Reproduced by permission of GreenSpirit and the author from GreenSPirit Journal, Vol 10.1, 2008, pp 9-11

Reclaiming our Animal Body – an ecopsychological journey towards embodied spirit - Tania Doley

These lines from Mary Oliver’s well-loved poem[1] for me encapsulate the essence of relationship to my body. They remind me about my ‘animal body’ and connect me to a tangible ‘felt sense’ of my embodied self. Reconnecting with a deep sense of acceptance in this way subtly changes my relationship to my inner self or soul. It seems to call my spirit back into my body, eliciting a sense of ‘rightness’ as I feel an inner shift and the recognition of “Ah yes, this is how it’s meant to feel”.

So often it seems that the journey of spirituality can, inadvertently maybe, lead us to recreate or exacerbate splits in us – mind (‘good’) versus body (‘bad’), spirit (‘good’) versus matter (‘bad’), seemingly a legacy of traditional Christian orthodoxy which taught that the body and its needs and impulses are the ‘root of all sin’. This has generated a sense of shame and ‘disowning’ of our physical selves, experienced particularly perhaps by women in our culture. For me, spirituality is intrinsically about a journey towards wholeness (‘(w)holy-ness’), which includes a process of healing the inner ‘splits’ that divide and separate us from all aspects of our selves, from God or Spirit, as well as from the Earth.

One expression of how we, in the industrialised world especially, have lost connectedness with our embodied, earthy selves can be seen in our dysfunctional relationship with nature and our attitudes and behaviour towards the Earth. We have abused our ‘Earth body’, nature, as we also often neglect or deny the needs of our own bodies - not least through the relentless demands and stresses of complex modern working lifestyles, that so often impede a natural daily rhythm that could otherwise allow us to honour the needs of both our body and soul. Just as in our fast-paced culture we expect endless productivity from our personal bodies, even driving ourselves to exhaustion as we squeeze more out of ourselves, so we seem to expect a never-ending provision of resources from the Earth.

Yet we ignore the wisdom of our body at our peril. I had a humbling experience of this recently following an accident when my car skidded on wet mud and flipped over. It happened so fast, I had scarcely realised what had occurred before registering that I was unhurt. After extricating myself from the vehicle grateful for being alive and safe, I told myself that there was therefore no need for any trauma reaction. Observing my good fortune to have escaped unscathed, a policewoman enquired why Iwas not upset, as would be expected. Advising me not to be surprised if shaking and crying hit me later, she mused that maybe I would be lucky and not suffer from shock. I concurred, naively assuming that because my psychologically-trained rational mind knows about trauma reactions, there was no need for me to have one on this occasion. So I didn’t.

Several weeks of feeling unwell then ensued. I eventually consulted my GP, anticipating a flea in my ear for wasting her time with such a vague malaise. Tomy amazement she immediately pronounced that I had classic symptoms of a condition common in people who had experienced no shock after an accident. Explaining how the normal adrenaline response instead becomes suppressed and chronic, she assured me it should pass in a few weeks and prescribed some rest.

Feeling very relieved and grateful for her insightful diagnosis, I retired to bed with a good book – ‘Waking the Tiger’ by Peter Levine[2]. It was fascinating to learn how animals and humans respond physiologically to traumatic experiences and how our ‘animal body’ naturally responds to a threatening situation regardless of what our rational mind may think. The nervous system’s response to danger is ‘hardwired’ in the reptilian (instinctual) and mammalian limbic (emotional) parts of our brain that we share with other animals. A threatened human or animal must discharge the adrenaline mobilized to negotiate danger, for example by shaking or trembling, or it will succumb to trauma as the residual energy persists in the body creating a variety of unpleasant symptoms. While animals instinctively discharge this energy, humans are less adept at this and when confronted with a life threatening situation, our rational brains may become confused and override our instinctive impulses. Levine described precisely my attitude following the accident, explaining that while our highly evolved neo-cortex (rational brain) cannot override the fight, flight or freeze response to danger, it allows an overcontrol which interferes with the instinctual responses generated by our older (evolutionarily) reptilian brain that are necessary for return to normal functioning.

I felt rather chastened, realising that it would have been much healthier to allow my body’s natural adrenaline response, and disconcerted at my mind’s power in overriding this. I realised that in order to heal more quickly I needed to listen to and connect with the feelings and sensations that my animal body had registered, but my rational mind had not - I had to allow my body to ‘speak’ and tell its own story of the accident and release its trapped shock energy. In processing the experience in this way with the assistance of a colleague, I quickly felt back to normal.

While our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived closely with the natural world and survival depended on powerful instinctive physical responses to danger, in modern life survival depends more on our ability to think. Levine suggests that consequently most of us have become separated from our instinctual selves and our human animal nature, and in so doing, we alienate our bodies from our souls – and also from the Earth.

Certain spiritual and therapeutic practices thus aim to facilitate awareness of our bodies. Buddhist teacher and psychologist Jack Kornfield[3] mentions James Joyce’s Mr Duffy who “lived a short distance from his body”, as do many of us. He explains how meditation practice may involve opening up to physical (as well as emotional) pain as we re-engage with neglected physical aspects and loosen tightly-held muscular patterns.

Wilhelm Reich[4] suggested this ‘body armour’ develops as a defence against emotions and prevents the free flow of energy. Reich saw the mind-body split as causing us to destroy each other and our planet, so his therapeutic work aimed to help reunite mind and body.

Many body-focused therapies view the body-mind-spirit as a whole system and recognise the importance of integrating memories held on a cellular level. Eugene Gendlin[5] views the body as a ‘biological computer’ storing a vast amount of information which it can instantly deliver as a “holistic, implicit, bodily sense of a complex situation”[6]. Gendlin emphasises that this bodily awareness or ‘felt sense’ is a physical, not mental, experience and is more accurate than rational thought. He suggests this inner sensing is a vital ingredient of successful therapy and as change occurs, a ‘felt shift’ is experienced. Similarly, Carl Rogers’ term ‘organismic experience’ refers to that sense of bodily knowing beyond intellectual understanding. Rogers describes a ‘fully-functioning person’ as being congruent with this organismic experience or bodily felt sense, and open to “the sensory and visceral experiencing which is characteristic of the whole animal kingdom”[7]. Western culture does not generally teach us to experience and ‘be with’ ourselves in this manner –we are used to living in a disconnected way that does not embrace our felt sense and ignores this natural human capacity.

Does our cultural world view and Western lifestyle then somehow keep us feeling separate from our own body, as well as from the Earth body and a felt sense of the interdependence of all life? This was brought home to me many years ago with a powerful experience in the Amazon rainforest. Being in this awesome wilderness environment, I suddenly found myself feeling as if I were a jungle animal, tangibly experiencing my ‘animal body’ for the first time. It was an almost overwhelming sense of being part of the jungle, like my body was merging with that of the forest around me as physical senses of which I had never been aware sparkled into life. I could scarcely feel where ‘my’ body ended and the forest began. All my senses alive and tingling, it felt as if I was thinking and feeling through my skin, experiencing my surroundings directly though my physical body. Swimming in the river, with the sweet, warm water caressing my skin I felt immersed in the womb of Mother Nature. It was an extraordinary and deeply moving experience that stirred my soul in a new way. The profound sense of reconnection, with my body and with wild Earth, of becoming ‘embodied’, seemed to touch and reawaken a long-forgotten reality in the depth of my soul and psyche. I sensed that a ‘missing piece’ of my self not previously encountered in my Western upbringing and academic education had finally slotted back into place. Although I had some experience of connection with Spirit, this ‘body awakening’ was different. It felt like a deeper integration of all aspects of my being. Perhaps in the jungle I had also encountered my ‘ecological self’, that Deep Ecologist and philosopher Arne Naess[8] postulates. Wondering whether the experience of feeling ‘embodied’ and ‘ensouled’ in this way somehow arose from being in the unique Amazon environment, I was heartened to find that my newly-discovered animal body responded similarly back in the woods and forests of England.

In re-inhabiting our body or becoming fully embodied we can re-embrace that aspect of ourselves which has grown out of the Earth, quite literally; every atom and molecule that makes up my body is derived from the food and water and air that has sustained my life, and is inextricably entwined with the whole web of life on this Earth and cosmos beyond. Some of the practices of Deep Ecology and Ecopsychology seek to help us reconnect with this truth in a tangibly felt, embodied way, and the Universe Story[9] and ‘Deep Time’ meditations can facilitate this awareness.

In reconnecting with our body, can we then reconnect with nature and the Earth that nurtures us, directly experiencing our interconnectedness with all life and with our deeper Self or Spirit – even perhaps a mystical oneness with all that is? Connecting to our ‘ecological self’, an expanded sense of self that includes an identification with all beings and the biosphere as a whole, often precipitates ‘passionate engagement’ in environmental action motivated not by duty, but by love for the web of creation. Conversely, cutting off from our embodied felt sense disconnects us from feelings, and the reality of our interconnectedness. This may serve to numb us to the pain we might otherwise feel about the destruction of our beloved planet’s habitats and the suffering caused to other Earth communities by our ‘industrial-growth society’ and highly consuming lifestyles.

This theme of listening to the body seems to echo the process of listening to our inner Self, the whispers of Spirit or our ‘inner voice’, and extends also to listening to the Earth ‘body’. Joanna Macy[10] observes that:

Perhaps my experience of suppressing my body’s natural response to a trauma somehow reflects how we relate to our ‘collective body in trauma’. Chellis Glendenning[11] suggests that one response to the trauma of living in a technological society that disconnects us from the natural world may be dissociation, whereby we split our consciousness and repress our experience, shutting down our full perception of the world. Denial is another form of dissociation that protects us from painful feelings and trauma. The collective denial of how our way of life is affecting the Earth allows us to avoid experiencing fear and pain about what is happening to our planet, and to continue ignoring the reality of our destructive behaviour.

As Kornfield notes, problems also arise when denial of our full humanity - and this includes our body - is built into a spiritual view. The denial of ordinary human longings is a form of idealisation prevalent in many spiritual traditions which advise against personal needs and desires, he suggests, so that the ideal of otherworldly perfection risks translating into repression. This can result in cutting us off from our own experience. Spirituality is not about being ‘above’ the mere physical, human reality of our lives; rather, it is about embracing it, including and ‘being with’ all of our experience in a process of integration towards becoming whole. Can an embodied spiritual practice facilitate healing the splits and help us open up to parts of our selves, our body and feelings that we have rejected or denied, so that we can reconnect with our wholeness of our human animal nature? The felt sense, as a means through which we experience ourselves as organisms, offers a way we can learn to hear the Earth ‘speak’, to listen to our instinctual voice and learn again to trust the wisdom of our soft animal body. When we embrace the reality of our experience, whatever this may be, we open to a deeper connection with our bodies, with Nature and with Spirit. Energy flows andwe become more fully alive. As we reconnect, a felt sense of care for ourselves, for others, and for the Earth may arise naturally. Through this process of embodiment and integration of all parts of ourselves, we may then reclaim our whole human animal nature and our connection with the Earth.

REFERENCES

1.	Mary Oliver. New and Selected Poems, Volume One (Beacon Press, 1992).
2.	Peter Levine. Waking the Tiger – Healing Trauma. (North Atlantic Books, 1997).
3.	Jack Kornfield. After the Ecstasy, the Laundry. (Rider, 2000).
4.	William Reich. Character Analysis. New York: Orgone Institute Press, 1949
5.	Eugene Gendlin. Focusing. (Bantam Books, 1981).
6.	Eugene Gendlin. Focusing-oriented Psychotherapy.(Guilford, 1996)
7.	Carl Rogers. On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy. (Constable, 1967) p105.
8.	Arne Naess. Identification as a source of deep ecological attitudes. In M. Tobias (Ed.) Deep Ecology (Avant Books, 1985) pp 256-270.
9.	Brian Swimme & Thomas Berry. The New Universe Story. (Harper Collins, 1992).
10.	Joanna Macy. Interview by Karla Arnes, Wild Duck Review, 1995, II(1) 1- 3. cited in Conn, S, 1998, Living in the Earth: Ecopsychology, Health and Psychotherapy, The Humanistic Psychologist, 26 (1-3)
11.	Chellis Glendinning. Technology, Trauma and the Wild. in T Roszak, M Gomes & A Kanner (Eds) Ecopsychology – Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind. (Sierra Club Books, 1995).

Tania Dolley works as a counselling psychologist, ecopsychologist and Hakomi body-centred therapist.