Embodied and body-led realities

Photo: Barbie Robinson

Very often in my classes and individual sessions I hear from women how they are already practising embodied spiritual traditions but still feel disconnected from their bodies. It takes some unraveling for them to experience the difference between simply embodying a practice and a body-led inquiry as life.

In the mind-body duality that is the most pervasive paradigm across almost all cultures, we have assumed that body is the not-mind space as designated by the mind. The body, in this conclusion, is what the mind defines as body—inert, directed by the mind and its narratives, including spiritual traditions. Most spiritual traditions master the body, control the senses and make the body the instrument of the mind.

Even when we speak of “free-flow” and other forms of embodied expression, I invite you to consider how much of that expression is still a manifestation of mental narratives of freedom, emotion and self.

We are fundamentally captured by the mind. Even the very definition of self is a mental narrative, separating us from Nature. As part of this separation, the body, as designated by the mind, is also separated from Nature.

Ancient dance begins with the Yagna ritual. This is the deliberate setting aside of the known. This can only be an embodied experience because it implies moving beyond the mind. The mind is the seat of the known, including knowledge of the self, the Divine and everything else that is available as information. The mind cannot be complicit in its surrender; this is only possible through a body that is supported to move into its own consciousness. In other words, the body moves into its true state of liberation from the mind.

Yagna is dance. The liberation of the body is an ongoing movement, the emergence of the ritual state of being and consciousness. This is why Yagna is also perceived as rebirth—it signals our rebirth in each moment, free of the shackles of the known.

In Yagna, any “knowledge” the mind holds does not have supremacy. That knowledge is held in the reflective space of the more expansive and connected Yagna state of the body. Truth is not provided to us by the mind. Truth is that which our body recognises from the intimacy of Her primordial sensation-led intelligence. This is of the same essence as the intelligence of Nature, and it is what the ancients experienced as the Divine that unites all life.

A body-led inquiry has its own “technology” and is not simply embodying mind-prescribed techniques. This is not to say embodying in general is not beneficial, it is to invite a consideration of how embodied traditions cannot be conflated with traditions that operate from a completely different intelligence. Not all embodied traditions are body-led, including some ways of approaching dance. This does not make them lesser, but we have to distinguish them as different from the intelligence of an embodied tradition that is body-led.

We cannot distinguish body-led traditions through our usual mental lenses including philosophy and spirituality. I find this is the challenge I face almost every day of my life when I teach my classes. I share the practice with amazing women from different parts of the world who are prepared to pioneer a new way of experiencing reality. I have heard many times from women how they find it difficult to describe what they do to their friends. A body-led reality cannot be conquered by the mind, because its very purpose was to expand us beyond the limitations of a mind-dominated relationship with reality.

And this expansion is vital to balance the nature of mental consciousness to separate and define by providing that material sensation of unity that is available in the body. In this sensation we are connected to Nature as an intimate and material experience—it is not a proposition, an aspiration or a story, but a visceral sensation that profoundly changes the very nature of reality and the place of the mind within reality. So perceiving body-led traditions has far more radical repercussions than we can ever imagine with our minds!

A body-led intelligence is vital to shift centuries’ old mind-led paradigms that have brought us to this divisive chaos of our time. We have given the mind centuries to work things out, surely it is time to give the body the reins!