Growing up, most of us kids took our body for granted. Cuts healed, broken bones mended, measles, mumps and flu peaked and then eventually moseyed on down the road. What few parents realized then, and probably fewer realize today, is how integral and critically important body-awareness is to both worldly and noetic wisdom. Learning to deeply attend to and be supported and validated in how we feel in our bodies becomes an essential component for not only finding meaning and purpose in our work and relationships, but for also being able to refuse work and relationships that don’t provide sufficient meaning and purpose.
Moral Jazz
Barry Schwartz, a long-time professor at Swarthmore College has recently written a book entitled Practical Wisdom (with Kenneth Sharpe). In a Google talk on The Choices That Matter, Schwartz outlines how kids who grow up body-wise will operate at very high levels of consciousness in future society.
First of all they will be “moral jazzmen” and “jazzwomen.” Meaning they will realize that there are exceptions to every social and personal rule and know instinctively how and when to improvise and break them for the greater good. Body-wise kids will be able to use the feelings in their bodies to choose among virtues or rules that show up in conflict in their daily lives. They will be easily able to navigate the gray waters running between the world’s black and white borders. They will also have a preponderance of mirror neurons allowing them to become Monster Empaths, easily able to take on the perspectives of others. They will instantly and instinctively know how falsifying a mortgage application or over-leveraging investments will play out personally and globally (Hint: Not good). And most importantly, they won’t need social approval to adamantly trust such instincts.
Free in the Middle
Unlike the people we currently have representing us in Congress, body-wise kids will be readily able to recognize the middle ground and have a toolbox full of creative ways to get there. They will deeply know the good and virtue in serving others rather than manipulating them for their own personal needs. They will form businesses and creative associations for the express purpose of serving. Their personal national anthem will be found in this short, compelling ironic video: What About Me?
Body-wise kids will know that wisdom requires more than a cap and gown and that the expression of wisdom is necessary to monitor and deploy every day. They will also know that when it’s up and running, wisdom will very likely become self-sustaining. Wisdom will no longer let us – as parents, teachers, healers and citizens – get away with simply doing tricky, clever, left brain things. They will come to intimately know the Great Heart required of wisdom.
Part of why wisdom needs to be embodied is because, together with the right brain, the body holds the security clearance that perpetually determines what information makes it up and into conscious awareness. In his seminal paper on PTSD and unconscious process, The Body Keeps the Score, Harvard psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk describes how every action of emotional significance that we take or that is perpetrated upon us, whether it be a circumcision before we have words to remember with, or unskillful actions done in a drunken stupor or blind rage, it all becomes stored somatically in the body and right brain. It’s for that reason, in part, that soldiers who kill the enemy have significantly higher incidents of post-traumatic stress than those who witness a comrade’s death. There’s no escaping the Santa Claus who knows if we’ve been bad or good – s/he lives eternally in our own neurophysiology.
FACE the Music
Finally, Dan Siegel, the acronym-loving UCLA neuro-psychiatrist, considers that body-wise children will be walking around with brains showing up with great FACES – brains that are Flexible, Adaptive, Coherent, Energized and Stable. What we will find at the heart of such brains is COHERENCE – our children becoming Connected, Open, Harmonious, Engaged, Receptive, Emergent, Noetic, Compassionate and Empathic. For a delightful illustration of what that might look like directly, check out this interview with a one-year old!
Thousands of years ago if you weren’t aware of your body, you would be dinner for a predator. Your life was about being in the tribe, working together, honing physical skills, and learning about your environment’s every detail. It was your very survival. In today’s society we are so outwardly focused that our own internal somatic awareness is actively discouraged! Thomas Hanna the Somatic Educator, wrote about the same phenomenon as van der Kolk – that there’s not one thought that enters our brain (the all encompassing filter of sensory awareness that it is) that isn’t responded to muscularly in our bodies.
Just being aware of how we respond to life reflexively or habitually due to our childhood can change the way in which we experience our bodies today. Someone who is somatically disconnected will also be someone who is also more likely to experience chronic muscle pain and wonder what happened to cause it. I see this every day in my own work.
Thanks as always!
A tribute to generations forward that no parent in her/his rightful body would wish to deny. However, we have foolishly denied body consciousness to ourselves, as parents through whatever mechanisms we utilized and thus to our children….the body seems to come last if at all.
A simple rememberance daily will suffice. I recall sitting in a group of people (all ages) all nervous and not terribly body present. The exercise was to simply begin tapping first on the arms and then the legs and so on…presence returned to the now shinning and vibrantly smiling faces. Why oh why do we forget the body so. Spirituality is culprit in my book. Yoga too, generally (not always) equaling out of body practice and experience. How does it feel in the body and where are you feeling that? Good questions to live by daily.
“They will come to intimately know the Great Heart required of Wisdom” now that is a story I want to hear. Beautiful choice and arrangement of words. This is the wisdom that comes with experience and direct connections, either or maybe both–and not the wisdom so cheaply for sale in today’s world–shaman this and shaman that…
Thanks Mark for a painting a positively balanced world picture for the future of our children and their’s to be…a naturally feeling, sensing, intelligent physical integrated being. And how wonderful to turn down those jobs and relationships that are less than meaning full and purpose full, whatever one’s requirements may be.
In Body,
Cheryl
“Learning to deeply attend to and be supported and validated in how we feel in our bodies” begins at birth when babies are allowed complete freedom of movement, thus developing authentic expression in all domains.
The dog and pony acts that babies are subjected to by things like mats fixed to activity bars with lights, music and colors ablaze when adults believe they need that stimulation serve to stop their mind-body connection, and feeling their bodies shut down, they may habituate to this dormant fate. I’ve watched the body of a four month-old twitch, shake, and stiffen while piercing stressful squeals were expressed when he was laid down under one of these. When gently removed and placed on a mat with a few simple objects nearby, within a few minutes this same baby’s newly relaxed spine allowed him to lift an arm towards his small soft toy animal, bring his pelvis toward the same direction and lie comfortably balanced on his side gazing at his hand reaching out, already gaining eye-hand coordination for fine motor skill-building. He knew it felt good to embody his attention from within his own “body wisdom” – a term from my teacher Magda Gerber. Her pioneering work, what she called The Educaring(tm) Approach, allows caregivers and parents to do less and enjoy more the natural miracles of infant development. These are truly the future body-wise people in the making. Find out how your offspring can grow similarly: http://www.rie.org
As we discern knowledge from wisdom, it seems, at least intuitively, that wisdom implies some level of long-lived experience (i.e. typically in tales the “wise old woman” and rarely the “wise preschooler”… not that we won’t find the exuberant, authentic, brilliant, intuitive and jazz-inclined preschooler).
If this is so, it would make sense if we treated the aging with a little more collective compassion… that a youth-obsessed culture may, by it’s very nature, become a culture with a paucity of wisdom.
What Dan Siegel’s FACES and COHERENCE may allow is not just jazzy individuals but something of a jazz-band culture (although it seems the jazz age crashed and burned)… a time when the grown-ups might swing once again… perhaps rooted in our bodies rather than in Wall Street, Washington or Hollywood.
Here’s to a COHERENT zeitgeist, and if not… Night in Tunisia.