The following article introduces Chapter One of my book, Taking Heart and Making Sense, which is available as audio podcast here or through my Substack.
Embodiment has many meanings
As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, embodiment has multiple meanings and divergent uses in different domains.
The meaning of embodiment varies:
- as it applies to practices (such as mindful breathing and grounding techniques)
- how it is used as a therapeutic tool (such as in somatic therapies)
- how it appears in philosophy (such as in the fields of embodied cognition and phenomenology)
- how it relates to feeling and emotion in different areas of psychology
The theoretical or academic approach to embodiment within disciplines (and across different schools or thinkers) is itself very wide-ranging. For instance, the field of embodied cognition contains a broad spectrum of versions of embodiment, some considered very weak and some very strong. A weak view might understand physiological signals from the body as information processes that influence cognition in the brain, while strong views understand the body as inseparable from holistic and ongoing processes of cognition; cognition is not limited to the brain. In addition, some philosophical views of embodiment lean heavily on embodiment as an experience while others hardly consider experience at all.
How does embodiment relate to feeling?
For those who understand embodiment through a lens of practice or experience – including in somatic therapies – embodiment is obviously related to feeling. Our sense of our own embodiment is at least partly generated by our experience of our bodies, as sensations and feelings, that we are or can become aware of.
In this sense, becoming more embodied literally means noticing the body more within our experience as well as developing a deeper understanding of the relationship between our own body and our personal experience. From the standpoint of practices, we might do things to become more embodied (such as mindful movement, bodywork or somatic therapy) and then notice how our experience changes (such as feeling clearer, more centred or less anxious).
For those who come to embodiment by way of philosophy, the relation between feeling and embodiment is a little different. Embodied cognition, as the name suggests, has been traditionally concerned with understanding concepts and language – how these phenomena, which arise in the mind, actually depend on the body. In this context, ideas about embodiment have not been focused on feeling or affect, but rather on how concepts are formed and informed by our bodily experience, such as sensory experience and movement patterns, rather than centralising experiences of feeling or emotion.
Embodiment within the field of phenomenology is different again, because it grapples more directly with experience, but often engages first with perception and sensing rather than feeling.
For me, embodiment, feeling and experience are deeply entwined. Still, a thorough understanding of embodiment should be able to take many of these different perspectives into account. I have tried to understand feeling and embodiment by engaging with many different theories and then identifying and working through their shortcomings.
This project resulted in my book Taking Heart and Making Sense: a New View of Nature, Feeling and the Body, an attempt at a theory of feeling as a whole body phenomenon. Chapter One outlines and comments on a prominent theory of emotion from the fields of psychology and neuroscience: that of Lisa Feldman Barrett, as outlined in her book How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. This theory seems to have gained quite some traction outside of academia in the past decade since her book was published.
Emotion, interoception and the brain
Barrett’s theory of emotion highlights interesting points about the range of approaches from within psychology. While psychology as a clinical practice must be (at least partly) concerned with experience, much research in psychology aims for scientific inquiry at a different level, particularly from a neuroscientific perspective. So questions about experience, such as ‘how do we feel and how do the body, consciousness and experience relate?’, are often reframed as ‘how does the brain generate those experiences?’ Questions about experience lead to inquiry at the level of the neurophysiology, of the brain and nervous system.
Enter the process of interoception. Interoception is sometimes used to describe a sense: sensing the inner state of the body. But interoception can also describe brain processes, of which we are not conscious. In Barrett’s theory interoception refers to how the brain senses and represents the state of the body, ultimately so that the brain can regulate the ongoing state of the body: interception is profoundly entwined with bodily regulation, the process of homeostasis. Barrett understands this process as predictive rather than reactive; emotions arise not when we perceive and respond to something in the world but when the brain predicts what might happen next (based on past experience) and then instructs the body to respond appropriately. Emotions are not direct bodily responses, but the result of brain predictions.
At this point it is simply interesting to note that interoception as a sense or awareness (what we notice in our own bodies) and as a brain process (how the brain senses and represents the internal state of the body) lead to different understandings of feeling and emotion.
Two theories, two directions
Barrett’s theory is an important perspective because it challenges what seems like an overly simplified view of basic emotions as physiological reactions patterns triggered by outside events. She sees emotions as developing over time, particularly in early childhood, as we also learn names for them from others. For Barrett labelling is important to the experience of emotion. I’m not entirely sure where this leaves feeling, which is something I grapple with in this opening chapter.
This chapter intends to open up the discussion of feeling and its relation to the body, to set the scene by simply noticing the different trajectories of Barrett’s theory of emotion in contrast to that of embodied cognition. The first, from psychology, disagrees with too much identification of emotion with bodily experience, and the second, from philosophy, disagrees with the idea of concepts existing separately in the brain and apart from the body. In this way, and intriguingly, this contemporary theory of emotion from within psychology moves away from the body while embodied cognition moves towards the body.
If all of these theories are, somehow, partial pictures, then what how can we bring them together? Is a different philosophy required at a deeper level? That is basically the subject of the book that follows this first chapter. For now, I will leave you with that question, and invite you to listen to the first chapter of Taking Heart and Making Sense.
If you’d like, you can read or listen to the introduction first. You can also find all chapters and introductions on my Substack, and on Spotify.