The Body Learns - How We've Gotten Education Wrong

I was wondering how long it would take for education science to catch up with cognitive science, particularly with embodied cognition. The use of embodied cognition in education theory is changing everything we thought we knew about how learning occurs.

Most importantly, especially for boys, we are learning that the body is an integral part of the learning process. Better late than never, I guess.

The Body Learns

For years we’ve been telling kids to sit still and pay attention. That’s all wrong.

By Annie Murphy Paul | July 10, 2014

Sam Herman, 7, draws on the SMART Board 885, an interactive whiteboard system that uses multitouch technology, at the Macworld 2011 showroom in San Francisco on Jan. 29, 2011. Incorporating bodily movements—even subtle ones—can improve learning. | Photo by Ryan Anson/AFP/Getty Images

Today’s educational technology often presents itself as a radical departure from the tired practices of traditional instruction. But in one way, at least, it faithfully follows the conventions of the chalk-and-blackboard era: EdTech addresses only the student’s head, leaving the rest of the body out.

Treating mind and body as separate is an old and powerful idea in Western culture. But this venerable trope is facing down a challenge from a generation of researchers—in cognitive science, psychology, neuroscience, even philosophy—who claim that we think with and through our bodies. Even the most abstract mathematical or literary concepts, these researchers maintain, are understood in terms of the experience of our senses and of moving ourselves through space.

This perspective, known as “embodied cognition,” is now becoming a lens through which to look at educational technology. Work in the field shows promising signs that incorporating bodily movements—even subtle ones—can improve the learning that’s done on computers.

For example, Margaret Chan and John Black of Teachers College of Columbia University have shown that physically manipulating an animation of a roller coaster—by sliding the cars up and down the tracks and watching the resulting changes in kinetic and potential energy, as shown in a bar graph—helps students understand the workings of gravity and energy better than static on-screen images and text. This embodied approach to instruction, the authors found, is especially helpful to younger students and to those working on more difficult problems. In counterintuitive domains like physics, bodily rooted learning allows the learner to develop a “feel” for the concept being described, a physical sense that is more comprehensible and compelling than a concept that remains an abstract mental entity.

In similar experiments, led by Insook Han of Hanyang Cyber University in South Korea, students learn about the concept of force by using a joystick to move two gears shown on a computer screen. Han’s studies show that allowing users to physically manipulate the gears in this way improves their memory and problem-solving performance on force-related questions. The richer the perceptual experience provided by the computer program, the greater the students’ understanding and retention of the material.

One reason involving the body improves learning is that bodily movements provide the memory with additional cues with which to represent and retrieve the knowledge learned. Taking action in response to information, in addition to simply seeing or hearing it, creates a richer memory trace and supplies alternative avenues for recalling the memory later on. Movement may also allow users to shed some of their “cognitive load”—the burden imposed by the need to keep track of information. Instead of trying to imagine what the gears would do if moved, a mentally taxing activity, learners can allow their hands to do it and see what happens, freeing up mental resources to think more deeply about what’s happening. This is pretty much how we all learned to drive.

From an evolutionary perspective, our brains developed to help us solve problems in the real world, moving through space and manipulating actual objects. More abstract forms of thought, such as mathematics and written language, came later, and they repurposed older regions of the brain originally dedicated to processing input from the senses and from the motor system.

This repurposing is apparent in the frequency with which we use physically grounded metaphors to express abstract ideas: counting is like moving through space (“the countdown is approaching zero”); accommodating two different principles is like “balancing” them on a scale. Bringing the body back into the equation can provide learners with a useful way station between concrete referents and all-out abstraction. Physically acting out knowledge to be learned or problems to be solved makes the conceptual metaphors employed by our brains a literal reality.

We can see this principle at work in the research of Arthur Glenberg of Arizona State University. In a series of experiments carried out more than a decade ago, Glenberg found that children’s reading comprehension improved when they acted out a written text, using a set of representational toys (a miniature barn and horse, for example, accompanied a story about a farm). Glenberg then demonstrated that the same procedure could work on a digital platform: In a 2011 experiment, he showed that having first- and second-grade students manipulate images of toys on a computer screen after reading a story benefits their comprehension as much as physical manipulation of the toys.

Mina Johnson Glenberg (who is married to Arthur Glenberg and also works at Arizona State, as director of the university’s Embodied Games for Learning lab) is taking the embodied approach even further, designing educational games that engage learners’ entire bodies.

A program called the Alien Health Game, for example, presents students with this scenario: “You have just woken up to find an alien under your bed. It is hungry and it is your job to figure out what makes it healthy.” From an array of foods, users learn to choose the ones that are most nutritious, and then must dance, jump, and exercise to help the alien digest his meal. (A bonus: The game is so physically active that it measurably elevates users’ heart rates.)

In other work, Johnson Glenberg employs Xbox Kinect–like technology to capture students’ movements as they interact with images projected onto a whiteboard. The interface can be used to teach subjects like physics, chemistry, and geology; in the geology module, for example, students use the movements of their bodies to deposit sediment layers, insert a fossil layer, and generate earthquakes in a virtual environment. The technology is being used in a half dozen American schools, including Quest to Learn in New York City and ChicagoQuest.

It’s early days for these real-world applications. But the research behind them can help teachers, parents and students better evaluate and use educational technology products that are already widely available. An awareness of embodied cognition, for example, might lead users to prefer touch-sensitive devices like the iPad, which respond directly to the movement of users’ fingers on the screen, over computers that interpose a keyboard between screen and user. According to John Black of Teachers College, technology that evokes movements that complement the concepts to be learned is also likely to be effective from an embodied point of view: For example, an application in which counting is expressed by tapping on a mouse (discrete movements that complement the discrete nature of counting) will better promote learning than a program that asks users to make a sliding movement as they count (a continuous action at odds with the discrete nature of counting).

Parents and educators can also treat the virtual “movements” involved in many educational programs and games as preparation for more traditional learning. For example, John Black and Jessica Hammer, also of Teachers College, showed that moving through the virtual spaces of the history game Civilization made players much better at learning history from a conventional textbook than players of the game The Sims. Even though Civilization players possessed no greater knowledge of history when they opened the textbook, their virtually embodied experience of grappling with the issues raised by historical simulations made them better prepared to absorb the lessons of the text.

Educators and parents can also help students incorporate bodily movements of their own into the use of educational technology, an approach that Black has applied to the teaching the programming language Scratch. Asking students to act out the motions they intend for the program’s virtual “agent” using their own bodies, and then programming the agents to make the same moves, has shown itself to be “a particularly effective learning approach,” Black writes. Even when they’re learning on computers, it’s wise to remember that students are more than mental machines.


* This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan education-news outlet affiliated with Teachers College, Columbia University.
* Annie Murphy Paul is a fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of the forthcoming book Brilliant: The Science of How We Get Smarter.

16 Effects of Testosterone on the Body

The graphic below was created by Ann Pietrangelo and medically reviewed by George Krucik, MD for Healthline. The graphic offers a basic Testosterone 101 reference for those who want to know how T functions in the (male) body.

I have included a more readable version of the references at the bottom of the post.


Article Sources:

• Birger, M., Swartz, M., Cohen, D., Alesh, Y., Grishpan, C., Kotelr, M. Aggression: The Testosterone-Serotonin Link. (2003, September). Israel Medical Association Journal, 9. Retrieved March 25, 2014 from http://www.ima.org.il/FilesUpload/IMAJ/0/54/27288.pdf
• Hormone replacement, the male version. (2004, May). Harvard Health Publications, Harvard Medical School. Retrieved March 24, 2014 from http://www.health.harvard.edu/newsweek/Hormone-replacement-the-male-version.htm
• How do muscles grow? (2004). University of New Mexico. Retrieved March 24, 2014 from http://www.unm.edu/~lkravitz/Article folder/musclesgrowLK.html

• How the male body works sexually. (2013, August 19). American Cancer Society. Retrieved March 24, 2014 from http://www.cancer.org/treatment/treatmentsandsideeffects/physicalsideeffects/sexualsideeffectsinmen/sexualityfortheman/sexuality-for-men-with-cancer-how-male-body-works-sexually
• Testosterone. (n.d.). Encyclopedia of Social Psychology. Retrieved from March 24, 2014 from http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/HomePage/Faculty/Josephs/pdf_documents/Testos_Encyclo_Entry.pdf
• Not enough test in testosterone. (2004, April). Harvard Health Publications, Harvard Medical School. Retrieved March 26, 2014 from http://www.health.harvard.edu/newsweek/Not_enough_test_in_testosterone.htm
• Testosterone, prostate cancer, and balding: Is there a link? (2004, October). The Harvard Medical School Family Health Guide. Retrieved March 26, 2014 from http://www.health.harvard.edu/fhg/updates/update1004a.shtml
• Testosterone replacement therapy. (n.d.). Cleveland Clinic. Retrieved March 24, 2014 from http://my.clevelandclinic.org/services/testosterone_replacement_therapy/hic_testosterone_replacement_therapy.aspx
• Testosterone therapy: Key to male vitality? (2012, April 10). Mayo Clinic. Retrieved March 24, 2014 from http://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-living/sexual-health/in-depth/testosterone-therapy/art-20045728
• Understanding how testosterone affects men. (2013, September 23). National Institutes of Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Retrieved March 21, 2014 from http://www.nih.gov/researchmatters/september2013/09232013testosterone.htm
• What are the heart risks associated with testosterone therapy? (2014, March 19). Mayo Clinic. Retrieved March 24, 2014 from http://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-living/mens-health/expert-answers/testosterone-therapy-side-effects/faq-20090015

Kate Bartolotta - What Happens When Our Emotions Stay in Our Bodies

This is an excellent article from Kate Bartolotta, posted at the Good Men Project, on what happens to us when we keep emotions locked in the body rather than letting them flow through us as they arise.

For boys and men, this often means sadness, sorrow, grief, rejection and all of the other "soft" emotions that men are taught not to feel - "boys don't cry," "shake it off," or "c'mon, be tough," as just a few examples of the many ways boys are taught not to feel. For men, there are cliches such as "man up," "stiff upper lip," "put it behind you," or "suck it up."

In the words of the AA folks, what we resist persists. We need to stop resisting the feeling and expression of human emotions.

What Happens When Our Emotions Stay in Our Bodies

May 27, 2013
by Kate Bartolotta

It’s never too late to address unexpressed emotion stored in the body as pain, tightness, and discomfort.

When we look at the language we use to talk about emotional reactions, there is often a physical sensation associated as well: a lump in the throat, butterflies in our stomachs, a gut feeling, the weight of the world on our shoulders. This isn’t coincidental! Those visceral reactions are messages from our body.

We hear this referred to as “the mind-body connection.” It’s often associated with using the mind or positivity to help boost the immune system or physically feel better. While that is certainly a helpful boost, we shouldn’t ignore what our bodies can do to help heal our emotions.

Most of us can recall a time growing up where we were discouraged from releasing a painful emotion by well-meaning adults. Parents tell little boys to “be a tough guy” or “shake it off” when they get hurt, while women are encouraged and socialized to discuss their feelings. Our bodies hang on to what happens with our emotions—even if we’ve “talked ourselves out of it.” The physical and emotional impact of unexpressed pain is one that lasts. Unexpressed pain sticks around.

Below are some typical patterns of stored emotion in the body as recognized within the bodywork community. Each person has their own patterns as well, but these are some common patterns :

Infographic courtesy of Nutritional Solutions
Our bodies are aware of the things that our minds would like to push aside. The things that we have forgotten at a conscious level are still present all the time in our bodies. The good news is that it’s never too late to address these issues, and that the results can help with both physical and emotional pain.

A few steps we can take to release unresolved emotion:

• Find a daily physical practice you enjoy. Notice I didn’t say “exercise.” Caring about our health and fitness is important, but the intention here is a physical activity that we love. It helps to choose an activity that quiets your mind a bit. For me, this is yoga. Many people find running to have a meditative quality. It could be as simple as a ten minute quiet walk where you pay attention to your breathing and the sensations in your body. 

• Receive regular bodywork. Therapeutic massage and bodywork are some of the most effective ways I’ve seen (and experienced) for releasing stored emotion. When someone works on those knots in your shoulders you have from long held anger or stress, sometimes emotions will come up. I’ve had clients cry on my table—and sometimes they’ve known and shared why; other times, the pain is old and just hanging on in the muscles, waiting to be released. It’s important to remember that a massage therapist is a facilitator for these things—not a psychotherapist. Through bodywork, we can tap into these stored emotions and begin to process them ourselves, or if needed, with another professional. 

• Make touch a part of your primary relationships. This sounds simple, obvious even. Unfortunately, we have become a very hands-off culture. Fewer and fewer of our daily interactions involve touch. As we rely on social media and smart phones for the bulk of our communication, our relationships often involve less physical contact than we need. Make a point of touching people on the arm or shoulder as you speak with them. Greet friends with a hug. Play a pick-up game of basketball instead of just watching the game. When we begin to remember that we are not just minds stuck inside a body, but body and mind working in concert, we can begin to heal old hurts in a deeper and lasting way.

~ Read more of Kate Bartolotta’s men’s health column, Body Wisdom, on The Good Life. 

Michael Boyle - Only One Body

From Mike Boyle's Strengthcoach.com blog - a little reminder that this body is our only body. I bet many of you spend more time and money taking care of your car or your house than you do your body.

Only One Body

By Michael Boyle

( the following is reprinted for a third time. Back in 2009 I might get a few hundred views. This time I might get a few thousand. I’m not sure where I posted it first by this is the third time on this site.)

Imagine you are sixteen years old and your parents give you your first car. They also give you simple instructions. There is one small hitch, you only get one car, you can never get another. Never. No trade-ins, no trade-ups. Nothing.

Ask your self how would you maintain that car? My guess is you would be meticulous. Frequent oil changes, proper fuel, etc. Now imagine if your parents also told you that none of the replacement parts for this car would ever work as well as the original parts. Not only that, the replacement parts would be expensive to install and cause you to have decreased use of your car for the rest of the cars useful life? In other words, the car would continue to run but, not at the same speed and with the efficiency you were used to.

Wow, now would we ever put a lot of time and effort into maintenance if that were the case.

After reading the above example ask yourself another question. Why is the human body different? Why do we act as if we don’t care about the one body we were given. Same deal. You only get one body. No returns or trade-ins. Sure, we can replace parts but boy it’s a lot of work and it hurts. Besides, the stuff they put in never works as well as the original “factory” parts. The replacement knee or hip doesn’t give you the same feel and performance as the original part.

Think about it. One body. You determine the mileage? You set the maintenance plan?

No refunds, no warranties, no do-overs?

How about this perspective? One of my clients is a very successful businessman. He often is asked to speak to various groups. One thing he tells every group is that you are going to spend time and money on your health. The truth is the process can be a proactive one or a reactive one. Money spent on your health can take the form of a personal trainer, massage therapist and a gym membership or, it can be money spent on cardiologists, anesthesiologists, and plastic surgeons. Either way, you will spend money.

Same goes for time. You can go to the gym or, to the doctors office. It’s up to you. Either way, you will spend time. Some people say things like “I hate to work out”. Try sitting in the emergency room for a few hours and then get back to me. Working out may not seem so bad. Much like a car, a little preventative maintenance can go a long way. However, in so many ways the body is better than a car. With some good hard work you can turn back the odometer on the body. I wrote an article a while back ( Strength Training- The Fountain of Youth) that discussed a study done by McMaster University which showed that muscle tissue of older subjects actually changed at the cellular level and looked more like the younger control subjects after strength training.

Do me a favor, spend some time on preventative maintenance, it beats the heck out of the alternative. Just remember, you will spend both time and money.

This Is the Average Man's Body (The Atlantic Monthly)

A friend over at Facebook alerted me to this article in an off-hand way - he jokingly asked his friends and followers, "Who would you rather?" among the four nationalities presented in the article below (United States, Japan, Netherlands, France). Of the four men (averages formed into a avatar), the "Todd" from the U.S. is 5' 9" tall, with a 39" waist and a body mass index (BMI) of 29 - 30 is obese.

As a personal trainer and athlete, I see these "average men" and feel sad that we have fallen so far from our potential - the average man in the U.S. is a fraction from obese . . . and that's AVERAGE!

I am not blaming the individuals . . . although there is always the option to change one's lifestyle. I also know from my years as a trainer how difficult that can be even for those who want to do so. If it were easy or simple, no one would go through the torment of being overweight in a fat phobic society (that is, ironically, overweight and obese on average).

A big part of the problem is the processed nutrition-void foods we eat, the marketing atmosphere we live in, the endocrine disrupting chemicals in the air and water (and in food packaging, water bottles, no-stick pans, aerosols, and so on), and the urbanization of human life (taking us away from a life spent working on the land, doing physical labor) - all of these things and more have contributed to this Todd avatar, from the U.S., at least, being a pudgy man.

We can only change it for ourselves, and lead by example . . . . How are you leading? What are you teaching your kids about health and fitness?

This Is the Average Man's Body

Graphic renderings of modern males

James Hamblin Oct 10 2013



Todd is the most typical of American men. His proportions are based on averages from CDC anthropometric data. As a U.S. male age 30 to 39, his body mass index (BMI) is 29; just one shy of the medical definition of obese. At five-feet-nine-inches tall, his waist is 39 inches.

Don't let the hyperrealistic toes fool you; Todd is an avatar. I gave Todd his name, and gave his life a narrative arc, but he is actually the child of graphic artist Nickolay Lamm as part of his Body Measurement Project.

Todd would prefer perfection—or at least something superlative, even if it's bad—to being average. But Todd is perfect only in being average. With this perfection comes the privilege of radical singularity, which is visible in his eyes.

Though in his face this reads lonesome, Todd does have three international guyfriends. They met at a convention for people with perfectly average bodies, where each won the award for most average body in their respective country: U.S., Japan, Netherlands, and France. The others' BMIs, based on data from each country's national health centers, are 23.7, 25.2, and 25.6.

I named them all Todd, actually, even though it could be confusing, because not everyone's name is a testament to their cultural heritage.

 

This is how Lamm made the Todds. It's also what zombie Todds look like.



And here are Todds from the right.

 

Most people look better from their left, but Lamm rendered the Todds from their right, just because he can. To these men, Nickolay is God.

Avatars of various ethnicities are important, because obesity depends on culture and genetics. The weight of every person's destiny is equal, but some countries are fat, and others are not. The World Health Organization cares about that, because understanding the differences should help to explicate causes.
 

(World Health Organization; based on 2008 data)

So does history. Fifty years ago, American Todd would not have been round. The trend is not unique to men, either; Lamm just chose to work with white male renderings. The same CDC data puts the female BMI in this age group at 28.7.

U.S. Obesity, National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys, 1960-2000

Americans are also losing ground in height. For most of two centuries, until 60 years ago, the U.S. population was the tallest in the world. Now the average American man is three inches shorter than the Dutch man, who averages six feet. Japanese averages are also gaining on Americans'. Anthropologists tie these recent changes primarily to diet and lifestyle, as we've turned habitable wilderness into excess. 

(All images by Nickolay Lamm)

George Maat, a professor emeritus of anthropology at Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands, has said that within another 50 years, the Dutch Todd could be six-foot-three. Several years ago the Netherlands was compelled to increase building code standards for door frames. If in the last half-century the American physical form has been expelled from international imagination as an ideal, we might presently look at the situation not just as failure, but with optimism for what we might become.

Shrink Rap Radio #322 – Mastering Resilience with Dennis Charney MD

On this week's Shrink Rap Radio, Dr. David Van Nuys interviews Dr. Dennis Charney, a specialist in the psychobiological mechanisms of human resilience to stress. His most recent book is Resilience: The Science of Mastering Life's Greatest Challenges.

Resilience is a special issue for men, we tend to be less resilient than our female peers. Overall, more males are conceived, fewer males are born (but still slightly more than females), and by age 45 or 50, females are more plentiful. In the U.S., there are five million more women than men in the 65 and older age group.

A little more on male fragility:

Boys in the U.S. have a 29 percent higher prenatal death rate² and are 20 percent more vulnerable to infant mortality up to age one.³   Boys tend to be more at risk than girls of being born with birth defects, perhaps because boys tend to develop at a slower pace, leaving more time for potential problems to arise.⁴ 

As of 2005, the average life expectancy in the U.S. is 80.4 for women and 75.2 for men.  That means men, on average, die 5.2 years earlier than women.⁵.  This phenomenon is world-wide.  Women outlive men almost everywhere in the world.

The article goes on to list a variety of factors, some biological (chromosomes, hormones, immune system, iron overload, and natural selection), as well as several socio-cultural factors (cultural conditioning, social standing).

One of the cultural conditioning factors is what we might call "traditional masculinity."

Differences in what is expected of men and women contribute to variations in mortality. Certain behaviors that are discouraged in women are condoned or even rewarded in men.  Men's higher rates of cigarette smoking, heavy drinking, gun use, and risk taking in recreation and driving are partially responsible for their higher death rate.¹⁰   Also,men tend to work in more dangerous settings than women and account for 90 percent of on-the-job fatalities.¹¹   Throughout life,men are conditioned to hide feelings of sadness or pain and not to reach out for help.  They are less likely to seek medical attention, less likely to seek psychological treatment and more likely to commit suicide.  Men take their own lives at nearly four times the rate of females and represent 79.4% of all U.S. suicides.¹²

Men have a series of biological hurdles to get over, but there is still a lot we can do to improve our resilience.

#322 – Mastering Resilience with Dennis Charney MD

A psychology podcast by David Van Nuys, Ph.D.

copyright 2012: David Van Nuys, Ph.D.

Dennis S. Charney, MD is Dean of Mount Sinai School of Medicine and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs of The Mount Sinai Medical Center.

Dr. Charney is a world expert in the neurobiology and treatment of mood and anxiety disorders. He has made fundamental contributions to the understanding of neural circuits and neurochemistry related to human anxiety, fear, mood as well AS THE discovery of new treatment for mood and anxiety disorders. He later expanded this area into pioneering research related to the psychobiological mechanisms of human resilience to stress.

Early in his career, Dr. Charney led a team that determined that the biology of human anxiety disorders were characterized by excessive noradrenergic activity and dysfunction in specific neural circuits including the prefrontal cortex, amygdala, and hippocampus. His work in depression led to new hypotheses regarding the mechanisms of antidepressant drugs and discovery of new and novel therapies for treatment resistant depression including Lithium and Ketamine, which works within hours.

After decades of work on the biology of anxiety, depression, and post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), Dr. Charney and colleagues have turned their attention toward investigating the psychobiological mechanisms of human resilience to stress. They have found specific hormones and peptides which contribute to resilience and identified a prescription for enhancing human resilience.

A prolific author, Dr. Charney has written more than 700 publications, including groundbreaking scientific papers, chapters, and books. Dr. Charney’s most recent book is Resilience: The Science of Mastering Life’s Greatest Challenges.
___

Check out the following Psychology CE Courses based on listening to Shrink Rap Radio interviews:

• Jungian Psychotherapy Part 1 (6 CEUs)
• Jungian Psychotherapy Part 2 (7 CEUs)
• Jungian Psychotherapy Part 3 (7 CEUs)
• Jungian Psychotherapy Part 4 (6 CEUs)
• Jungian Psychotherapy Package of the Four Above (26 CEUs)
• Wisdom of The Dream (4 CEUs)
• Positive Psychology (6 CEUs)
• Pros and Cons of Positive Psychology (5 CEUs)
• CERTIFICATE PROGRAM IN POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY (32 CEUs)
• Body-Mind: Goodbye to Dualism (6 CEUs)
• Meditation & Psychotherapy (8 CEUs)
• Get our iPhone/Android app!Get 25% discount on all lectures at The JungPlatform using our discount code: DRDAVE

 

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Posted on October 19, 2012

Rob McNamara - The Three Faces of Embodiment

Rob McNamara is one of the leaders in the integral embodiment community (along with Shawn Phillips) and has been instrumental in designing the body component of the Integral Life Practice system. His first book is Strength to Awaken: An Integral Guide to Strength Training, Performance and Spiritual Practice for Men and Women (2012). This piece comes from Integral Life's Integral Post series.

To start off, here is some background on Rob:

Rob McNamara

Rob McNamara is an Author, Performance Coach, Psychotherapist and Professor from Boulder Colorado serving clients throughout North America and Europe. Rob’s book, Strength to Awaken: An Integral Guide to Strength Training, Performance and Spiritual Practice for Men and Women (2012) sets forth to reshape integral embodiment and the evolution of integral consciousness. He is a professor of Integral, Transpersonal and Developmental Psychology at Naropa University and has has worked with Ken Wilber, the Integral Institute and contributed to Integral Life for over a decade serving as a Core Faculty for the Integral Life Practice and Integral Spiritual Experience seminar series.

Here is the beginning of the article - enjoy!

The Three Facets of Embodiment

Going Beyond Misunderstood Embodiment

July 23rd, 2012

Recently I spent an afternoon with Ken Wilber down in Denver to discuss the important issue of embodiment. Ken and I first met over a decade ago and our early connections circled around the rich and often misunderstood discipline of strength training. You could say embodiment is, and has been, a central concern for both of us. As we settled into conversation at his loft, we kicked around some of the major issues: why embodiment is essential for all of us and how it is critical for many to grow into what I am calling mature integral consciousness. Here are a few dimensions of our conversation that I would love to share with you.

The Two Big Misunderstandings

When I talk about embodiment, most of the time people immediately start to think about and look at their body. While this is most certainly part of the picture, it is not all of it. Embodiment is not just a message that you need to give your physical body more attention, care and consideration. Often when I get into conversations about embodiment, someone starts talking to me about how they have been meaning to eat better, get to the gym more and so on. Yes, this is part of it, but quite honestly—at least from my perspective—this is tertiary. Embodiment is not and cannot be reduced to taking care of your body. This is our first big misunderstanding.

The second big misunderstanding is the presumption that embodiment is pointing to some anti-intellectual feeling consciousness residing in your body. This is the generic and often overplayed question, “how do you feel about that?” The implicit message, stop thinking and start feeling. This is often not necessarily an invitation to become more embodied, but instead more psychologically divided between two modes of functioning: thinking and feeling. Embodiment is not anti-thinking or anti-intellectual motion. So, if this blog is not about taking better care of your body or a message telling you to get out of your head, Where exactly are we going?

Embodiment is the structure and form of who you are. Embodiment is literally you in form. The structure of your thoughts are just as much a part of your embodiment as the form of your skeleton. The anatomy of your emotional life right now in this moment, the pattern of breath that is breathing you, the shape of your attention in this immediacy and the organization of your perspective as you make meaning about this sentence are all part of your embodiment—just as is your muscle mass and heart rate. Embodiment is the structure and form of you ... all of you.

The Topography of your Embodiment

Embodiment has at least three central processes. Lose one and your embodiment erodes, causing you to become less in the immediacy of your life. The three processes are embrace, inhabitation and movement. 

Go read the rest of the article at Integral Life.

Alexandra Sifferlin - WHY Stressed-Out Men Prefer Heavier Women

The other day I posted a research summary showing that stressed-out men prefer larger women. I speculated about skinny women being less likely survive is things are tough, with stress being an indicator that things are tough.

So now Alexandra Sifferlin at Time Magazine tells us just exactly WHY men who under stress prefer heavier women (I was pretty close to what one might suspect the evolutionary psychology people would propose).

 Jane Russell (1950s)

A little more context for this study. Until the 1960s or so, skinny women were not considered attractive. Women with curves and a little "meat on their bones" were the ideal of beauty, like Jane Russell in the image above, or Rita Hayworth (below).

Rita Hayworth (1940s)

Going back to before the 20th century, being skinny signified poverty, whereas being heavier was a sign of wealth and prosperity. Likewise, being pale showed that one did not need to go outside to work, whereas having a tan meant one was so poor that s/he had to work in the sun.

When we look back at the history of Western art, especially at the portraits that so many artists did to earn a living, the patrons who paid for those portraits were all plump by our standards. The models who posed nude for painters were generally much thinner than the patrons (compare the women in the Renoir painting below to the obviously affluent woman in the Rembrandt). Again, having some heft was associated with wealth (and power).

Rembrandt - Young Woman with a Fan (1632)

Renoir - The Bathers (1887)

The point is that our fascination with skinny women is recent - and very short-lived within the history of human desire. It's not likely that this is yet a "real" preference - give it another few decades and we'll see if it persists.

We (men) have preferred shapely women for a few millennia, now. Given that is likely still a psychological default mode, under stress we will tend to fall back into our default modes of behavior and beliefs (a kind of regression). Preferring larger women when stressed might simply be indicative that this is what we prefer in general, and it's only a socially constructed preference that we experience for skinny women.

Why Stressed-Out Men Prefer Heavier Women

By Alexandra Sifferlin

Most men prefer leggy and lean women, Gisele Bündchen lookalikes, right? Not necessarily. In fact, the body type that a man finds attractive can change depending on his environment and circumstances, a new study finds: when under stress, for instance, men prefer heavier women.

The study, published in the journal PLoS ONE, reports that when men were placed in stressful situations, then asked to rate the attractiveness of women of varying body sizes, they tended to prefer beefier frames, compared with unstressed men whose tastes skewed thinner.

“This suggests that our body size preferences are not innate, but are flexible,” said study co-author Martin Tovée of Newcastle University in the U.K., in an email, noting that they may be influenced by our particular environment and resources.

The findings fall in line with evolutionary theories that suggest when resources are scarce or unpredictable, a woman’s thin physique may signal illness, frailty and the inability to reproduce. Indeed, Tovée and colleague Viren Swami of the University of Westminster in London have previously found that men under trying conditions — like extreme hunger — tend to rate heavier women as more attractive. The researchers suggest also that underlying biological mechanisms, such as blood sugar and hormone levels, are major players in how we perceive our surroundings.

“Our work in parts of Malaysia and Africa has shown that in poorer environments where resources are scarce, people prefer a heavy body in a potential partner,” said Tovée. “If you live in an environment where food is scarce, being heavier means you have fat stored up as a buffer against a potential food reduction in the future, and that you must be higher social status to afford the food in the first place. Both of these are attractive qualities in a partner in those circumstances.”

Moving from a low-resource environment to a richer one, like the U.K. or the U.S., can cause a shift in these preferences, says Tovée, and to test the theory further, the researchers recruited some male volunteers and manipulated their stress levels — a key problem for people living in poor environments.

The study examined 81 heterosexual men, about half of whom underwent the Trier Social Stress Test. In the test, the men participated in an impromptu job interview in front of four interviewers. They were asked them to “sell” themselves for five minutes, and then calculate answers to simple math problems under time pressure.

Afterward, all the study participants were shown images of 10 women with body types ranging from emaciated to obese and were asked to rank them based on their attractiveness.

The images were numbered on a scale of 1 to 10 based on the women’s body mass index (BMI), with 1 representing very thin and 10 obese. The largest body size rated attractive by the stressed-out men was 7.17, which fell in the overweight category. The largest body type deemed attractive by the unstressed control group was 6.25, which was considered normal on the BMI scale.

Overall, stressed men preferred a bigger body — their “ideal” figure was a 4.44 — than the unstressed men, who idealized a thinner body type, at 3.90. Stressed-out men not only rated heavier women as more attractive, but they also gave higher ratings to a wider range of body types overall.


“This shift suggests that stress alters what you find attractive in a potential partner, and it is another factor helping you to optimize the fit of your partner preferences to your environment,” said Tovée.

Understanding how body preferences may change or be influenced by circumstance also sheds light on the development of warped body image, the authors say. “People suffering from conditions such as anorexia nervosa have a distorted perception of body size and body ideals, and it’s important that research focus on the mechanisms underlying and influencing the perception of body size,” says Tovée.

Despite our media’s seeming reverence for size-zero models and ripped muscle men, it may help people suffering from eating disorders and other body-image problems to know that such body “ideals” are not exactly ideal after all. “The information from this article could be useful in therapy of anxiety and eating disorders,” Dr. Igor Galynker, associate chairman of the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Beth Israel Medical Center, told ABC News. “The information could be an alternative to thoughts such as, ‘I am fat; no man would find me attractive.’”

Jayson Gaddis - What Happens When We Don’t Teach Our Boys About Sex

Somehow I missed Jayson's article at The Good Men Project back in May - better late than never. There is much I admire in Jayson, and we are in general agreement on a lot of men's issues (though not always on language - I do not like the word "sacred" in this context, nor do I wield a "cosmic sword"). I am pleased to reshare this article with those, like myself, who may have missed it when it originally appeared at the GMP (I suspect this may have appeared at his blog, as well).

What Happens When We Don’t Teach Our Boys About Sex

May 22, 2012 By Jayson Gaddis 

Exploring the mess we are in around male sexuality. How did we get here and what on earth do we do?

My first sexual experience with another person was when my cousin taught me how to masturbate. Naturally, it felt good. But then he shamed and humiliated me, leaving a deep scar. This became my initial sexual imprint, and it has impacted my sexuality to this day.

Instead of learning, I went into hiding like most men run by shame. I listened to other peers who were equally immature and confused.

Before I sought out help, I was left adrift, aimlessly trying to be a man with this cosmic sword between my legs. No one ever taught me the profound power my cock could yield. That I could give life or destroy life with its power. My dad dropped the ball as did my culture.

I received ZERO training around sex or my body until age 34. None. Fortunately for me, I now have excellent mentors and friends who are helping me grow up my sexuality and dive into it’s headwaters with open arms.

To not teach children about the sacredness of their bodies and their sexuality is one of the CORE abandonments of our time.

This post is about the mess we are in around male sexuality. I am here to name it and simply put it in the open for all of us to see.

So how did we get into this mess?
I’m guessing there’s more to the story than this, but I’m naming one GIANT dynamic if not THE dynamic that got us here.

First, let’s acknowledge that some of us (not me) got an amazing, healthy, wise education around sex, our bodies, and our sexuality. If that’s you, congratulations! Seriously. Then, let’s acknowledge that there are a good number of people out there that believe we are teaching are kids plenty, even too much, about sex and sexuality (i.e. conservative religious groups).

Leaving it up to the Churches and schools to train our kids about their penises and vaginas and how to use them has gotten us where we are today, ashamed, avoiding, and hoping someone else will teach this complicated stuff for us. If those entities did a great job, we’d be seeing different results.

Because adults have been, by in large, too ashamed or limited in themselves, they have taught our boys a very watered down version of sex education. That’s the best case scenario. It’s either nothing at all, or a “birds and the bees” talk in middle school or high school, likely from a teacher who is filtering information because their hands are tied by a fearful administration.

Think about what you got in terms of sex ed. I got a health class in 8th grade (in Utah) and then my dad talked to me in High school about wearing a condom. That’s it. That’s all I got.

So, what did I do? I learned from peers (well before high school) who were equally as ashamed, misinformed, and confused.

I was completely and utterly abandoned, as was my father by his father and on and on. I get that it wasn’t my Dad’s fault. How could he teach me anything about sex given what was taught to him by a Dad who probably never even mentioned it? Generations of betrayal. Generations of neglect and looking the other way, hoping kids would “figure it out” or innocently thinking it would take care of itself.

So, when I think about my own son, I can see the doorway toward “letting him figure it out.” That door is wide open and would be easy for me to just drop the ball and keep the generations of abandonment alive.

But I won’t do that. No way. Not in my house. I won’t pass the buck to other adults and expect them to deliver. I also refuse to let other 4, 5, 6, 7 year old boys teach my son about his sacred body. I refuse to let another kid shaming him while he’s naked or hard core porn be his first sexual experience.

I will show up for my son. I’m scared and excited to teach him everything about his beautiful body and its power. I feel inspired to train him to use his penis responsibly. And guess what? My son is 3 years old and needs information now! He is exploring his body right now! Wait until middle school? I don’t think so.

Most of us men received little to no sexual training as boys. We simply learned from other boys. Our first sexual experiences were often either molestation (1 in six boys is sexually abused before age 16), experimentation with ourselves (some kind of masturbation, mostly to porn these days) or other boys (more than one-third of the sexual abuse of America’s children is committed by other minors).

As boys, in order to fit in, we were supposed to make fun of other boys when we were naked. If we were too “good” or too scared to do that, we got quiet and became bystanders hoping some adult would step up and set a boundary. When no one did, we remained silent because speaking up we might have faced ridicule or humiliation.

Anything that resembled being gay or too feminine, we shamed and humiliated in each other and called it “funny.” We were mostly taught that sex is great, but also bad and that masturbation is bad even though it feels good. Hmmm….Our choice? Posture and fake it trying to “be one of the guys,” or go underground with our sexuality and experiment in isolation.

Confused yet?

As teen boys, we taught each other to objectify women and keep score. We were either taught that women like strong men that are stoic and hide their vulnerability like any superhero in the movies, or maybe we took the gentleman’s path, (slightly more conservative but still damaging) where we are supposed to take care of women and be “clean” by never masturbating or succumbing to our animal desires, thus being a “good boy.”

If we were gay, or wondered if we were gay, we had no where safe to turn to, no one to ask, no place to explore in a safe way. So, again we isolated and felt shame and guilt. Then we might have played along with the straight boys thus adding more self-abandonment and confusion.

Then we found oursevles in an oversexualized culture where women’s bodies were everywhere for us to gawk at including in video games, TV, magazines, and even in men’s sports. We went to college where our sex drive was through the roof and we sprayed it around like a fire-hose with no supervision and little consequence. Or we were so confused, we shut down and got quiet. If we wanted to be “one of the guys” we tried to get laid a lot and talked a big game, thinking that might win us friends. If we didn’t take that path, we stayed a quiet bystander letting our brothers off the hook over and over as they objectified and used women over and over again while we isolated and went inward for answers.

Pile on more confusion….

Of course, then we became adult men (whatever that means), and even though we have the power to seek out a therapist or professional to get help with the confusion and power between our legs, we didn’t. Either because we didn’t even know it was an option, or because we might have faced silent judgment or ridicule from our peers–more shame and humiliation, all part of the gender straightjacket.

Now that we are officially confused and ashamed about our penis and sex, and live in a culture that supports our dis-embodiment, we paradoxically find comfort in our isolation and disconnection. It’s the new norm. We mask over any whisper of shame or fear so we can fit in with the guys and then we hope to meet a cool woman that likes us despite our insecurities.

Then in our isolation, while no one is looking and with the door locked, we finally find relief in our sexually confused state–porn. It’s quick, easy, cheap, with an endless variety where we don’t have to deal with the complexities of interpersonal relationship dynamics. We can stay alone and keep it locked away in our inner sanctum. It even gives us temporarily relief from the stress in our lives and gives the illusion of keeping our shame at bay.

Whew.

Once again, the boy code has conditioned us into a little, tiny corner where we remain angry, alone, confused, and isolated. Our conditioning is a trap. Be a certain way, and don’t act outside the box. If you do, we will humiliate you. Don’t speak up or intervene, b/c that too is gay, weak, or feminine. So, stay put, stay a bystander, stay in your box.
 
So this is where we are today
Like it or not, the state of male sexuality in this culture (and probably the world) is that of a sick, neglected, and deeply abandoned child, and we can see the wake of it everywhere in our lives. The way boys treat girls, the way men treat women. The way boys treat boys. The bullying and shame, coercion, and intimidation to be a certain way sexually. The gay jokes, the “small penis” jokes, the “pussy” jokes, the rape, misogyny, misandry,  the violence, Matthew Shepard, Penn State, The Catholic Church, and the shame and self-hatred toward our own bodies.

All taught by who? Boys.

That’s right. We adults have put boys in charge of teaching other boys about the most sacred parts of their bodies. Boys are teaching other boys about sexuality in this culture. And because adults are unable or unwilling to step up, this is the mess we are in.

Wow.

So, this is on the table for us to examine and see clearly. How about we pause and take this all in.

Breathe.

The next question for me is “okay, what do I do about it?”

In my own home, I will take on the responsibility to teach and train my son about his “wee wee” (penis), his body, and his sexuality with unwavering respect and love.

In terms of the global problem, the questions are rolling in. From single moms to new dad’s like me.

How are you dealing with your own confused sexuality and how will you/are you teaching your son about it? Because wherever you are ashamed and stuck, you will block your son from learning and embodying a healthy sexuality.

What I am doing about it?
I am teaching him about his sacred body. Where I’m stuck, I’m getting help, hiring mentors, going to classes and learning about how to appropriately (factoring in age and brain development) and truthfully talk to my son about his body and his sexuality. And, if enough parents ask, I’ll probably offer tele-classes or write more on the subject. I’m open to suggestions.

Please share below (at their site) how you are navigating this critical terrain.

If you are a parent of a son, or are actively involved in raising boys in your life, join our facebook page Raising Boys.

Will Johnson - Full Body, Empty Mind

 

 
This is a very cool article from the Tricycle Wisdom Collection. Johnson advocates that we learn how to feel into our bodies through our meditation practice as a way to deepen it. He now teaches embodiment training, which he defines as “a path of awakening that views the body as the doorway, not the obstacle, to personal growth and spiritual transformation.”

A lot of men (and women as well) are raised to experience their bodies as a tool, especially if one grows up playing sports and/or lifting weights. We do not learn to be embodied, to relax our muscles and joints, to feel the tension and tightness loosen and the contractions give way to softness and tenderness. We seldom if ever experience this deep relaxation, so with all that tension and tightness in our bodies, we remain numb to our feelings, armored against being vulnerable (as Wilhelm Reich would have taught).

Johnson's approach is based in deep experiential bodywork, Sufi teachings, and his Buddhist practice. This is good stuff - there is a lot to learn in simply reading this article/interview.

Full Body, Empty Mind

Will Johnson explains that by turning our awareness to the full range of physical sensations, the body becomes a doorway to awakening.

In many Buddhist groups, the body is addressed only in basic instructions on posture for meditation, sometimes lasting no more than a few minutes. Many practitioners are drawn to body-based practices such as yoga, martial arts, or the Alexander technique to complement or even enable their sitting practice, but they are often on their own when it comes to integrating these traditions with their larger spiritual path. What is being lost in this gap? One of the most convincing voices for the importance of the body in meditation belongs to Will Johnson, author of several books on the topic, including The Posture of Meditation; Aligned, Relaxed, and Resilient; and Yoga of the Mahamudra.

Johnson, the director of the Institute for Embodiment Training in British Columbia, Canada, began his Buddhist practice in 1972 and was certified in the deep bodywork system of Rolfing in 1976. Drawing on his experience in these traditions, Sufism, and others, he now teaches embodiment training, what he calls “a path of awakening that views the body as the doorway, not the obstacle, to personal growth and spiritual transformation.” I exchanged emails with Johnson to discuss how meditators can explore the body and what they might gain from the practice.

—Andrew Merz

You’ve said that in order to experience emptiness of mind, one must first experience fullness of body. While this intuitively resonates with many meditators, clear explanations of why that is true and how it can be integrated into a Buddhist meditation practice are hard to find. How do we start to understand this view in a Buddhist context, and how do we address it without feeling as though we are detracting from our usual sitting practice? 

This focus on awareness of the body is what, for me, the teachings always kept leading to. The part of the Four Noble Truths that attracted me the most, for example, was the explanation about why we suffer. The Buddha’s observation that we create upset for ourselves when we’re in reaction, and that we manage to do this to ourselves through the twinned actions of desire and aversion, just rang true.

The teachings tell us that actions disturb our peace of mind, but what I’m suggesting is that we can’t just look to what we conventionally call our mind to sort this out. Reaction, clinging, and aversion are physical actions that the body performs and that, no matter how subtle, create muscular tension through the repeated motions of either “pulling toward” (desire) or “pushing away” (aversion). Repeat anything often enough, and you create holding patterns in the body that predispose you to continue doing that action. Sitting practices that focus on relaxing the underlying tensions and holdings you feel in your body, as well as restrictions to the breath, help you mitigate the legacy and habit patterns of reacting, clinging, and aversion.

As the eleventh-century Mahamudra teacher Tilopa said, “Do nothing with the body but relax.” When we start to relax, we start feeling the body. Tensions and contractions in the body serve as a numbing blanket that keeps the tiny physical sensations that exist on every part of the body from being felt. Learning how to relax while remaining upright in the sitting posture allows the body’s full range of sensations to come out of hiding and make their existence felt. It’s always struck me as peculiar: If I know that sensations can be felt to exist everywhere in the body, then why don’t I feel them? And what effect does blocking out awareness of feeling have on me? And finally, if the mind that is “lost in thought” is somehow dependent on my not feeling the sensations of the body, what happens to the mind if I let myself feel the entire body, head to toe, as an unbroken field of sensations? The sitting posture itself can be a kind of crucible for burning off the tensions and restrictions to body and breath that all too often keep us lost in thought and unaware of feeling presence.

A good place to start is examining what happens to the body when you’re lost in thought. This, of course, is tricky to do, because when the mind is off wandering in involuntary thought, you’re not very aware of the body at all. But if you can include an observation of the body while you’re off in a thought, you’ll find that the condition “lost in thought” is directly accompanied somewhere in the body by muscular contraction and tensing, stillness and rigidity, and a subtle contraction or holding quality to the breath. In other words, when you’re lost in thought, you’re tense in body. It follows, then, that if you can consciously work with the body during your sitting practice to soften and relax the tensions and allow more resilient and natural movement to accompany the passage of the breath, the chatter of the mind can be reduced, and your practice can start going really deep.

Read the whole interview.