Embodiment, Story, and Sensation

I have danced my whole life - both in classes and out - at home, in clubs, at raves and warehouse parties, in mosh pits and caves and fields and stages and festivals. But dance was never a subject for the life of my mind. It belonged to the life of my body. It was a need - As a child I knew communion with spirit through dance. It came through centering and breath, arms and emotion. As a teen I knew the release of anger and where it meets joy in a mosh pit (the body slamming dance floor that accompanies punk music), I knew the dance of stay-the-fuck-back-from-me in clubs and the pleasure of dancing like no one is watching with large groups of other dancers. I knew the discipline of performance through ballet and modern forms, and the mental gymnastics required in flamenco and classical Indian kathak. But to study dance in university was below me. I was smart. I needed a life of the mind that asked it to become critical and political, sensitive and modest. I knew dance. What would I study it for? 

Unbeknownst to me at the time, I was a product of my culture’s dichotomies. Mind over body. That means a lot of things. Dichotomies cascade, one through another, because they always imply a power relation, and thus a subjugation of one thing by another. In the case of dance versus “more serious study,” the mind subjugates the body, bending it to its will. The mind is an active subject while the body is a passive (sitting) object: my body. I studied power in university. Power in language, sociopolitical power, neo/colonial power, gender and social justice, the unconscious, and global economics. I wrote a doctorate on how the cultural production and consumption of nonsense is a symptom of changing paradigms - the shift whereby one meaning system subjugates our capacity to make sense in and of the world. But I never recognized my need to dance, which continued unabated, as part of the dynamics of the power and change that I studied. 

Then came babies. Triplets, then, in my body’s infinite wisdom mid-pregnancy, twins. I gave up cultural theory for cradles and strollers. But still, I danced. I was jumping and turning pirouettes till I was 6 months pregnant, and lay babes on the floor while I danced around them: processing the changes in my life, in my body; integrating this new reality; practicing ways to be present to these two larval beings while still being with myself. This was the turning point - there was no choice anymore but to develop this new relationship between mind and body because body was really forefront. Mind suffered, feeling like a tethered cow, only good for milking. But I followed body, knowing I had to dance in order to stay sane, in order not to follow through on the very real desires to throw babies down the stairs. Being a sensate being - practicing surrender in and to movement, I found some capacity to pause between thought and action, action and reaction. 

I’d never wanted babies because I didn’t trust myself not to abuse them physically. It was my greatest fear. I tried to sterilize myself at 21 but was told I was too young to make that decision. The fact that I had babies finally doesn’t mean my younger self was wrong. It would just have been a different life. Probably a life of the mind. Maybe I would have come to this different organization of body-mind that some call sensate being anyway. Maybe I would have gotten children by other means anyway. It doesn’t matter. The point is that through movement practice, I avoided living out my fear. 

I believe it’s important to name the experience because certainly many parents and caregivers, of children, the elderly, the infirm, the neurodivergent, have the same violent desire to change the immediate situation in which they find themselves in moments of frustration, difficulty, challenge, overwhelm, and fatigue. I wasn’t post-partum, but I did imagine myself throwing a baby, who’d been crying for minutes, hours, days, who knew, at the floor. Hard. Movement practice let me feel that feeling, meet it, breathe with it, and let it pass. I could then move with it in my dance practice, which sometimes looked like me in a corner of the room banging my head rhythmically on the floor, or hitting the floor with a first, until that energy changed on its own, making space for a different rhythm, a different movement to emerge. It doesn’t “look” like what we think of as dance. But it was. It was my dance - the one that was there, waiting to be moved, to make space for what came next, whatever it would be. On a dance floor, I learned to let that moment process and pass so that I could be in the next, moving with it, with some clarity. 

Peak moments, when we are at our highest and lowest, are sometimes the first ones to articulate themselves through movement. Peak moments are the densities of experience by which we emerge from the situations that shape us: our movements and patterns, the rhythms of our becoming and habits of our response. New research in trauma bears this out with unarguable evidence. PTSD is a locked trauma response that holds a life (or lives, when there are care-givers and families), hostage. Addiction too, is a locked response pattern. Embodiment based theories and approaches look for ways to un-fix the reactive pattern. They offer means to process otherwise, using movement to interrupt and reroute toward sensate being in the present. Movement practice builds new neural pathways, and thus opens and offers the very real possibility of different patterning. Some approaches call this hacking the nervous system. Trauma is part of the what and why of embodied emotional intelligence, which is the field in which I am writing here. When we start practicing embodiment, we have the opportunity to process layer upon layer of the peak moments that make up the palimpsest that is the performance of a fixed self-- a self with patterns of reaction and interaction triggered by recognizable situations, like a partner’s misunderstanding of our words and needs, or a car that cuts in front of us on the highway. Fear, anger, sadness, bust out like it’s a jailbreak. A physical surge held in check by the dam of normalcy overflows or sneaks and trickles, and we rage or cry or protect ourselves, and then we cope. We call a friend, have a drink or a cigarette, punch a bag or lift weights. Or we yell at home, pick fights in the safety of our loved ones, eat, or purge. Control or cascade. 

So why embodiment? To make space at the start. To give time, marked by focus and attention, to feeling into sensation in the body. In this first step, we begin to distinguish sensation from story, one of the four basic differentiations critical to growing emotional intelligence and capacity to be present. For example, there is tightness or numbness in a shoulder. Through movement practice, we give ourselves the time and space to notice and become curious about the sensations, adopting them as movement teachers, asking, and answering in micromovements that can grow into whole body listening, how does this move? The cultural norm would have us notice numbness or tightness in a shoulder and explain it by naming it: “oh, that’s just from the bicycle accident I had two years ago that never healed properly.” The story shuts down sensate curiosity. Armed with the story, we can push through, or ignore, or stiffen to protect. We can avoid attending to what is there, interrupting, asking to be heard. Alternately, we can touch it, get a massage, try to fix the sensation, make it go away. The practice of meeting it with curiosity, bringing breath and awareness to it, and letting it dance, will have different results. Sometimes these can be surprising, insightful, visionary emotional or even spiritual experiences. Sometimes they are simply physical easings that soften the tightness, enabling different sensations than numbness, like bubbling, weightiness, sludge, even liveliness. The practice isn’t to fix it or make it go away, but to meet it and move with it. As a literary and cultural theorist, it is clear to me that we are meaning-making machines. Story is what we are and do as we make sense of the world and our places in it. Differentiating between story and sensation, making space to move and include sensation, allows story to evolve and change. It enables us to move from fixed to fluid; from text on the page to relevance in time and place. 

A word on process though. Embodiment enables process. It is a practice of meeting and moving with what is there, alive in us at any given moment. It does not come with an end goal of getting rid of anything. Practice does not make perfect. Practice is always ever practice: means without end. What embodiment practice does though, is build resilience, presence, capacity. It makes space, lets stories shift and change so that we are less locked by the unmet patterns of old stories, and capable of building curiosity and liveliness in their place. It also provides us with a set of really valuable tools to turn to when we notice and catch ourselves in a fixed reaction pattern. 

What tools? The one specific to this article is interoception - feeling, and bringing awareness to what is stirring in the body. What in the body is asking to be heard, to move, stretch, or roll? Bring curiosity to the feeling - can you find a word or two to describe it? Can you suspend the story that names and contains it, and instead, let it move you? Big or small, no matter what it looks like, this is your dance right now. What is alive in you, sensate being? I am aware of a kind of brightness in my left shoulder, some creakiness at the base of my neck, and the weight of my leg collected at the bend of my ankle and where the ball of my foot meets the floor. I also feel the inseam of my right leg as a line connecting inside knee around back of shin to outside ankle and sole of foot between third and fourth toes. I breathe through my upper chest, expanding lungs upward and dropping shoulder blades down back. Spine arches and then undulates toward tail and sits bones, opening hips and swiveling femurs. Blood flow changes, legs swing back and forth, loosening and activating hips, knees, ankles, 24 bones in each foot. Feet start to play with weight, chair legs. Whole body shakes, sighs, ready to move on.

Select Bibliography

Agamben, Giorgio (Translated by Cesare Casarino and Vincenzo Binetti). Means Without Ends: Notes on Politics. Theory Out of Bounds vol 20. University of Minnesota Press, 2000.

LaMothe, Kimerer. Why We Dance: A Philosophy of Bodily Becoming. Columbia University Press, 2015.

Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. University of Chicago Press, 1962.