Losing Oneself

Tag: embodiment

  • embodiment isn’t a match with experience

    Here’s a quote from Tim Ingold’s Making that describes how Maxine Sheets-Johnstone questions the synergies between embodiment and experience:

    Comparison of the two pieces vividly demonstrates how animacy and embodiment pull in opposite directions: where the former is a movement of opening, the latter is bent on closure. For the living, animate beings we are, argues dance philosopher Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, the term ‘embodiment’ is simply not experientially apposite. We do not, she insists, experience ourselves and one another as ‘packaged’ but as moving and moved, in ongoing response – that is in correspondence – with the things around us (Sheets-Johnstone 1998: 359; Ingold 2011b: 10).

  • body awareness and embodiment

    Wolf Mehling specialises in family and community medicine and has published on interoception and body awareness. In one study, Mehling and colleagues sought to understand the “conceptualisation of body awareness” in mind-body therapies like yoga, TaiChi, Body-Oriented Psychotherapy, Body Awareness Therapy, mindfulness based therapies/meditation, Feldenkrais, Alexander Method and Breath Therapy. They created a series of focus groups with experienced practitioners and their clients/patients.

    The theoretical stance of the practitioners demonstrates a striking parallel to positions presented by phenomenological philosophers who, in the tradition of French phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty, attempt to transcend viewing persons in dualistic terms and focus not on “the body” as such but on what it means to be ‘embodied’. “Embodiment is the human experience of simultaneously having and being a body; the term conceptualizes the body as a dynamic, organic site of meaningful experience rather than as a physical object distinct from the self or mind”

    – Mehling, W.E., Wrubel, J., Daubenmier, J.J., Price, C.J., Kerr, C.E., Silow, T., Gopisetty, V., and Stewart, A.L. (2011) ‘Body Awareness: A Phenomenological Inquiry into the Common Ground of Mind-Body Therapies’. Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine 6 (1), 6 http://peh-med.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1747-5341-6-6

  • embodiment is not apposite

    Here’s Tim Ingold from his 2013 book Making citing Maxine Sheets-Johnstone (who has long been critical of how we in dance use the term embodiment):

    … animacy and embodiment pull in opposite directions: where the former is a movement of opening, the latter is bent on closure. For the living, animate beings we are, argues dance philosopher Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, the term ‘embodiment’ is simply not experientially apposite. We do not, she insists, experience ourselves and one another as ‘packaged’ but as moving and moved, in ongoing response – that is in correspondence – with the things around us (Sheets-Johnstone 1998: 359).

    – Tim Ingold Making (2013: 94).

    In the detailed, messy and complex conversations between Katye Coe and me after each improvisation we both seem to share a similar experience of slippage or “correspondence” between the interior and exterior. As if that which is contained in a “bag of skin” (from Alan Watts) is not functionally discreet from that which is out.

    The Sheets-Johnstone reference is from The Primacy of Movement (1998) Amsterdam: John Benjamins.