Tomorrow: Embodiment Hour at The Stoa from noon-1p EST
Hello friends,
Join me tomorrow for the first regular session of Embodiment Hour at The Stoa. We experimented with this offering and format in January. You can check it out here:
Each week I will choose a piece of cultural content (along with Peter Limberg, the steward of The Stoa) and we will watch, listen to, or read it together. We will then work through the feelings and sensations it evokes in us. The experience may be triggering. It may be provocative. It may be awkward. It may be many things you are not used to experiencing in a group. It will also be real, compassionate, inspiring, and healing. My motto for these sessions is: Feeling is healing.
Our current cultural orientation around media and information is heavily skewed to the mental: reason, logic, persuasion, manipulation, ideation, abstraction, etc. We often ignore or are completely oblivious to the feelings the media and culture stir in us. This is understandable given how much stimulus comes our way; so much of it with a hidden (or overt) agenda. We are numb, skeptical, dissociated, and dubious—overloaded with advertising, corporate agendas, celebrity culture, cancel culture…The only way to really make sense of what’s going on and to feel grounded in our own truth is to begin to awaken and invite the body’s intelligence to participate in the process.
The feelings in the body contain critical clues about the veracity of content; the position, intention, and level of development of the content creator; and our real position on issues. How do I feel about the Metaverse? Can I trust this broadcaster? What is my position on controversial issues? Where is this information coming from? I hear more and more people talk about “checking out” or tuning out of the media, the news, and these conversations. It’s just too confusing and incendiary. I can understand this position and frequently do media detox myself, but we can tune back in when we learn to approach important content with more emotional intelligence, curiosity, and compassion.
What excites me about Embodiment Hour at The Stoa is that it will be regular and brief (every week for one hour for the next three months). We have the opportunity to get to know each other and build our own small culture around the role of embodiment and feelings in communication and building community. I hope you’ll join!
There’s something very unusual and liberating about being transparent with our feelings in a group space held in unconditional acceptance (and love, to be honest). We learn from each other. Someone else often names the thing I am feeling that I hadn’t yet put my finger on. Or maybe we’re having feelings we’re ashamed of and we feel a huge sense of relief when we hear someone else is feeling that, too. Feelings are what connects us humans in our human experience—the basis of real empathy. Sensemaking that doesn’t include feelings is incomplete in my opinion. It’s faulty. Often, the real import of a piece of information is in the feelings it provokes. Coming together to explore the dynamics of the embodied experience of information can help us develop precision in naming and owning our experience and acceptance for the position others are holding.
TOMORROW we will look at this video by the actress, Annalynne McCord. You’ve probably seen it. It made the rounds as something Peter Limberg is calling “crisis cringe.” In the video, Annalynne appeals to Putin by painting a picture of how things would be different if she was his mother. I won’t say more here. Watch now if you like, or wait until our session tomorrow when we’ll all watch it together and FEEL our way to some truth about what the experience brings up for us.
You can register at The Stoa. Please note, the session is behind The Stoa’s Patreon paywall. Subscribers to Art of Emergence get access for free (email me for link).