 Learning
to be Embodied:
A Recommendation for College Curriculum Transformation
by Michael E. Zimmerman
Insights into our emotions can be effective only if we are capable of noticing what
transpires in our bodies. Emotions occur, but they can be overlooked. Hence,
embodiment training would involve lots of practice in perceiving bodily states.
The capacity to make appropriate discriminations of bodily emotional states
could be developed by various kinds of meditation, body work, the Alexander
technique, Tai Chi, yoga, and so on. There are many powerful disciplines available.
Students simply have to be introduced to them.
Yeah, that seems to be my stumbling block. I'm having
a grand time playing in my mind, but I have yet to approach the problem of
embodiment with my body. I don't think I'm lazy. I think I'm scared.
Scared of failing? Scared of the feeling of my body being tired? As if it's
dying? Being physically tired makes me feel like I'm losing my body. Like
it is failing, dying. But my body is strong, even without doing anything.
I can work hard, physically, doing something that makes other peoples' muscles
ache, and I'll wake up the next morning feeling fine. I need to see my body's
fatigue as good.
With increased awareness of one's own
body, one becomes increasingly aware of the living bodies of others...
This seems important to me, because I'm terrible
at fitting my body to someone else's. At rest. If I'm sitting with someone
on a bed or a sofa, I'll accidentally hit them with my body, or slam myself
into them when I sit, or impose positions on them that their bodies can't
accomodate, like trying to bend their elbows and knees in ways they can't
go. I think it's a problem with what they call proprioception.
You'd really think I'd be terrible at sex, but I'm not.
Sex is like a dance for me, and I know exactly how to do it, no matter who
I dance with. For me it's like a ballet. An intricate mirroring, maybe because
I'm so tuned into the other person? Or to myself?
Being
able to feel means being attuned to the world in a way not disclosable
by reason alone. Reason... separate(s) the
reasoner from the natural world. Feeling reminds the reasoner that he or
she is embodied and thus inextricably related to natural bodily processes.
Embodied beings are mortal. Hence, to learn to feel is to learn to be a mortal.
That's important, and it relates to my stumbling block
above.
...becoming enlightened does not mean transcending
the body but rather means becoming wholly this bodily event...
And I think that's what Marty's
trying to tell me when he says to become more aware of my body in motion - when I'm walking,
and moving.
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