CE Insight: Embodied Sensemaking - Synchronize the Mind, Body, & Emotions

Over the weekend I wrote a quick piece on The Pulse sharing a link to an ongoing discussion between various people on the quickly unfolding "Russian Coup."

We all know now that the situation abruptly ended, and that is a whole other discussion, but I wanted to draw attention to a sentence in my piece that was said just before the discussion link.

"If you choose to listen, see what it feels like to stay connected to your body and notice your felt sense as you hear what’s happening."

There are multiple intentions behind this invitation, and I wanted to share some ideas around this idea I call 'embodied sensemaking.'

During major global events, or quickly unfolding events, it is common for people to want answers immediately.

What's happening? Why? Who is involved? What will happen next? Are we being lied to? Is this a psy-op etc.

Getting these answers with certainty is usually impossible. But it doesn't stop millions of social media users from claiming they have all the answers.

Chaos typically ensues as people race to be FIRST to have an answer, often leading them to jump to conclusions that may not even make sense.

But this is our current culture, and it's easy to get stuck in this habit.

In this chaos, so much is missed as we become stuck in the mind and perhaps driven by emotion.

We forget to sense how we truly feel about the global event, what it might mean for us, how people are being affected by it, the layers of human consciousness acting upon it etc. 

If we are not aware of some pain or trauma that is driving our patterns, can we do anything to change it? No. Awareness gives us the chance to see and choose. Awareness comes from being present to what we have become disconnected from.

I believe that in order to truly understand our world, and our individual circumstances, we have to be present to a more holistic way of knowing and feeling.

To me, critical thinking and sensemaking are not just cognitive processes. We sensemake and critically think best when our entire being is in play.

When we bring on the sensing and relational capacities of the body and nervous system. When we synchronize the mind, body, and emotional state, it also opens the doors for implicit and explicit intuition to be more clear and available to our awareness.

Consciously staying connected to the body is one of the simplest ways to practice bringing about these synchronizations.

If we do this while taking in news or our environment, we expand our awareness beyond JUST the mind. Our society is typically very mental in its approach to society. We have become absent from deeper levels of knowing within ourselves.

The trick isn't to throw away the mind, but to bring it into balance with our other capacities.

I began experimenting with the idea of embodied sensemaking in 2010 with Collective Evolution. I formally incorporated it into the reading experience on CE in 2016 by adding a simple exercise to the start of our articles inviting the reader into a deeper understanding of what they were consuming.

That same exercise lives at the top of articles on The Pulse as well.

Our society is complex and many of our behaviors, individually and collectively, are driven by our past, trauma, and conditioning.

If we can sense where these pieces might be impacting the nature of our society and the stories that happen around us, we can get a better sense of how to solve the challenges we face because we can sense where the problem truly is.

With this approach, we are literally seeking to solve problems from a different level of consciousness. We are bringing to our awareness how the human condition, individually and collectively, is creating the world around us.

We move from reacting to what happens, to being about to take responsibility for what happens. 

The more of us that be in this way, the more capacity there will be to collectively change our existing systems or create new ones.

Simply put, emodied sensemaking allows us to understand and witness more deeply what is happening in a situation. It reveals how we truly feel about a situation, and what might be driving it.

Awareness of that allows us to do anything from healing our past or traumatic wounds around a situation to seeing the world through a clearer lens so solutions can come about and cycles can stop.

We make the unconscious conscious and are empowered with choice.

Make a note to truly practice sensing how you feel in your body when you are at home, at work, watching or reading news or engaging in a relational situation.

Practicing this over time will expand your awareness to be more present to the signals, energy, and information already existing in your body and field that we have become absent to.