Embodiment is living within, being present within the internal space of the body. It’s something quite different from being aware of the body.
—Judith Blackstone
I’ll be giving a presentation tonight (10/21/22) as part of Nerd Nite Memphis. If anyone is in the area and interested, the evening begins at 7pm at the Memphis Chess Club. My actual presentation (.pdf file) is here for downloading.
My overall talk is on “Aikido and Embodiment.” I’m not the first one to dig into this area of thought, but it is an interesting (to me) avenue to pursue, and it connects aikido to anthropology, identity, social and political relations, cognition, trauma, and a lot of other interest areas for me. So, I guess I’m wearing two hats for this: aikido practitioner and anthropologist.
Part of the challenge here, I think, is that aikido isn’t traditionally learned and practiced in the realm of words. Sure, there is “verbal aikido” but for the most part aikido like a lot of other activities is a physical, somatic, embodied practice. I consider my own aikido to be in the shinshin toitsu (mind/body unification) tradition, since that was the pattern for both Toyoda Shihan and Jarman Sensei, who ran the dojo where I trained in New York. Mind/body unified–embodied practice–means that to put aikido into words alone involves more than a little translation. And, translation is always problematic.
I’ll try to get someone to record the event for those who can’t make it.