The term embodiment seems to be appearing more and more frequently in contemporary life. Psychologists and psychotherapists often use it when discussing trauma and its treatment. Yoga and movement teachers emphasise its importance and it often crops up in discussions of meditation and mindfulness. Embodiment theories within cognitive science are becoming increasingly influential and it is even spoken about in relation to Artificial Intelligence.
Given its use in so many contexts, it seems unlikely that embodiment has a single meaning. If embodiment does have multiple meanings or nuances, how do they all interrelate? And what is embodiment philosophy?
Embodiment and therapy
For therapists, embodiment is often about listening to the body as part of a process of healing from difficult or traumatic experiences. That means paying attention to, and being open and curious towards, all sorts of feelings and sensations in the body. It includes experiences we normally think of as emotion, but is much more than that—perhaps an impulse to move, a fluttering sensation or a pain that intensifies and then resolves. The idea behind this listening is that our bodies remember our past experiences in ways we are not usually aware of, and that we can heal and move on from the past through our present-time, bodily experience.
If a person feels safe enough, perhaps with the right amount of space and attention from a therapist, the body can begin to effect its own change. This change might be obvious and outward, such as the nervous system recalibrating itself by shaking or shivering, or completing bigger movements of the body that were interrupted or suppressed during traumatic events. Or change might emerge in a more emotional release, such an aching crescendo in the heart and chest, accompanied by crying. Yet change in the body can also be very subtle, experienced as small inner movements, a sense of letting go or simply a feeling of increased vitality and aliveness. None of these types of change are necessarily superior to any other. All are ways that the body creates more harmony within itself, either by releasing tension or by amplifying natural, vital processes.
A major theme in the therapeutic context is that our bodies have evolved strategies to survive trauma and manage in the face of potentially overwhelming difficulties but that these strategies can sometimes produce long-lasting effects that impair our mental and physical health. Even so, our bodies remain resilient and ready to change, even if that change takes time. The implication here is that we can improve our health and wellbeing by becoming more embodied. As the body lets go of unhelpful past experiences, we can also become more attuned to the present, particularly in our relationships and interactions with others.
At the mundane but equally important level, we can also become more embodied by literally using our bodies more (such as in movement and exercise) and by regulating our bodily selves (such as with good food, enough sleep and stress minimisation). Embodiment as a relationship between the body and experience makes a strong case for looking after ourselves physically to improve our everyday mental and emotional experience.
Much of the therapeutic orientation of embodiment has been developed in extensive research and practice in fields such as psychology and psychiatry, but also in complementary therapies such as bodywork. It is detailed and explored in relatively accessible, and now very widely-known, books such as Bessel Van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score and Peter Levine’s In An Unspoken Voice, as well in as clinical texts such as Pat Ogden’s Sensorimotor Psychotherapy.
Embodiment and academia
In academia, embodiment is often associated with a field of cognitive science called embodied cognition. The focus in this context is less on health and healing (and the idea that we can be more or less embodied) and more on how our minds and our bodies are always entwined. Embodied cognition tries to understand the ways that our thinking (or activities that we traditionally associate with the mind) is actually embodied (or heavily dependent on our bodily experience).
This orientation of embodiment only really makes sense in the context of the academic trajectory of the whole field of cognitive science—a field that began more than fifty years ago and was initially based on a philosophical understanding of the mind as very separate from the body. Traditional cognitive science was especially concerned with how we form and use concepts, and was based on the metaphor of the mind as a computer.
Ideas about the mind have come a long way in the past twenty years and embodied cognition refers to a fairly loose grouping of positions that differ according to how deeply the body is involved in the activities of the mind. For instance, some positions in embodied cognition understand the mind largely in terms of brain processes, but acknowledge that the brain receives information from the body. Other positions take a much stronger stance, such as that the body and brain form one system that cannot be meaningfully separated; our experience emerges from the whole system, which is always dynamically engaged with the world. According to this view, even perception is not the passive reception of information from the world; perception is in itself an active participation in a situation and involves the whole body.
Intersections between theory and practice
There is certainly a good deal of overlap between the academic and therapeutic fields. For instance, a major theme of one of the classic early texts in embodied cognition—The Embodied Mind, by Varela, Thompson and Rosch, published in 1991—is the importance of contemplative inquiry into the nature of the mind, such as in Buddhist meditation. We can see how this lines up with the increased uptake of meditation as a practice for a healthy life and the broad integration of concepts such as mindfulness into therapeutic practice in counselling and psychology.
A recent theory of emotion—How Emotions Are Made, by research psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett, published in 2017—devotes much attention to interoception, or the way the brain surveilles and interprets physiological, bodily processes; this theory explores how interoception relates to our experiences of emotion. An important idea in this context is that our conscious experience is not necessarily what it seems. Feelings and emotions are understood as arising as a result of brain predictions, or how the brain anticipates situations and directs the body based on past situations. Here our experiences of feeling and emotion can be more or less attuned to what is actually happening, depending on how well the brain predicts. A straightforward example is anxiety; most of us have at some point experienced anxiety and its physiological manifestations where the object of our anxiety didn’t come to fruition, but still the feeling did.
The brain can also misinterpret signals from the body, generating experiences that we attribute to our environment, but that really originate in unrelated physiological processes. Many people can easily observe in themselves that tiredness or hunger manifest as irritability with situations that disappears after sleep or a meal. While Barrett’s theory of emotion is not about embodiment per se (it is more about brain functioning) the importance of interoception does fit with the idea that the more we look after and attend to our bodies, the more we can distinguish between different reactions and more readily understand their causes. Doing so can sometimes improve daily life to a surprising degree.
Different academic and therapeutic approaches to embodiment draw upon scientific research to varying degrees, but most cite empirical studies. While therapeutic approaches obviously make more use of clinical studies, both approaches draw substantially upon neuroscience and recent theories developed in that field. Examples of these are neuroscientific theories of emotion developed by Antonio Damasio and Joseph LeDoux through research, books and publications over the past thirty years. Their theories differ significantly from one another but both have been heavily influenced by studies of fear and threat detection, and discuss brain areas involved in automatic or emotional responses and the formation of implicit memories, which then influence experience in ways we may not be aware of.
Philosophical foundations of embodiment
Despite this enormous and productive turn towards embodiment in academia and therapeutic practice in the past twenty years, I believe something very important is missing. The turn towards embodiment is often expressed in, or at least forced to fit with the language of neuroscience—it has occurred at the same time as the flourishing of neuroscience, at least partly fuelled by significant technological progress in that area. Our ability to observe and map brain functioning has improved immensely and much of the research drawn upon in relation to embodiment does come from neuroscience. But even if we can better detail and understand how physical and physiological brain and body processes interweave and integrate, this still doesn’t explain how our experience arises. The so-called mind-body problem is as alive as ever.
Of course a better understanding of brain functioning is worthwhile, but it does mean that embodiment is at times added on, forced to fit somehow into this existing body of knowledge. This creates a default position that explains embodiment in relation to the brain—the body gains importance in our consideration of experience, but experience is somehow still in the brain. This default position is further complicated by the status of neuroscience—references to brain functioning can act as a mark of expertise. For instance, to help a client understand anxiety, a therapist might describe implicit memory in relation to the functioning of the amygdala (a brain area often associated with that type of unconscious memory) or the emotional brain (brain areas present in mammals and often associated with emotion and attachment). Moreover, the field of psychiatry remains highly guided by pharmaceutical interventions, meaning that an understanding of brain chemistry is central but preserves an orientation that tends to eclipse the importance of attending to the body, which we do from within our actual experience.
This default position—embodiment in relation to the brain—that seems to underlie the general understanding of embodiment, in the climate of neuroscience, shows up a tension between science (and its notion of impartial, objective knowledge) and experience (which we usually think of as subjective). Science arguably remains the most credible form of knowledge making in our culture, essentially the current gold standard. Yet when we apply science to experience, we always end up reducing it to the physical, which makes experience secondary. It becomes impossible speak about experience in its own terms, to really get at its meaning and to fully appreciate the role of feeling in and with the body in all areas of human life.
To bring embodiment to fruition, then, we must understand the relationship between the physical body and conscious experience. While the body and brain can occupy the same level of discourse (the physical) understanding the body and experience requires something different. This something different is, I believe, a completely different worldview. Importantly, that worldview is not in opposition to science, (in the way that the subjective is often seen as in opposition to the objective) but rather supports developments that are already happening in some branches of science; it is a worldview based on change, process and perspective.
So, by embodiment philosophy, I mean the worldview that can systematically answer questions about experience and embodiment. This worldview acknowledges the effectiveness of science as a mode of inquiry but offers a broader philosophy of nature that can better account for feeling and meaning.
The term embodiment philosophy does not describe one particular philosophy, but in my book Taking Heart and Making Sense, I offer an embodiment philosophy that attempts to grapple with these questions.