8.
EMBODIED NOT KNOWING
Being brought up by teachers and with a precocious reading habit, Mark Walsh, ‘Embodied Leadership’ trainer, found school and academic learning straightforward. He grew up thinking that this was the only way to learn that mattered – at least until he took his driving test, an important milestone of practical importance in rural East Anglia, UK. He failed the test dismally, several times. He recalls one occasion when he was driven back to the test centre by the examiner on his insistence for their safety. Around the same time, Mark also fell madly in first love and discovered the world of connection and intensity of feeling within the body. “The world of love knocked me off the scholastic pedestal and brought me to my senses.” Sadly, inexperienced in relationships, he soon “failed” in this area too. It turned out that there was a lot he didn’t know.
“What these two hard lessons showed me is that there are other ways to be smart than cognitively ‘knowing about’,” Mark says. “Driving and social relations are not things you can learn from a book. They are examples of what neuroscientists now call implicit, procedural or embodied learning. Leadership, relationships and life itself are an embodied matter. The body is our unconscious and it reveals itself through habit and intuition. If we limit ourselves to what we know about, we limit access to what we really know.”
Mark discovered this through bodily arts such as martial arts and dance that he has since studied. However, in the modern work environment where he trains and consults, he has found that people often ignore the body. True effectiveness through responsiveness and creativity only comes through relaxing and letting the intuitive bodily response flow. In Zen this is known as “Mushin” or “no-mind.” This concept is familiar to actors, comedy improvisers, lovers and great leaders. Mark explains: “The body is a source of both mystery and wisdom. This may be surprising to those accustomed to viewing the body simply as a cart that carries the brain around. So I should first explain that when I say ‘body’, I do not just think of a machine but rather an intimate part of who we are. How we move and how we stand is the way we are in the world.”
Mark notes that the illusion of knowing both the world and ourselves is maintained in our literal leanings and movement patterns. We have habits and the body keeps these in place. “From the perspective of Not Knowing, our bodily predispositions – solidifications of past events – take us away from the reality of what actually is and from flexibility of response. If we are not in dialogue with what may be, but rather repeating patterns from the past, we cannot respond with power and grace.”
The body is a gateway to Not Knowing, a useful resource to tap into when our heads and brains fail us in the confusion and anxiety of the unknown. Rather than try to “work things out” in our usual, habitual ways, only to find out that we can’t, we can practise being more embodied. What happens “below the neck” is crucial as a source of data for what is going on, as well as for giving us clues in navigating the unknown.