Welcome fellow explorers of the body-mind!
If you want to dig deep into a different way of thinking about consciousness, feeling and the body, this newsletter might be for you.
It’s for embodiment philosophers, somatic therapists, sensitive scientists and general theory nerds who suspect that the brain simply isn’t the whole story.
To start, my newsletter is mainly to share my book, an adventurous commentary on multiple theories that ends up in some surprising places, such as that feeling is the basis of consciousness and emerges from the whole body as a system over time. Not just from the brain.
And that each person’s experience is utterly unique as well as interconnected with the experiences of others.
Initially I’m going to post my book as chapter-by-chapter audio. I’m doing this simply because I love these ideas and want to share them. I’ll also post related reflections and some more personal writing.
I seem to be caught up in a long dance between science and spirituality, tending more towards the latter these days, so I can’t say where all this will go. Lately I find myself more interested in experience and less in proof, more drawn to expressing feeling than writing theory. We’ll see.
That being said, I think of my book as semi-academic so you probably need to have a fairly strong interest in the more academic and detailed side of things for now.
Free subscribers get my whole book, as an audio recording of one chapter each week, as well as related articles that I’ll post sporadically while I’m recording the book.
Paid subscribers get an ebook version delivered to their email address and can comment and ask questions.
Some more personal posts will be only for paying subscribers.
All subscribers and listeners receive my heartfelt gratitude for making the effort and spending the time.
I initially came to philosophy by way of cultural studies, perennially curious about human feeling and experience, as well as the natural world and our relationship to it. I completed a PhD in philosophy more than a decade ago now. My doctorate was more interdisciplinary than pure philosophy, meandering through process metaphysics, complexity theory and biosemiotics, with forays into attachment theory and metaphor theory.
More recently I followed developments in embodied cognition and the neuroscience of emotion, building on the foundation of my PhD. I finally put it all together in my book, Taking Heart and Making Sense: A New View of Nature, Feeling and the Body, which was published in 2022.
My drive to understand feeling is personal. I’ve spent a significant amount of my life energy on healing and understanding my own trauma, with much of that effort at a time when trauma was far less talked about and understood, particularly in terms of its relation to the body. That being said, my book isn’t about trauma itself, but about the relationship between our feeling experience and our lives, or what we feel and what happens.
In the past decade I also found spiritual anchors in Vipassana meditation and therapeutic bodywork, both of which have taught me things I just can’t imagine having learnt otherwise. They each offer a wellspring of unique, subtle experiences that compell me to refine my perspective, while keeping me forever on the edge of a great mystery. I can honestly say that my ideas have developed in tandem with my experience.
I love big, sweeping theories and intricate, detailed concepts, and I’m passionate about making complex ideas accessible. I honestly believe that we are at some sort of critical point where a paradigm shift is possible. That shift includes the conceptual and intellectual, but I see it as much more than that, as a deep shift in our understanding of who we are as human beings and what is possible for us. What I ardently hope and tentatively believe is possible is much more love and connection, between us as humans and with the natural world, as we learn to live more strongly through our living, feeling bodies and our sensitive hearts, as well as our intellectual minds.
