Embodiment studies IMA residency workshops 2-2002 to 1-2007 - Ellie Epp
- Red titles in the residency schedule summaries below are linked to informal hand-out notes that accompanied these workshops and minicourses. Some of these notes are fairly developed and readable, but others are sketchy. Most have reading lists.
1-2007 Mind and land: a three-part minicourse
Arguments for preservation and restoration of the natural world are often stated in terms of the intrinsic value of that world, or of the health or emotional well-being of humans, but since intelligence evolves in contact with the physical world, isn't the integrity of the natural world also fundamental to the integrity of intelligent function? When we destroy the beauty, the complexity, the manifold coherence of the natural world, we are destroying potentialities of perception and comprehension.
Premise: preservation of a sound and beautiful natural world, and of full contact with that world, is essential to the well-being of human minds; the forming of sentient persons through contact with the world is the specifically human part of environmental value, and the core of value in cultural creation.
Mind and land I: Cognitive ecology: sketch of a project.
This first session of Mind and land will lay out an open question about whether environmental care and concern are necessarily in tension with human aspirations to be technically hip and culturally sophisticated.
Mind and land II: Practitioners of marvelous contact
Does the natural world ever have to run out of interest for smart humans? Is science the only way humans can be cognitively engaged with the natural world? In this second session of Mind and land we'll look at ten instances of organic high intelligence people who, though they are not scientists, are unusually observant of the natural world; and who, by being more highly developed as humans in relation to natural world, rather than in the old ways 'transcending' it, are cultural shapers and innovators.
Mind and land III: Theoretical aspects
What kind of academic support can there be for landed mind
and a culture of organic high intelligence? This final session considers
four kinds of significant academic shift happening already: epistemology
based on perception; anthropology of complex connection; understanding of
disaffection; revision of basic metaphors in science.
2-2006 Body and cosmos: a three-part minicourse
The intention of this minicourse is to lay out a vision of how we as human bodies can live and work in deep love with the universe.
Body and cosmos I: A philosophical map
In religion, science, and philosophy there has been a long history of derogating the physical body. Derogation of bodies (and with them at times the whole of the physical world) has resulted in descriptions of the senses that minimize their capabilities and exclude cognitive powers - for instance mystical experience, intuition, creativity, imagination, and reason - that are more highly valued. But perception is in fact the ground of all of these capabilities. In Body and cosmos I will use findings in poetics and cognitive science to redescribe perceiving as the essential core of human intelligence and connectedness.
Body and cosmos II: Love eyes
I am impressed by two things about visual perception: how much we can know by looking, and how much pleasure we can take in seeing. Neither mechanistic nor dualistic accounts of seeing have had much to say about these significant facts. If we understand ourselves as spirited bodies rather than disembodied minds or machines, how will we understand seeing? Can a more organic redescription of visual perception support abilities we already have and don't use? Are we afraid of seeing? Is there an ethic of seeing? A politics of seeing? How much more can we see? In Body and cosmos II I'll approach these questions by showing four experimental films that invite rapturous knowledge.
Body and cosmos III: What is a body?
Only the middle distance and what may be called the remoter foreground are strictly human. When we look very near or very far, [the human] either vanishes altogether or loses [its] primacy. the physicist, the chemist, the physiologist pursue the close-up - the cellular close-up, the molecular, the atomic and sub-atomic. Of that which, at twenty feet, even at arm's length, looked and sounded like a human being no trace remains.
My question in this session is how to understand the quantum
physics discussion if we keep the human body central. What is the relation
between quantum theory and embodiment studies? Our newer understanding of
materiality grounds the notion of embodiment in a kind of etheriality. What
can be the relation between what is speculated to be the unified but unsubstantial
physical ground of the cosmos and the substantial and separate bodies we
experience concretely and theorize at human scale? Can quantum theory be
used to enrich our sense of bodies at the human scale?
1-2006 Embodiment, focusing and the full self: a two-part workshop
This two-part minicourse will be more experiential than previous embodiment workshops. I will introduce a simple and profound cognitive method as useful in critical thinking and theory construction as it is in creative work or therapy; and I will consider what this amazingly useful technique suggests about the embodied nature of human knowing and being.
The second session will build on experiences introduced in the first; you are welcome to attend either session on its own, but attending both will allow more time for guided practice.
I. Embodiment, focusing and the full self in creative writing and self-repair
This first session of the minicourse will introduce the main concepts - 'felt sense', 'felt meaning', and 'felt shift' and the basic steps for Eugene Gendlin's focusing technique. We will be learning the method in the context of creative writing, but will also look at how it can be used for emotional processing and self-development.
TLA students may be particularly interested in the fact that the same method can be used for both creative writing and therapy, because of what this fact implies about how and when writing can be transformative.
II. Embodiment, focusing and the full self in critical thinking and theory creation
This second session of the minicourse will
demonstrate how you can use focusing both to discover for yourself just
exactly what you are thinking and feeling about someone else's statements
or theoretical framework; and to arrive at theoretical thoughts of
your own thoughts that are subtle, original and accurate expressions
of your own experience.
2-2005 Body as spirit: a 3-part workshop
This semester a student sent me an email that that read:
- I'm wondering how, if the mind is body, and identity and the sense of self are body, and thought, brain, and mind are also body, embodiment as a field or school of thought avoids the problem of reducing humanity to mere fleshy matter, in a clinical way. What happens to the ideas of soul and spirit, of the heart that we speak of when we are not talking about the thing with four chambers? What happens to everything we previously thought of as being separate from the body? Heather Davis Sat, 21 May 2005
This three-part minicourse will begin to answer these questions. There will be a general introduction, and then two more specific workshops.
Body as spirit I. Introduction to 'spirituality' in embodiment
Beliefs and experiences we categorize as 'spiritual' are often quite inarticulate, and they are culturally extremely diverse. They are however very dear to the people who hold them, and they have had, and continue to have, extraordinary cultural and political influence. What are some of the things we mean when we talk about 'spirituality'? What is the relation of 'spiritual' experience and 'spiritual' belief? Why are beliefs of this sort so diverse and so passionately defended? Can recent changes in our understanding of bodies help us to understand 'the spiritual' without soul-body or spirit-body dualism? What are the body's resources for 'spiritual' exploration?
Body as spirit II. Somatic processing: a case study in soul welcome
- In the end, commitment to creative life is a commitment to a constantly increasing relationship with the lonelier outreaches of the psyche, learning not to disrespect the smallest, not to kick aside the most tattered, learning to take in and care for "the stranger" of the psyche, the one who has the longest view from the farthest away reaches of mind, spirit and imagination. We are the only ones who can even begin to be a friend to this friendless one. Do you hear that knock on the door? Do you know the one who is standing outside waiting for you? Go see. That is my first and last advice. Go see who is there. May it, for your sake, and all to the good, be a very strange stranger indeed. Clarissa Pinkola Estes
This workshop will approach felt soulfulness as one aspect of early or nonverbal bodily structure.
Body as spirit III. Subtle body experience, with Susan Moul
The essence of the 'the spiritual,' as it is seen in many cultures, through many centuries, seems to have been a notion of spirit as some sort of nonphysical body. There are many variants of this idea. Some cultures describe souls that survive death and migrate to a realm of the gods, or move into another physical body. Some describe nonphysical guardians of individuals, groups, or locations. Some describe nonphysical beings who live apart from human beings in their own nonphysical realm. Certain magical traditions describe methods for creating a 'body of light' able to leave the practitioner's body and accomplish supernatural feats.
What sort of experiences or intuitions can give rise to these beliefs in some form of 'subtle body'? Do these intuitions and experiences imply that nonphysical entities exist? In considering what exactly they may mean, we need conceptual care, common sense, good research and a strong will to stay clear and grounded. It may be that the notion of a subtle body is well-founded but somewhat misunderstood. There are actual things about the physical body that we could think of subtle. There are the body's various sorts of structured electromagnetic envelope, which may have been felt long before they were scientifically explained, and there are also the body's various sorts of subtle perception and intuition, which are unrecognized in general culture, and which are intensified by practices such as yoga.
This workshop with student Susan Moul will
use breath-work as a way to begin to experience subtle body phenomena.
1-2005 Speaking bodies: understanding language as embodied: a 3-part workshop
This 3-part minicourse introduces an understanding of language as inherently embodied, essentially social and necessarily embedded in the natural world.
Speaking bodies I. How language happens: the recent science of language
Is non-language necessary to language? Could there be 'meaning' without a physical world? How can language have evolved? What are the evolutionary precursors of language in animals? What changes in primate brains have allowed language to develop? What happens in bodies when we use language? Is language somehow an encapsulated function, or does it draw on the whole of the brain, the whole of the body? We know language is social, but how should we understand the embodiment of social interaction among speakers? This first session of the Speaking bodies minicourse will set out an integrated way of understanding language as part of human bodies, which in turn are parts of the physical earth.
Speaking bodies II. Topics in cognitive linguistics: metaphor, gesture, deixis, and polysemy
This second session of the Speaking bodies minicourse will introduce an exciting alternative approach to linguistics that has grown out of interdisciplinary contacts among linguistics, philosophy, psychology, computer science, neuroscience, and anthropology. Classical linguistics has thought of languages the way we think of algebra or symbolic logic, as abstract systems of rules applied to combinations of elements: as codes. Cognitive linguistics, instead, has wanted to investigate language as one of the ways human bodies influence each other while in the midst of dealing with the surrounding world. Aspects of language use that have been particularly important in strengthening this viewpoint have been metaphor, gesture, deixis (the way words like here or now can only be understood in relation to a context shared by speaker and hearer), and polysemy (the way words have many meanings). This is sophisticated material, some of it quite new, but I will present it in a leisurely way, with clear examples and good notes.
Speaking bodies III. Language and wholeness: the transformative practice of language
In this concluding session of the Speaking bodies minicourse we will look at practical applications for the embodied understanding of language laid out during the two previous sessions. We can use language to restructure ourselves and other people, sometimes very comprehensively. What does this imply about an ethics of language? What does it suggest about the art of language? What does it suggest about language and therapy, or language and spirituality? Does an embodied understanding of language give us a way to understand what ethics, art, therapy and spirituality have in common, in our practices with language?
2-2004 The cognitive significance of birth
We're mammals. We come into being cell by cell inside an already existing human body. As we grow from two cells to many, the means by which we perceive and feel construct themselves in reference to a small, tight, wet, and instantly provident bedroom. Then comes an extraordinary passage, violent and outrageous, in which immensely strong waves of force bear down upon us to eject us into what must seem a cataclysmically foreign world.
How does this central fact of human embodiment inscribe itself in our physical and thus our psychological being? Can we detect its traces in our intuitions, our metaphors, our habits of feeling? Our religions and philosophies? As a root both of brutality and of hope, structural traces of birth and prenatal life are visible in poetry, philosophy, science, spirituality. This workshop is an introduction to a form of self-investigation which thus also becomes cultural investigation.
For this seminar on writing and embodiment, students who have been looking for ways to write from or in relation to the body will talk about their discoveries and read examples of their work. Students have been doing beautiful work, and this is an opportunity for people to come and hear it, and for us all to talk about it - a way to make embodiment studies concrete.
2-2004 Wild research
Transdisciplinary work is thrilling, like
travel without a map. Working across disciplinary lines also is nerve-wracking:
we parachute into specialized areas sometimes without knowing the basics
in those fields. This workshop describes the art of bold, creative, personal,
transdisciplinary research.
1-2004 Seeing: a two-part workshop
Part 1 is about seeing in general; Part 2 describes a particular instance of seeing, seeing landscape by looking at it through a camera lens.
Below are links to notes accompanying lectures given at the IMA winter residency 2004.
Seeing 1: An erotic philosophy of visual perception
I am impressed by two things about seeing: how much we can know by looking, and how much pleasure we can take in seeing.
Neither mechanistic nor dualistic accounts of seeing have had much to say about these significant facts. If we understand ourselves as spirited bodies rather than as disembodied minds or as machines, how will we think about seeing? Can a more organic redescription of visual perception support abilities we already have and don't use? Why would we block or disallow seeing? How much more can we see? Is there an ethic of seeing? A politics of seeing?
Seeing 2: Love eyes and landscape photography
This workshop will include a very brief how-to discussion of framing, depth of field, composition, and print formats, but mostly it will be about photography as a means of learning to see. Moving around in a landscape with a camera can intensify our understanding of, and pleasure in, places and their times. How does this deeper contact happen? How can it be increased? What makes a photo feel 'right' or significant? What makes a landscape photo a good photo?
2-2003 Being about: perceiving, imagining, representing, and thinking: an introduction to cognitive science
If human intelligence has evolved in contact with the physical world, does it need continuing contact with that world as an essential condition of its thriving? This workshop introduces the notion of a cognitive ecology, a way of understanding mind as essentially embodied, essentially embedded in nature.
1-2003 The unconscious: a 2-part workshop
Workshop I is an introduction to the recent biology of nonconscious intelligence: it investigates what 'the unconscious' is or might be. Workshop II is a practical introduction to working with nonconscious powers.
The unconscious I: Left hand of darkness
Ovid told stories of descent into an underworld. Freud tracked unconscious structure as a cause of pathological behavior. Jung conversed with an unconscious he found to be brimming with marvelous images and stories. Buddhist philosophers name an unconditioned self more truthful and capable than the illusory self of conscious ego. In Workshop 1 we will briefly consider the history of the idea of the unconscious, and some of the many things that may be meant by the term.
We will go on to look at recent science that illuminates questions such as these: What is different about conscious function in a brain? What is the significance of right and left hemisphere specialization for linguistic and spatial intelligence? How do we dream and imagine? How do we recognize truths we could not have formulated ourselves? What is intuition? Is there really a belly brain or hara?
The unconscious II: Connected: keeping company with the uncon
Knowing more about the bodily structure of conscious and nonconscious function does not reduce, but instead deepens, appreciation for the possibilities of human being. In Workshop 2 we will look at some of these possibilities. Ancient skills of nonconscious perception and comprehension have been handed down within the traditions of magic, wicca, fairytales, shamanism, spiritualism, music, art, religion, and even science itself. Our means for directly experiencing an autonomous creative self include trance, meditation, dream study, automatic writing, scrying, conversations with alternate selves, Tarot, many art forms, and - in fact - an ethical life.
Nonconscious powers are notoriously attractive to the flaky and the downright mad. It takes a lot of consciousness to work safely with the unconscious. What are the dangers and safeguards? What sort of testing is needed and effective? Is there a difference between 'working with the unconscious' and integration?
2-2002 Theory: a 3-part minicourse - with Karen Campbell
The Canadian artist Michael Snow said, I don't need a theory, I am a theory. What might he have meant?
What are some of the things we can mean by 'theory'? Is a religion a theory?
How is theory created or found? Who makes theories, and why? Is there such a thing as 'pure' theory? What is the relation between experience and theory? Research and theory? What do we know about theory and the brain? How do we recognize a theory, summarize it, assess it, use it? What is theory good for? What is it bad for?
This minicourse is organized as three one-hour sessions:
one on the philosophy and psychology of theory, one looking at examples
of theory, and one about theory and critical thinking. There will be a reading
assigned for the second session, and a brief writing assignment for the
third.
Theory I: What is a theory?
Theory II: Example of theory
Reading from Ladelle McWhorter 1999 Bodies and pleasures: Foucault and the politics of sexual normalization, Indiana University.
Theory III: Working with theory: theory and critical
thinking