend most of our lives not looking at it, or seeking to address it from problem-solution mindset, the same mindset that got us here. We’ve lost our way, and technological solutions aren’t going to get us where we need to go, collectively. Human ingenuity alone, divorced from its context, rarely does.
Science has its uses. In its particular blunt way, it tells us about the health of ecosystems, and how they are changing in the age of the Anthropocene. It can also point us in the direction of some helpful solutions to the predicaments we’ve created, especially where the solution is simply to stop doing the damage (e.g., the hole in the ozone layer is a clear example). However, we try to use science, and it’s applied wing, engineering, to solve far too many of our problems. First, engineering typically creates fragile solutions, as opposed to the antifragile solutions of nature. Second, and more deeply, the very problem-solution mindset we use does something to our conception of time, and therefore our relationship to the world. It’s a kind of abstraction that distances us. And when we can’t feel, we can’t relate. Most of us in the modern Western world have forgotten how to feel the world, and therefore we relate in a cold and distant way. The world becomes just a bunch of resources, and some nice photos for our Instagram feed.
This leads me to embodiment. We’ve forgotten just how much our relationship to our senses has been winnowed down to a mere fraction of its full blossoming. We identify 5 senses, other more intact cultures use many, many more. We isolate our senses, particularly our visual sense, and furthermore use it in a focused way – we’ve forgotten the inherent interconnectedness that arises from seeing with a diffuse gaze, or sensing with multiple senses at once. More than anything, we are not consciously aware that we’ve lost these abilities, or of their consequences, because the world we grow up into teaches us to cut off certain senses and certain ways of using senses, simply by learning to read too early, watching television, making our way through the modern school system, and generally absorbing our culture’s subliminal messages via our families and other means. It’s a kind of trauma, actually, that is centered in our bodies, meaning that we are distanced from a felt sense of ourselves, and therefore each other and the world. Embodiment is about re-integrating the frozen parts of our bodies, energies, and sensory pathways so that we are more fully here, now, able to participate in the incredible unfolding happening all around us, that we’ve always been invited to, but largely been unable to sense, feel, or show up to.
