Embodiment+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