Karden’s Corner by: Karden Rabin
To quote Mugatu from Zoolander, embodiment is “so hot right now.” It’s hot because of the outcomes that embodied therapies produce along with the emerging body of research that supports those outcomes. Which is awesome.
As a person who started in this field as a bodyworker, I am thrilled by the inclusion of these modalities. But the question still remains… Why are these approaches facilitating breakthroughs where conventional talk based therapies have failed? Many folks will point to the brain and nervous system and how embodied modalities access them in a more direct way than cognitive based modalities – which is true. But for me, that’s not enough of an explanation. When it comes to human beings, I am always on the hunt for the most foundational principles, the laws of physics if you will, of how and why we work. My observations into embodiment over the last fifteen years has led me to the following conclusion.
Touch, embodiment, or what is often referred to as the felt sense is, in and of itself, a realm of consciousness. Not only that, it’s far older, more massive and arguably more important than our cognitive based consciousness. Deeply understanding this and learning how to dwell in that consciousness is an essential part of our work. Ignoring it would be the equivalent of a geologist only studying top soil.
To put this in proper perspective, its helpful to get just how primordial touch and the felt sense is. We rarely think of it this way but every organism on this planet is a physical phenomenon. People probably don’t think of their neurochemistry as physical, but it is. I mean, how do you think selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) work? They jam a physical object into the physical entry point on the physical synapse of a physical neuron and prevent the physical uptake of the physical molecule of serotonin. Every one of these contacts is literally a touch, monitored by the “embodied” felt sense of the cell. Touch touch touch touch touch touch touch touch touch touch touch touch touch touch touch touch touch touch touch touch touch touch touch touch. Trillions and trillions of touches from the molecular, to the cellular to the gross anatomic level of every second of every day is what life is.
And while I am at it…
Hearing is the movement of vibrations in the air touching specialized touch receptors in our ear that get translated by the brain into sound. Smell is the physical touch of molecules in the air landing on specialized touch receptors in the nose that get translated by the brain into smell. And so on for taste. Eyes are arguably the same but different (and would require a wave/particle debate that we don’t have time for).
Touch touch touch touch touch touch touch touch touch touch touch touch touch touch touch.
And it gets cooler. The first organisms on earth were single celled and the aspect (among a few) that defined them more than anything is in their very name, “celled”. Cell. They had a wall that separated them from what was around them. The most primitive nervous systems arose in the cell walls as it was at the periphery of the organism where they needed to sense and find what they could eat and avoid what could eat them.
Over millions of years, nervous systems evolved and became more sophisticated, but for all intents and purposes, they were an artifact of the “skin” of the organism and it was only after many more millions of years that they encephalized. Which is the process by which more and more neuronal tissue concentrates into specialized sensory and processing organs (i.e the spinal cord, brain etc.) deeper in the body and further from the skin.
This, by the way, is the evolutionary explanation for why the skin and the nervous system arise from the same embryonic germ layer, the ectoderm. But let’s be very clear, the brain arises from the skin, not the other way around.
The “skin” of the embryo “folds” in to create the brain and central nervous system
To further illuminate this, I am going to borrow generously for a moment from Deane Juhan, author of what is quite possibly the most profound and beautiful book on bodywork, Jobs Body.
This close association between the skin and the central nervous system could not have more concrete anatomical and physiological connections.
Skin and brain develop from exactly the same primitive cells. Depending upon how you look at it, the skin is the outer surface of the brain, or the brain is the deepest layer of the skin. Surface and innermost core spring from the same mother tissue, and throughout the life of the organism they function as a single unit, divisible only by dissection or analytical abstraction [emphasis added]. Every touch initiates a variety of mental responses, and nowhere along the line can I draw a sharp distinction between a periphery which purely responds as opposed to a central nervous system which purely thinks. My tactile experience is just as central to my thought processes as are language skills or categories of logic.
The skin is no more separated from the brain than the surface of a lake is separate from its depths; the two are different locations in a continuous medium. “Peripheral” and “central” are merely spatial distinctions, distinctions which do more harm than good if they lure us into forgetting that the brain is a single functional unit, from cortex to fingertips to toes. To touch the surface is to stir the depths.
To touch the surface is to stir its depths… two different locations in a continuous medium… the brain is a single functional unit. See what I am saying now about a geologist studying only topsoil? If we are only interfacing cognitively in our therapy, we’re missing most of a human being. Evolutionarily, we have been “felting” our consciousness for so long that the length of time we have been thinking our consciousness is statistically insignificant (though not practically insignificant, obviously our thought based realm of consciousness is of critical importance, I’m just trying to make a point 🙃 )
My massive oversimplification but hopefully useful visualization of what I’m talking about
Anyway, the object of this sloppy meander through evolutionary biology was to provide the reader with a more fundamental and practical understanding of how the felt sense (embodiment) was the first manifestation of our nervous system and is a primary realm of consciousness that precedes our cognitive consciousness by hundred of millions of years. That’s why therapies that access felt sense consciousness are capable of breakthroughs in healing – they directly access the majority of our neurophysiology and arguably our most quintessential physical self .
Moreover, this article is an invitation for individuals to go beyond any particular modality and think critically (and creatively) about how one can work with their own non-cognitive consciousness. What becomes possible when we begin to take seriously that there is an embodied felt sense of consciousness that is as vast and as important as one’s cognitive consciousness and does not need to be interpreted through cognition to be meaningful. It’s meaningful unto itself.
We now know that “trauma lives in the body.” It lives in the body because the seamlessly interrelated whole of our neurology and physiology is massively composed of a felt sense that is a co-equal (with our thoughts) aspect of consciousness which can only be accessed through feelings in the body (hence why Somatic Experiencing is called Somatic Experiencing). In doing so, we begin to inhabit and be able to influence a much greater geography of self including the autonomic nervous system and so called subconscious. We develop a real time relationship and voluntary direction of so much more of our mindbody. Whereas humans often feel that they are a head bolted to a body which has powerful and mysterious motives of its own, when we lean into our felt sense as a form of self awareness, we reestablish the ancient union and cooperation with our embodied consciousness
If that sounds like too much, or is too abstract, let me simplify it. When a toddler is upset, a hug is a thousand times more helpful and meaningful than talking to them. That’s because it’s the touch of two embodied consciousnesses, which have been relating to one another through touch for ages and eons, and speak a wordless language which travels instantly from the surface of the ocean of their organism to their very depths. What if you were aware of this realm as much as you were aware of your thought realm? What if you felt it, touched it, moved it, soothed it and lived it?
References:
Excerpt From: Deane Juhan. “Job’s Body.” Apple Books. https://books.apple.com/us/book/jobs-body/id1459698915
Karden Rabin is a mindbody practitioner specializing in psychophysiologic disorders and the co-founder of CFS School
Photo by Matheus Ferrero on Unsplash
