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How can embodiment techniques be helpful in the workplace?

How can embodiment techniques be useful in Organisational Development work? Listen in to this podcast to find out more
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We recently hosted two Artful sessions on the topic of embodiment. Sophie Tidman hosted one on Radical Rest and Tom Kenward hosted one on Living From Centre More of the Time. They were popular sessions and so we decided to explore the topic further.

In this podcast Martin Saville and Sophie Tidman discuss what brought them to learn about embodiment, how it relates to their work in Organisation Development, the insights it give us over ourselves and more.

If you are interested in joining a future Artful Event you can find out more about our upcoming events here: Our Artful Calendar 2022.

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Transcript

Claire Newell 0:09
Hello, and a warm welcome to the Mayvin people change podcast. This is the place to find thoughtful and heartfelt conversations about leadership and organisation development. Each episode is created with our listeners in mind. So if you have a suggestion for a topic you'd like to hear us talk about, please do get in touch with us on [email protected].

Mayvin are thought leaders in the area of leadership and organisation development and have a wealth of experience in this area, we have a thriving community and we offer regular free events such as Artful Ways programme, you can find out more details via our website, Mayvin.co.uk.

New for this year, we're launching our exciting master's programme which is our MA in people and organisation development. Again for more details, check out our website. You can also find us on Twitter and LinkedIn. We'd love to catch up with you there too. If you enjoy listening to this podcast, please do leave us a review on your favourite platform to help us grow our audience. Thanks so much for being here. And we hope you enjoy listening.

Claire Newell 1:20
Episode 13 Embodiment. This year we have hosted two artful ways webinars on embodiment, one on radical rest, and one on centering. It has proved to be a really popular topic. So once again, I got out my big prodding stick, and I locked our director Martin Saville. And our principal consultant Sophie Tidman in a room and made them talk about the topic further until I had something to turn into podcast, and here's the result. We hope you enjoy it.

Martin Saville 1:50
Okay, so we're having a conversation about embodiment today.

Sophie Tidman 1:56
I was curious about what, what brought you to embodiment?

Martin Saville 2:02
Well, it was a guy called Pete Hamills fault. He's one of our associates and a good friend. And it was he who introduced it to me when I was at a previous consultancy, where we were working together. We won a programme together. A piece of work, which had embodiment as a kind of core piece behind it. And we put that in because he told me about it, and it sounded interesting. And when we won it, we then had to get to a point where I was able to deliver on it. So we we found ourselves with the need for me to go off and do this training. And it absolutely blew me away.

I think that was the thing that was was really striking was I had worked up until that point, in a world that was underpinned primarily by a kind of talking orientation, you know, talking therapy, I trained in psychotherapy, psychotherapists in my family had got a huge amount out of that, many ways, it was the basis of my practice.

And then doing embodied work, suddenly a load of things that I thought I'd done business with, and had worked through, suddenly, I found that they were still showing up in my body. So it was, it was a very kind of striking and slightly humbling experience. And then the possibility of starting to do business with those kinds of issue at a, at a somatic level, at an embodied level, really, it shifted things quite significantly for me. And so that was, I suppose the start. Yeah. How about for you?

Sophie Tidman 4:08
I guess it was quite traditional in that I just did a lot of yoga. And when that's actually quite good, and and some of us to make sense of some of the stuff they talk about in yoga, where previously, I would have thought it was quite woowoo. And I think I have that very intellectual background as well. I guess not not in psychotherapy, but certainly my education. I mean, I did a lot of I used to play chess, it's very kind of in the head. So I think I think it was probably what I really needed.

Martin Saville 4:42
So anti head work on the head work.

Sophie Tidman 4:45
And there's just a very directness to it that I find very, I mean, you don't experience your world through rationalising. That's just the sense you make of it afterwards, but there's a very direct experience of being in your body.

Martin Saville 4:59
Definitely and I mean, that was certainly my experience was that both both for me and then working with others. There's a way in which it's so easy, isn't it to come up with all sorts of stories. defences, if you like about why things are as they are, why they can't change, you know why they're not as they look. We can tie ourselves up in knots there. And somehow the bodywork just cuts through all that because it's there you are, there's your body doing that thing. But it does, you know, so what one of the really striking things for me, I started working with Richard Strozzi heckler, who's one of the kind of leading exponents of this work.

Then later on, I started working with Wendy Palmer, another really fine and experienced practitioner. And what I found when I was working with both of those was that, you know, they both have different ways of helping you see what your body does when it comes under pressure.

So in Strozier's, world, you stand and someone just grabs you by the arm, and you know that they're going to do it. It's not a particularly hard or violent grab, but your body goes into this kind of reactive mode. And it doesn't seem to matter how many times you do it, your body does the same thing each time. And when you work with Wendy Palmer, it's a process where you work with a partner and someone pushes you. Yeah. And again, your body does that thing. And,

Sophie Tidman 6:34
and, you know, when she does that, when we do the Wendy Palmer whenever I do that, my response I always think afterwards. Oh, damn it again. Yeah, I think that's the point.

Martin Saville 6:47
Not gonna do it this time. And actually, she's got this very delightful way of. If you're the kind of person that has got sort of sufficient mastery over your, your immediate reaction, and you think, oh, I've mastered it there. She has this way of just taking your arm and sort of beguiling you along, and then pushing you and it's like, damn , done it again.

So, the body always wins. Yeah. So and then making sense of how does that show up? So so the particular move? Yeah, so in mind, it's a way it's definitely an a kind of an away move always from whatever is whatever is grabbing me or pushing me. Other people. It's it's more more toward and yeah mine, mines always away. And, you know, where does that show with my life?

Well, it shows up everywhere, you know, whether that's someone asking me to do something, my first thought is, oh, no, I can't do that. Sorry, no. And then it's kind of like, well actually hang on a minute, you know, do I want to do that? Should I shouldn't I, I can start to think about it.

But I remember if I was invited to something, even if it's something I wanted to do with someone I wanted to be with, you know, that was my first move. You know, so from from something like that, that's really kind of innocuous through to something where, you know, someone might be attacking you in school physically or verbally, you know, same reaction. And it's like, okay, my body just does that. It's what it does.

Sophie Tidman 8:14
And we, so I know that that's your reaction. Because you see how people move in the world. And that's how they are.

Martin Saville 8:23
Yeah,

Sophie Tidman 8:23
I mean, we're Mayvin's, it's how you do something, it's how you do everything. But the most fundamental thing you do in the world is how you are in the world, how you move in the world. You intuitively know, might not be explicit in, explicitly say it or kind of say even to yourself, you see people you understand their, their essence of it just by the way they move.

Martin Saville 8:43
Yeah, yeah, you get a hit off someone, don't you? You get to get a sort of a sense of them. Yeah, yeah. So which are you, I have a sense of you're probably towards but but there are different types of towards aren't there. So how would you characterise your, your response?

Sophie Tidman 9:01
I push. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, very much. It's the fight response, isn't that

Martin Saville 9:06
Right. Yeah.

Sophie Tidman 9:07
And the slight and then it's like pulling back like, Oof, oh not really

Martin Saville 9:13
Yeah I don't mean it. Yeah.

Sophie Tidman 9:15
Yeah.

Martin Saville 9:17
I was just thinking it was funny. I remember doing this kind of practice, pairs practice with a, a guy who had a very, he was quite intimidating. Yeah, I was slightly intimidated by him. He had a powerful presence, he was large, physically large, big, booming voice. And quite a powerful job. You know, he was the chief exec of quite a significant organisation and I was doing this pairs practice with him.

We were grabbing each other and he grabbed me and I did what I did. And then I grabbed him and he made exactly the same kind of move and it completely surprised him because it was totally different to his story about himself and the identity he'd created. And he burst out laughing, he just looked at me. So we're both just scared little rabbits, aren't we. It was just such a lovely moment of kind of contact.

Of course, what that then meant was that, you could then start to have a conversation with each other about what we do with that in the world and how we are with that in the world. And, you know, for him, it opened up all sorts of stuff around how he, who's created strategies to protect himself. How that sort of slightly intimidating front that he has was actually a strategy to protect himself from that, that sense of innately wanting to move away from things when they were challenging him.

And it was a really fruitful, lovely conversation, because, you know, and I was trying to think, you know, how, how long would it have taken to have had a coaching conversation with him? Where we would have gotten to the point where that might have been something you'd been open to? Just sharing? Yes. Yeah, it was, it was lovely.

Sophie Tidman 11:08
Yeah. directness. Yeah, I was thinking a lot about the body is a metaphor for everything, really, like anything you see out there. In the world, in organisations, you can also feel in the body. Yeah. Which isn't surprising, because this is our primary way.

This is how we are in the world. This is how we experience the world. This was our instrument of action in the world, I was doing a lot of practice around the body is fluid, because it's because it's about 80% fluid. But we we are in the world, when we move, we're very solid. We think of ourselves as very solid, and therefore quite unchangeable.

And if you think and also, we see ourselves as machines a lot of the time, the way society kind of conceptualise the body, the way the healthcare system treats it, kind of has lots of problems to be solved. Not really necessarily something that that flourishes, and that is, you know, it's a pleasure to be embodied.

Talk about that much in our society. And the same thing with our organisations, we think of them as machines, but actually that in Mayvin, we've often we start with that point. But I think it comes even more a more sort of primitive level that our very concept about ourselves and our bodies actually gets in the way of our aliveness.

Martin Saville 12:32
Yeah, yeah. So how would things be different if we could shift the metaphor, a bit.

Sophie Tidman 12:40
I think they'd be more vibrant, and more, no more space for pleasure, the connection,

Martin Saville 12:49
There's something in what you're saying, for me about being embodied is about actually being able to experience and therefore contain our energy and our aliveness and allow ourselves to feel it. And I think, perhaps what we do, under the kind of pressures of everyday life is, we have ways for dampening that down a bit.

So one of the things that the embodiment people talk about is, the different ways in which you can just sort of tamp down your your aliveness physically. And, you know, so if you think about, you know, tightening your jaw, hardening your eyes, holding your stomach in my special one raising and touching your shoulders, those are, they're natural stress responses. They're what the body does under pressure.

In fact, even single celled creatures, if you prop them with a stick, you know, a little rod in a petri dish, they contract. And it's a safety move, isn't it? But doing that actually prevents ourselves feeling ourselves. And you know, if you if you think as a child about, if you're trying to stop yourself crying, you know, someone's telling you to do that, that's what you do.

You you clamp down on your jaw and you you hold everything in and you push it away. And of course, if that then becomes your habit, you become the man who hasn't expressed or felt an emotion for most of his adult life. And so there's something for me about embodied work giving ourselves some of that back. I think that that's the connection I'm making. To what you're what you're saying.

Sophie Tidman 14:36
Yeah, it's all contraction, isn't it? And a separation of self.

Martin Saville 14:40
Yeah.

Sophie Tidman 14:41
Away from others. That's what we do under threat. Yeah, what we're trying to move to is more expansion and permeability. You connection.

Martin Saville 14:50
Yes, yes. Letting people into your space letting challenges being your space as they are not needing to be different. Yeah, We should probably talk a bit about centering as well shouldn't we, in that context, or I feel we should anyway.

Sophie Tidman 15:06
Yes.

Martin Saville 15:07
Because that seems to me to be a really sort of central idea. It's more than an idea, isn't it? It's a central way of being in the body when conversation. You're, you're centred or you're off centre. And I suppose all those kind of reactive states, we've been talking about this contractions and so on are ways of not being centred. And actually, it's when when we're centred when we're in that place where we're breathing easily, we're not scrunched or pulling ourselves out of shape. Our gaze is soft and open, we can then be in that place where we can start to notice more what's happening. Connect more, all that good stuff.

Sophie Tidman 15:54
Yeah. And it's very intuitive. Even the words, isn't it? When I tried to explain embodiment, I'm like, but we use it all the time in our language. I mean, essentially, we have a central channel of our body. We know when we're kind of away from that. We know when we're off balance, you know, emotionally, there's always a, there's an emotional sense, there's a physical sense of it. And we know when you've got somebody's back. You know, when you're seeing eye to eye, it's all kind of in those geographical embodied terms. That's all our language, our language is all like that.

Martin Saville 16:26
Yeah, you're absolutely right. Talk about solid people or people being a pushover.

Sophie Tidman 16:32
Yeah. Or just even open people

Martin Saville 16:36
Oh indeed. Yeah. grounded. So So you're right. We know this stuff. At an instinctive level, don't we?

Sophie Tidman 16:46
Yeah. But sometimes I think that yeah, the word centering sounds like jargon to people. I never quite. It is always challenging I feel to kind of talk about embodiment, even even the word, is it embodiment, somatics. It's never, I never found a nice word for it really. People get I think that's because it's it's actually very countercultural. And so I don't think the language is there yet.

Martin Saville 17:12
Well, I suppose if we get intellectual about it for a minute, there's this, which, of course, is paradoxical because, well, because it is, but but there's something about the enlightenment, and Descartes, and I think, therefore, I am, leading to this to the idea of dualism, that the body and the mind are separate things. And actually it's the mind that matters. And that's given the world amazing things in terms of the scientific method that have created all sorts of amazing technological advances and all of that good stuff.

But there's, there's a way in which it sort of feels like, you know, in that in that reality, as someone I know, put it, you know, the body is sort of like a taxi that carries the head around from meeting to meeting. The price you pay for that is disconnection from really important part of your experience. And if you really push it, the ability to, to connect with, with yourself and with others in that way that goes beyond intellect.

And indeed, you know, Strozzi says that, that he's convinced that the reason that we're able to pollute our planet is because actually, we feel it separate from ourselves. So actually, if we want to connect to our planet, you know, how do you do that you connect to yourself, your own experience of it. It's sort of as if there's a huge price to pay for that. And it is countercultural, because, you know, it goes against the way we're schooled. The way we were brought up the way, at least here in the West, and the way we, we live our lives.

And there's something always kind of heretical about the idea that the body should, in some way, be part of that wisdom. And, and then, of course, there are religious overtones as well aren't there. So there's a way in which, you know, in certain religious systems, the body is a domain of sin, and as a way in which there's a discomfort around that.

Sophie Tidman 19:11
Yes. And I find it interesting. There's definitely that hierarchy of Mind Over Body. Yeah, the body is the instrument, and it's quite fixed hierarchy, which matches kind of the way our societies have been governed for quite a while. Yeah. The way we expect organisations to be a thick structure rather than this complex, intertwined, kind of.

There is no way of separating body mind. It's actually kind of totally crazy, but we always talk about it as binary in the same way we talk about rationality and emotion is as like two separate ends of a scale rather than like, you don't go my rational mind saying this, my emotional mind saying this, like. Rationality by itself just is totally nonsensical. Yes. not driven by an emotional, by feeling, by drive.

Martin Saville 19:57
Wasn't there that, wasn't an experiment, I think it was something that happened to this man that he was in a car accident, I think it was and he suffered some brain damage. And what they established was that actually his kind of cognitive rational processes were perfectly undamaged. But he'd lost his connection to his emotions. And as a result, he, he couldn't live his life at all.

Because actually, if he opened the fridge and wanted to work out what what to eat, you know, you can't work that out, you know, you have to feel what you want to eat. And then, you know, rational processes may come into, into play. But without his connection to his emotional feeling world, he literally wasn't able to function, the rationality on its own, without that didn't didn't serve him at all.

Yeah. I also wondered, I mean, in terms of what you were saying, just jumping back at a moment, is there something in what you're saying about that split, you know, around gender as well. So is there something around, we act as if the rational world is a male world, and the way the world of organisations traditionally a male world? And so there's a way in which if you bring in all that feeling stuff, that's the domain of the female? And somehow we don't have time for that? Space for that, or?

Sophie Tidman 21:17
Yes, yeah, we're very fixed. That Western mindset of this is what feminine, this is masculine. These are the things we attribute body to female, mind to male. Yeah, rather than thinking perhaps more fluidly. Yeah. Instead of archetypes maybe more helpful.

Martin Saville 21:37
Makes me think, you know, actually, we live in a much more fluid world now, in terms of gender. I think about my, my children's generation, and how much more comfortable they are with that gender fluidity. And I wonder whether in the sense that move towards embodiment, it's part of a shift, I'm thinking, you know, maybe there's hope. Maybe there's hope for us.

Sophie Tidman 22:02
Yeah, it does all seem to come together. And embodiment does tend to be quite female dominated, if you've noticed, right, yeah. You and Pete are obviously bucking the trend.

Martin Saville 22:14
Yeah, I guess. Although it's interesting. I think about Richard Strozzi Heckler, who really does embody a very male way of being as a former Marine. He's got quite a kind of powerful presence. But it's certainly true that then if I think in his organisation, most of the people in other roles in there were women. So I suppose there is something about about that. And I don't know it feels like this is a conversation along the same lines of more women in senior roles, more people of colour, in senior roles in organisations, it feels like this is sort of part of that kind of shift.

Sophie Tidman 22:52
I remember my, one of my first working experiences, like looking back now it was so rigid. And it was like, working in a government ministry, we used to call it the ministry of funny walks. It seemed to be anybody who got to a certain senior level position, just had a very strange walk, weren't quite connect the parts of their bodies weren't quite connected to each other.

It was like a very, like, people didn't really touch in the workplace or anything like that. And then I worked in Africa for a bit and so nice, just putting your hand on somebody's shoulder and kind of like having that connection while you have a conversation. I really liked that it was such a relief and I think there is a certain amount of observing all those boundaries and being quite frugal in the connection you have with other people.

Martin Saville 23:49
Yeah. We've got some learning to do, I guess, haven't we? Yeah, collectively, all of us.

Sophie Tidman 23:56
So I think what often people think about embodiment isn't isn't just a bit like mindfulness. And definitely, yes, it's part of it. But I think it's very easy to get into the way that Western culture has taken on mindfulness, it's very easy for it to become a very detached thing and where you are meditating in your head, it can be a ruminating space. Whereas there is something really lovely about being in the body, being in your feet, inhabiting the whole of your body where you can't really not be present.

And also, the part, part of the kind of embodied centering you're talking about is often centering in space, so visualising yourself right now in this room, where you are in space. So you're constantly in relationship with the space around you with other beings. So definitely, to me that embodiment, is a social practice. Being present to yourself and being present to others simultaneously, which is you know, it's that is something you obviously have to train just like mindfulness training, your attention.

Martin Saville 25:01
Yeah. So they have a kind of similarities in terms of it's about attention training. It's about watching yourself noticing. But but then actually, they split off in quite different directions, potentially in terms of what they might lead you to attend to.

Sophie Tidman 25:22
Yeah. And I think partly it depends how you, because we haven't actually bothered defining embodiment yet. And it means different things to different people. But often it would mean kind of being very aware of your sensations, which can also be a route back to intellectualising them. So to do so just just inhabiting, just being in your body inhabiting being spontaneous with it, like moving spontaneously, that I think is very freeing.

Martin Saville 25:48
Well, I think you're right, because there's a trap isn't there? Because as soon as you take your experience, your primary experience of being in your body, or whatever it is, and you put it into words, you intellectualised it. You know, it's not it's not, it's not what it is anymore. You know, the words are a representation, aren't they of that experience. So there's something about how do you not do that, and yet still communicate? I guess this is where artful practices or other ways of engaging or presenting perhaps also have something to offer?

Sophie Tidman 26:30
Yes. So try just having practices to totally take the words out, because that is where we go to. Language is very late in our development really wasn't, you know, reptilian brain and our limbic brain, like, their main language is sensation and movement, yeah, sensation, emotion, but we put a lot of weight on language.

Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, one of my teachers, sometimes, she often like says, okay, move from me from this part of you, you know, when you're moving your arm, you can move it like a lever, you know, like a mechanical, you know, the kind of system of levers and pulleys that anatomy has kind of, it's that's just a primary model of anatomy, or, you know, you can move it from the heart, you can move it from itself, like, you know, she kind of talks about it having a consciousness all of its own. So you're not moving from the head. And just lots of experiments like that. Just really quite fascinating to move in different ways or moving from, like, the fluid body, rather than moving from a muscular place or the skeletal system.

Martin Saville 27:34
Yeah. Yeah, lovely. That reminds me of a book I read, I think it was called the spell of the sensuous by David Abrams, but but this point about language. And if I remember, rightly, the point he makes there is that up until we develop writing, we would hear the landscape talking to us, you know, we would be in that kind of connection. And somehow the process of that, that that capacity that we have as human beings to look at something and hear it speak to us got focused on and translated into, into writing. So, you know, when when you read a book or a piece of writing, you will hear it in your head. And in doing that, it was when, as he puts it, the nature and the landscape fell silent.

Sophie Tidman 28:34
Very beautiful.

Martin Saville 28:35
Yeah, and sad, but beautiful. Yeah, yeah. And I don't know from it. For me, there's something about how we recapture some of that, in our 21st century brains without giving up on all the good stuff. All that progress has given us.

Sophie Tidman 28:56
Yeah, I love the phrase, the poetic body. Because you can't, we like to capture kind of the functions of the body and cause and effect, the written word. But actually, how you experience the body how you feel it is incredibly poetic, it's like, yeah, and they're finding the language for it is really important to kind of give it back that voice. Yeah, how this how this particularly feels.

Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen also talks about as you can feel the arterial flow of your body, if you really tune in, and it's different from the venous flow. So one is more like a pulsing kind of like drumbeat. And the other is much more sensuous kind of flow, like a shhh kind of sound and, and sounding is also quite useful that rather than rather than speaking, yeah, so there's something very poetic.

I mean, maybe it's not about it's that kind of come back to that subjective experience of it. And giving words to that and giving giving that voice because we, we tend to kind of complain about we notice our body when it hurts, right? I kind of notice our tummy hurting away and notice kind of like weird thing going on our body. But we won't really pay attention to when it's going well when it's flourishing. And actually what? Maybe that does have a feeling to it.

Martin Saville 30:16
Yeah, absolutely. Just experiencing ourselves in our aliveness. And in our connection to others? Absolutely. Well, I think that, that comes back to what we were talking about earlier, which is, actually I think that, for many of us, certainly put my hand up to this. It's an uncomfortable feeling. And actually, you know, there's a way in which, numbing and pushing that away, is a natural thing to do. For me, it's been about actually building the capacity to tolerate those sensations, actually, to allow myself to experience them.

And for me, that that sort of, been part of my, my journey of embodiment, if you like, the journey towards embodiment, it's been really allowing myself to experience those and feel into them and tolerate them. Yeah. And I know that there are people who say, and I get this, I occasionally get this experience in my body, and I certainly get it intellectually, you know, that actually, all feelings, emotions are physical sensations with a story.

And so there's something for me around, you know, the centering practice in the moment is about bringing myself back from a particular place, you know, resourcing myself connecting myself and all that but uh, but actually over time, for me, the centering practice is about actually developing that, that ability to feel and experience myself and and tolerate it and tolerate it when the energy rises,

Sophie Tidman 31:55
And it moves through.

Martin Saville 31:58
Yeah, yeah. And I know that when I'm able to do that I experienced myself and people experience me as more alive. And I've occasionally had those kinds of experiences of just energy running through and it feels like when I put my finger in a light socket, as a young boy, yeah, that sense of energy really kind of rippling through you.

Sophie Tidman 32:24
Yeah, yeah, that kind of theory of armoring, isn't it that we're holding the embodied part where, we often holding where we don't want the energy to run through because it's too painful from where we were a child and we couldn't cope with it, but we are more resourceful now. So we can so it's about loosening that armour and whether it be in the shoulders or pelvic floor wherever to just let it run through.

Yeah, I remember somebody pointed out to me that how you know, are you feeling compassion? You know, what, you know, when you're hearing, like the horrific stories from the Ukraine in the moment, it's like somebody on the radio, I think it was this morning, talked about it as a kick to the gut, in the recent war crimes. And it's like, yeah, it because it is painful, and you don't there's no way of intellectually comprehending that. Like, it's, yeah. And it's hard to be in touch with that. It's hard to to kind of be open to that.

Martin Saville 33:26
Yeah. And there's something for me about allowing ourselves to experience it without then building a whole story on top of it.

Sophie Tidman 33:37
Mmm just being with it rather than having the blame, yeah.

Martin Saville 33:43
The judgmental or, yeah,

Sophie Tidman 33:45
Yeah and the Shrewsbury and Telford was another recent thing in the news that it was. So much grief there. And kind of talking about blame culture, and then straightaway go into more blame. Because actually sitting with it just being with it. And it's just very hard.

Martin Saville 34:09
Yeah. And, of course, you know, as human beings, we're meaning making machines, aren't we? I mean, that's, that's what we do. It's part of our, our gift and at the same time, sometimes it doesn't serve us. I suppose that feels like a bit of a theme for one of one of one of the themes that's run through this conversation, isn't it is this sort of sense of, we have these amazing gifts as human beings. And actually, in some ways they over done don't service. And it's how we can manage ourselves in that.

Sophie Tidman 34:43
Yes, the pendulum has swung very far one way. Yeah. And embodiment can be a way of bringing it back. But not, not a way of punishing the intellectual, punishing rationality. It's about integrating.

Martin Saville 34:57
Yeah. Always think about that. Yin Yang symbol where inside the dark is the white circle. And inside the light is the dark circle. So there's a way in which one's innately inside the other, rather than it's one or the other, and we banish the other. Because that takes us back to that binary thinking that embodiments inviting us to move away from I suppose.

Sophie Tidman 35:25
Yeah. And, and it's sorry to repeat this, but like that, you can feel that in the body that binary as well, like, I love the Strozzi, kind of when, you know, talking about being grounded to be able to lift up, to root to rise. And that's, you know, from our very, even our developmental pattern as babies and toddlers, like, Yeah, you see that how that develops, like, and you can feel it in your body like, Okay, now I'm really grounded. I feel like I can lift so much more.

Martin Saville 35:55
Wendy Palmer has, she has a metaphor, which I really love in terms of how to do that in practice, which is like a, a plunger on a cafetiere, you know, so there's a way in which you're pushing down the plunger, but at the same time, the coffee kind of comes through and kind of lifts up as you do it. Which so it's, it's a down and up the same time, but I quite like.

Sophie Tidman 36:22
Yeah lovely, always more to say.

Martin Saville 36:33
Well, maybe we'll do a part two.

Claire Newell 36:36
Thank you so much for listening to us today. And we hope to see you next time. Take care. Bye bye.

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