How To Get Out Of Your Own Head | Mark Walsh | Modern Wisdom Podcast 230

So do you want to have some conscious embodiment or do you just want to have the same old bloody unconscious embodiment that your dad had and his dad before him, and that your culture gave you, and you're supposed to have as a working-class British bloke, or whatever the hell you are out there? Like, like, that's, you can just be completely unconscious with that, or you can say, "You know what? I choose something different." And I'm a believer of any embodied practice. If people want to do yoga or dance or martial arts, different people like different things, great. Get in your body. Start to feel again. Stop thinking that wanking over porn and reading books is gonna cut it. Like, get into a dojo, go do yoga, do something that you get into your body again and reclaim that humanity.

(wind blowing) What does embodiment actually mean?

Get asked that every single interview. There's different answers. One, you know your body is a part of you. It's not just like a pen or something. It's a part of who you are as a person, your body. The subjective view of the body. So the body as an aspect of our being, as an aspect of who we are as people. There's a reason if people lose an arm, they get more upset than if they lose a pen, 'cause it's part of them. Um, another term for embodiment would be the umbrella, the umbrella term for all the body-mind arts. So I've done martial arts, yoga, meditation, conscious dance, body therapy, improv, body work. All these things have something in common. They relate to the body, uh, for awareness and the body is part of who we are. Um, so even though they look very different, they have this thing in common, so we need a sort of terminology for that. You could say body-mind arts, you could say somatic arts. Embodiment is the word I tend to use. Uh, so that would be another definition. Third definition could be a form of intelligence and we could drill down into exactly what the skill sets are within that. So how's that for an opener?

Nice, man. I like it, considering embodiment to me is a, a d- if you ask me to define it, I wouldn't really understand. Maybe I embody the role of a parent, I embody the role of a podcaster. You know? Um, but so it's crossing the barrier between the mental and the physical whilst remaining in the body?

Yeah. So the common sense usage is actually quite close to the technical usage. We say, you know, such-and-such, uh, embodies leadership. We understand that there's only so much you can learn from a book. If someone said to you, you know, "I've read, Chris, I've read a lot of books on kissing. I'm an amazing lover."

(laughs)

Or, you know, "I've looked at a lot of websites on how to drive a car. Do you wanna lift to Newcastle?" You might say, "Well, hang on. That's one way of knowing. That's knowing about something," right? So, uh, if you're listening to some of your podcasts to prep for this, it tends to be the Western philosophical tradition is to think about or to know about or to learn about. And that's useful. Like, it's useful for me to know the capital of France is Paris, but that's quite different from the embodied knowledge of Paris. It's quite different from, you know, having your coffee in Paris and there's a certain kind of light that comes up in the morning, and being aware of that, or the French way of being, God forbid. Uh, or, um, you know, that, that manner of Frenchness. So this is a different kind of, of knowledge and requires a different kind of learning. So you know, I'm, at school I read every book in the library. When I was in sixth form, s- high school for American listeners, I literally speed-read every book in that library, and yet I was suicidal, drug-addicted, miserable, failing at my first intimate relationships, and everyone was telling me I was really clever. They said, "You've got a high IQ, you know, you're a very clever guy." And I said, "If I'm so clever, why am I so miserable? What has education f- how has education failed me?"