Losing Oneself

Tag: phenomenology

  • 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

  • me doing into it doing itself

    One of the things that Katye Coe and I have been focused on in the studio is the remarkably subtle shift that happens between a very expansive and open awareness that is the consequence of attention, and the feeling that a similarly open awareness is happening of its own accord. Katye beautifully captures this distinction as “me doing into it doing itself”.

    I’ll get more into this another time as it seems to be at the phenomenological heart of these movement improvisations Katye and I are practicing. My initial hunch is that these oscillatory experiences (between me doing and it doing itself) are different by degree, and not by kind.

  • experience and consciousness

    Wherever there is experience, there is phenomenology; and wherever there is phenomenology, there is consciousness.

    – Anil Seth (2021) Being You: A New Science of Consciousness. London: Faber & Faber

  • the body tends to efface itself

    Normally, the body tends to efface itself in our world-directed activity. However, it appears as an object of conscious attention, particularly when it is inadequate for a task to be performed, be it by a lack of capacity, fatigue, illness or numbness, and whenever it becomes an object for others to whom I feel exposed. In these cases, the body’s performance is made explicit and may often be disturbed. Thus, the body has a double or ambiguous experiential status: both as a ‘lived body’, implicit in one’s ongoing experience, and as an explicit, physical or objective body. An ongoing oscillation between these two bodily modes constitutes a fluid and hardly noticed foundation of all experiencing.

    –Thomas Fuchs and Jann E. Schlimme (2009) ‘Embodiment and Psychopathology: A Phenomenological Perspective’: Current Opinion in Psychiatry 22 (6), 570–575.

    I find the language of the body effacing itself to be fascinating. How it is that the body can do this to itself? Is the body in this case both subject and object?

    The work in the practice component of this research is to foreground the body in consciousness such that it tends not to efface itself, if at all — to patiently allow, enable or afford the body to resonate through consciousness. What are the strategies for such affordance? What does this feel like?