What kind of thoughts can we think when we allow the body and world to contribute their intelligence to the proceedings? What happens when we include sights, spatial relations and sounds in our awareness of what’s happening “in the pose”.Ĭan we allow the room, the mat, and the humidity of the air to become part of the pose? My first idea for integrating this perspective into yoga practice, which I’ll be leading in my classes this week, is to experiment with shifting focus back and forth between the body, our thoughts, and the world. The world is indeed a mirror, as what we see “out there” in inescapably tinted by our unique bodymind. There is no generic self-aware human mind, only yours, living inside of this exact Earth and this specific body with its particular history.Īt the same time, the embodied approach to cognition would add the important corollary that anything we perceive “out there” in inescapably conditioned by our particular self. The field of study relevant to the yoga process is much larger than anatomy, scripture and philosophy.įrom the embodied mind perspective, the mystical claim that “it’s all within yourself” is not a grandiose statement of cosmic ego, but rather an acknowledgment that our experience of “myself” arises interdependently with “all of it”. So if we are setting out to study our mind - and perhaps even transform it beneficially - we must consider our bodies, our environment and our whole history (personal, ancestral, evolutionary). Flight arises from the exquisite coordination of many factors inside and outside a bird, as do mental phenomena such as focus, insight and compassion. The basic sense is this: what we call “our mind” is really an ongoing conversation between our organism and the environment, and therefore cannot be located in our heads or even our bodies.Īs Evan Thompson puts it in this excellent podcast, “the mind cannot be said to be in the brain anymore than we can say flight is in the wing of a bird.” Birds need wings for flight, but also an appropriately thick atmosphere, oxygen, a certain bone density, neural patterning, etc. Those words might feel a bit slippery if you’re not oriented to the jargon. The basic idea of the enactive approach is that the living body is a self-producing and self-maintaining system that enacts or brings forth relevance, and that cognitive processes belong to the relational domain of the living body coupled to its environment. It was first clearly articulated by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch in their book The Embodied Mind : This time around, I’d like to explore an approach called embodied cognition that is gaining popularity in cognitive science and has big implications for what we’re doing in yoga. Ģ, sometimes coded as the Moon in tantric symbology. I hope to spin out some of these synergies through this newsletter and my ongoing teaching. Science has so much to offer in this vein, especially when put into dialogue with our embodied experience. Knowing more about our micro- and macrocosmic situation seems quite relevant to the yogic quest of discovering who we truly are. Just as the Milky Way is the universe in the form of a galaxy, and an orchid is the universe in the form of a flower, we are the universe in the form of a human.Īnd every time we are drawn to look up into the night sky and reflect on the awesome beauty of the universe, we are actually the universe reflecting on itself.īrian Swimme & Mary Tucker, Journey of the Universe How remarkable that we humans have awoken to find ourselves in between such vast scales of existence - from quarks, viruses and honeybees through global supply chains, plate tectonics, exoplanets and galactic superclusters. Yet we’re also really big compared to microbes! And life flows on within you and without you
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