Susan Aposhyan - Heart Open, Body Awake: Four Steps to Embodied Spirituality

M Y FIRST MEMORY of the embodied spirituality that underlies all my work began with stars. When I was a child, the dark infinity of the sky was overflowing with them. It seemed that the universe was composed almost entirely of twinkling celestial bodies. There was also my small childs body, huddled in an old wool blanket and feeling blissfully overwhelmed by the vastness of it all. More specifically, the seeing and feeling of the stars and the vastness felt somehow continuous, as if without any separation between the little me-ness that was watching and the titanic size and beauty of that which I saw. My body was small, but the feelings it was hosting were as large as that sky.

Growing up in the sixties in Virginia, experiences like this were plentiful. The world was quiet enough and dark enough. Nature was strong enough to dominate my childs mind. Lying in the grasses, watching the endless circuits of the clouds. Hearing the insects conducting their business in meadows. Running through the forest that was itself an endless dance of light and leaves, filled with the symphony of many birdcalls. And then there was the waterrain, creeks, rivers, and wavesflowing over rocks, moving, always moving. Enchanting, beguiling, intoxicating, engulfing, bathing the eyes and the ears and thereby washing through the interior of my body. Nothing was left untouched by these experiences. In having them, I was also sampling the way in which feeling and seeing and hearing and smelling and even tastinghoneysuckle, blackberries, rose hipscould take place under the aegis of a larger continuity. There was no barrier between my body and nature. I was directly absorbed into the natural world, educated by it, without a thought of separation or distinction.

In contrast, the human world seemed quite odd and disjointed, and its denizensthe people around mehollow, unnaturally subdued, as if they were merely playing at being alive rather than actually living. As I grew older, I saw that they were making deliberate choices to ignore life, to wall themselves off from it, electing instead to live within very small parameters, and deceiving themselves and others in the process. I soon learned about the pain that came with this artificial separation of one individual self from the continuity of life. As I became intimate with the pain of my family and friends, I always saw the solution to that pain as reestablishing continuity with nature.

The perceptions Im remembering and describing are quite visual in my mind. When I looked at nature, it seemed everywhere to belong to an effortless universal continuum. But when I looked at people, they appeared to be somehow cut off from this continuum, standing outside it like cartoon figures cut out of a drawing. Eventually I learned that this strange disconnect between people and their natural surroundings was part of a larger existential confusion in our culture. I became interested in psychology and in the possibility it offered to understand this confusion and, as a result, to help relieve human suffering.

Religion was apparently another system that was supposed to resolve the pain. I faithfully went to church as a young girl, and I watched and listened. But I simply didnt see the continuity of healing that I beheld in nature. I didnt see the cartoon figures becoming reconnected to the universe. In my church, I really didnt see much happening at all.

Finally, on the Easter Sunday of my thirteenth year, I resolved to leave the Christian church. Watching the congregation with the exquisitely intense eye of adolescent arrogance, I determined that no one in the room, including the minister, was touched by the words or the music or the presence of other people, let alone a feeling of God. Not a single person there seemed to be in touch with the vital force of their own heart.

Less than a decade later, after time spent meditating, teaching dance, studying psychology, and practicing counseling, I would discover Body-Mind Centering, the lifework of Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen. In her beautiful body of material, I found the inspiration that allowed the disparate threads of my various interests to begin slowly to weave together.

I have spent my life studying what it means to be human in all its aspects. I have studied the body, the mind, psychology, various religions, spirituality, art, anatomy, physiology, neuroscience, evolution, movement, birth, and death. I have worked with thousands of people, individually and in groups, in classes and retreats; as a psychotherapist, a bodyworker, a movement teacher, and a meditation teacher. And from all this, there is one thing I know for sure: we are all in this together.

One of the basic tenets of embodied spirituality is that we each have to begin where we are, as we are, with whatever is arising in this body right now. On one level, our individuality is a crazy swirl of thoughts, emotions, sensations, and beliefs happening in our bodies moment to moment. With awareness, we can emerge from this swirl into an open clarity, resonant with the world around us. From here, we can begin to work together to wake up humanity and avert the planetary crisis that may end us. Even though we are all coming from different places, different views, we are truly all in this together.

I first began teaching about embodiment in the 1980s. At that time, the use of the term was rare. Now it is ubiquitous. Yet when people refer to the word embodiment, they are usually approaching the body in some cognitively dominant manner. They remain in the realm of ideas, thinking about the body and telling it what to do. All too often this realm of ideas is mixed up with mainstream cultural tropes about how the body should look, feel, and be. I want to reclaim the word for its deeper, wilder purpose.

Embodiment is something that all the other creatures on the planet exhibit and something we adult humans have systematically attempted to snuff out in ourselves. We can define embodiment as the continuous, complete, and free flow of cognition, emotion, and behavior through our bodies. Practically speaking, this means that whatever is occurring within our beings is allowed to organically express itself in our behavior. Is this dangerous stuff that leads to chaos? Not really. Through the course of this book, as we explore the physiological, evolutionary, and neurological bases of human embodiment, we will come to understand that our drive to live harmoniously with others is deeply embedded in us. Thus, as we practice embodiment, we tend to become more compassionate toward, more connected to, and more considerate of the world around us.