Embodiment
+description
This concept reminds us to return to form, the body, the structure and support.
Thrivability is not a abstract idea to simply and only be imagined. It is a yearning for a lived experience in the body, in your body, in our collective body, in the physical form of the world. Thrivability is not purely materialist in the sense of only focusing on the form either though. Thrivability doesn't assume the mind and awareness live inside nerve cells in the head.
Embodiment, as differentiated from materialist approaches to mind, allows us to have the full sensory awareness of our bodies to what is outside us (through the five usual senses) and also of the awareness of what is inside us. Our gut feels, magnetic pulls, heart sensations, and feelings are all a part of embodiment. Thrivability requires embracing our bodies as sensory organs, and wonders what more is there to be felt, what magic lives in us that goes beyond atoms and neurons.
+Personal
Embodiment: Are you a brain or a body?
Am I my brain or my body? Turns out bodies are probably crucial parts of our intelligence. So let’s get embodied! Embalmed? no. Balmed? Yes. Bammed? Bam! That’s it!
This concept reminds us to return to form, the body, the structure, and support.
Thrivability is not an abstract idea to simply and only be imagined. It is a yearning for a lived experience in the body, in your body, in our collective body, in the physical form of the world. Thrivability is not purely materialist in the sense of only focusing on the form either though. Thrivability doesn't assume the mind and awareness live inside nerve cells in the head.
Embodiment, as differentiated from materialist approaches to mind, allows us to have the full sensory awareness of our bodies to what is outside us (through the five usual senses) and also of the awareness of what is inside us. Our gut feels, magnetic pulls, heart sensations, muscle tiredness, and all the other sensations that create an experience of embodiment. Thrivability requires embracing our bodies as sensory organs, and wonders what more is there to be felt, what magic lives in us that goes beyond atoms and neurons.
We will be launching Thrivable You Salon Series later this month! We are so excited! If you want to explore how you can get embodied and be more thrivable, as you are, then come join us!
+Relational
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4f_1_r80RY
What does relational embodiment feel like?
I have had years of religious and cultural training reinforcing the idea that one day, I will escape this transactional meat sack and only then will I experience the world as a united whole.
Intellectually I have rejected this concept of a separate mind and body, but it's harder to undo a lifetime of programming in practice.
But practice I do. I practice what it would it feel to be a wild thing (it's more fun than just thinking about where my own foot is if I can also think, how would this foot feel different if it were a bear paw.) How does it feel to be embodied as a tree, a root, a bird, a mycelium network?
The idea and practice of embodiment gets me to think less Cartesian, less “pas de deux” (dance for two) and more “pas de nous” (dance for us) - because really, everything we experience we experience through the lens of our physical self, it is how we relate to and dance with the entire world.
Which brings me back to starlings, how they relate to one another as they look for a collective place to end up. I imagine that when we experience embodiment in relation to someone of something else, it feels as mesmerizing as a murmuration.
@melissa
+Organizational
Minutes not Minutia: Embodiment in Organizations
What is embodiment with an organization? Is it the building that houses it? Does that work for virtual organizations? Is a company the paperwork that makes it legal?
What I am learning through being part of a Quaker Intentional Community is that the embodiment of the community lives in the recorded minutes. Someone will say that the community "thinks" or "feels" something but it is just their guess. The way the community takes form is through the minutes, which everyone present can influence the expression of. This can be a challenge for those of us new to Quaker Process. That is capitalized on purpose. It is a THING.
The meeting minutes is the expression of the whole, formally dated and numbered. We take time to massage the wording until the whole finds it satisfactory. There is an opening for someone to express their disagreement with the sense of the meeting of the whole. Then the minute becomes officially the expression of the whole.
I find it interesting how time seems to play a role in it. Partly this is important because the meeting can "change its mind" at a later time/date. Partly because there is something about embodiment that feels profoundly rooted in space-time.
What evidence do you notice from organizations that they have an embodied existence beyond the individuals that participate?
+Systemic
Whose Line is it Anyway?
Where does the line belong between my body and yours?
Where is the line between my body and my experience of the system? Am I in it? Of it? Always already included?
Where is the line between the system and what the system touches and how do we recognize that? How do we experience it through our bodies?
Who decides the lines?
