Attuning again

I’ve spent my life feeling out new experiences and finding the threads between seemingly unrelated interests. As a very young human, my life was all about curiosity, imagination and exploration of my body, senses and environment. I’d spend my days crafting and creating, looking at things up close, climbing trees, sneaking up on adults and even putting my foot behind my head before I knew yoga was a thing!

Somehow, in my teens and early twenties, I began to forget all of this. My colourful direct experience was replaced with a lot of time spent sitting still and ignoring my body. Instead of learning through direct human experience, my learning happened through ‘exercise books’ and my self-worth was based upon exams and competition. I began comparing myself to images of success that didn’t belong to me. I had lost all sense of how to listen to my body’s inner voice or leverage my own strengths and interests. I had no idea what I wanted to ‘do’ with my life, so… I did an Arts degree.

By the time I finished uni as a Philosophy major I’d studied:
- Metaphysics (the branch of philosophy that deals with the first principles of things, including abstract concepts such as being, knowing, identity, time, and space)
- Ontology (the branch of metaphysics dealing with the nature of being, and relationships between things with different properties)
- Philosophy of mind (a reflection on the nature of mental phenomena and especially their relationship with the ‘body’ and ‘external world’)
- Epistemology (the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope, and the distinction between truth and opinion)

As interesting as it was to study such big questions, the knowledge I’d gained was very abstract, ‘heady’ and intellectual. I simply didn’t have enough life experience to feel the meaning of all this information, so it was pretty useless for a while. I’d ingested more than I could digest. When my dad died quite suddenly in my third year of studies, I really struggled not to disengage. I filled my life with responsibilities and left no space to let my emotions flow fully. Throughout this, the only constant in my life was strength training. My life revolved around becoming as strong and physically capable as possible, and it gave me a sense of control and worth. At one point I was state weightlifting championships for my age and weight class.

I had built a suit of armour. I was afraid of vulnerability and couldn’t allow my emotions to flow. I hadn’t yet realised the profound linkage between the physical and emotional; that when we suppress emotions, we create issues in the body. I suffered a debilitating back injury and could no longer use my training regimen as a coping mechanism. I hit absolute rock bottom, and things became very dark and dense for a while. Through my rehabilitation, I gradually began to develop a deeper level of body awareness along with huge collection of therapeutic movement tools and a more varied, expressive physical practice. As I did so, raw emotion began to flow for the first time in years. It was incredibly difficult at first - almost too much to bear - but as I dove deeper into the body, I was also delving into stored emotional energy.

This was when movement became a practice of meditation and self-inquiry. For the first time in my life, I had developed a conscious awareness of my body and senses; a relationship with myself. The more attuned I became to my nervous system, the more I realised that the feelings and sensations arising would often be unnameable. I noticed that trying to make sense of it by labelling or conceptualising would only prevent me from being fully present and open to real time experience. I began to feel that divisions between physical, emotional, mental and environmental only really existed within language, and not on the base level of reality. Labels like ‘mind’, ‘body’ and ‘emotions’ limit our relationship with ourselves, because they oversimplify the true nature of our human experience.

For years, I had been living in a world of concepts and lofty ideas, without noticing that these ideas were just one shallow level of life. I began to gravitate towards eastern philosophies and yogas (yoga in this context meaning way of realising truth) like zen, buddhism, taoism, tantra and the non-dual. What struck me about these traditions was the emphasis on embodied knowing, and non-interference (prioritising what is, not what should be). My entire education had been about stuffing my face with more information than I could chew on, and it caused me indigestion when I couldn’t integrate what I’d been exposed to. The eastern way said “hey, why don’t you pay attention to what you’re already chewing on, and see if you can digest that first?”. After all, our 'knowledge’ is useless without meaningful experience.

I began a new way of living, trusting what I sensed and felt, rather than constantly seeking external validation. I remembered how it felt to be a child; open to experience and seeing everything as if for the first time… knowing nothing, and as a result, perceiving more. I found that when I could access this attuned state, life passed through me with a calm yet energising, edgeless quality. I realised I could notice the interplay between myself and my environment with more detail, and therefore become more creative and expressive. My movements became more intentional, I became aware of more subtle sensory feedback from my nervous system and my body felt better. My perspective became more expansive, and so rather than directly engaging with problems on the level at which they would arise, I would be able to see the state of mind which created the problem to begin with.

I’ve been helping others understand themselves through movement for 6 years now, through various lenses: olympic lifting, bodyweight training, injury rehabilitation, yoga and somatics. There are clear links between our approach to movement and the type of person we become (values, attitudes, habits, even diet and sometimes even political beliefs)… So, often, the problems we are looking to solve in our lives begin to naturally flow away when we become more aware of the role of our ‘body’ (to speak in dualistic terms) in the development of our ‘mind’ and ‘identity’. If we could only fully understand ourselves, we’d realise our ‘problems’ arise from misunderstandings of reality. Without expanding our perspective, there is no point in trying to fix anything!