Camille Litalien: Embodied Learning

This is a transcript of Camille Litalien’s TEDx talk Embodied Learning at TEDxUSU Dec 8, 2017:

Everything substantial I have ever learned I learned through being in my body. I am a dancer…

When I dance I recover the ability for my mind to inhabit my whole body. All my senses become active, spontaneously responding to the changing textures of my internal environment. Through my senses my mind can feel, listen and obey the intelligence of the body tissues. This living fully inside the senses of the body is remembered rather than learned. … This uncontrived, pre-verbal, integration of the body and mind through the senses is a natural capacity for all humans.

The awakening of this intelligence, through the senses, so that my mind can reach out and feel with more acuity the world around me, and listen more deeply to the sensuous language of nature and self, is what I refer to as embodiment. There are very many approaches…to the process of embodiment. …

My dance training was a classical conservatory training where you studied long hours a day via repetitions of external shapes and movements, via copying an idealized external form and correcting it by looking at a mirror. … An external pursuit to achieving a particular skill.

(3:29) I noticed my physicality was deeply affected by the buildings, the forms [we] where taught in. These man-made structures deeply affected not only my sense of space, lines, rhythms, volumes, but also my mind, my emotions. … I started to notice that these idealized forms, which I had now embodied as my means of expressions, were out of touch with the sensuous world, and thereby of my own self. I felt fragmented. This is how I trained and I got injured a lot. I also got really bored. …

(4:25) I felt like rather than sensuously inhabiting my body, and exploring the natural world within and without, I was enforcing my mind and body into yet another idea. While I could appreciate the beauty of a newly distorted body, or a correctly aligned body, my sensing self was not involved in the discovery. It felt contrived. …

…I sensed how much of my human capacities lay dormant in my dancing and in experiencing life. I started exploring different modalities to re-approach both, all of which emphasized learning experientially through my body. I started to remember, to connect, to a deeper field of sensitive intelligence greater than my own self-reflected image.

I wanted to feel the rhythms of the Earth, the tides, the seasons. I went to Nature to discover her body-mind, her intelligence. Reaching out to nature through my recovered senses I became aware that my body-mind could move freely between the inner and outer landscapes. There was a continuum in the silence beyond the confines of human thought. I started to discover a more direct contact with the sensitive intelligence of the living Earth. I became aware that Nature was inside me too, her rhythms, her qualities, and tides, in this sensuous, embodied approach.

I caught myself dancing free of pain, with a newly discovered sense of what it means to be human. We are all born … with a natural capacity to feel the intelligence of the living Earth. (6:42) But we need to consciously step out of abstracted man-made structures, architectural, intellectual, cultural, to listen and respond to these [other] kinds of wisdom. Through attentive touch, awakened curiosity, and a sense of play, we can create profound contact between ourselves and the life around us.

My learning experience and the one I am attempting to share with students has to do with recovering the ability to live fully in the senses, to be present, embodied, responsive. Starting with the breath, we listen to her qualities, her sound, her depths. In doing so we become aware of places in the body where she may not move so freely.

When we listen attentively through the breath, through sound and sensation, we start to notice when the sound stops, when the breath stops. This usually signals a blockage of attention in the body-mind, and an unconscious hold or habit. And the body has such a great capacity to adapt that we will often compensate lots of immobility in one area with overworking another.

With time we are likely assume that these unconscious over-compensations as our normal way of being. And this in turn creates other blocks, other tensions, other compensations. And it goes on and on until we find ourselves in a constricted body-mind that is quite far from its natural state, and deprived from its potential.

(8:38) Through sensing, hearing, feeling, we invite the opening and the release of these contracted and restricted patterns, whether emotional, physical or mental. When the body-mind is not able to enter an area of hold, we can use structured guided anatomic imagery, and this can help our senses remember a more effective body re-alignment. Our senses’ intelligence can then reach and re-join a new position of mobility.

We can also do hands-on partner work to help the body-mind access, feel a physical and emotional blind spots that needs unwinding in order to transform and become sensitive again. We will revisit early developmental patterns, both human and evolutionary, to assist the recovery of our body-mind recovery.

(9:38) All body tissues are intelligent. They receive, perceive, respond, transform. They each have a way of exploring on their own. When the body tissues are in full sensual contact with a living Earth, they can yield into her, feel her intelligence, her body-mind. If we listen closely, each organ, muscle, fluid, cell, who all carry their own memories and experiences, has a story that wants to be told.

I am inspired to learn more about who and where we are. To be deeply rooted in my body-mind, in Nature, the community and place I live in. Once rooted we have a chance to hear all living voices of the organic and non-organic world. In waking up to their stories we wake up to our own. (10:43)

Update 2023-06-05: Correction of transcript. Added time stamp links.

Update 2022-10-12: Correction of typos.