Announcing 'Embodiment and Flow'
Our new course with John Vervaeke, Rafe Kelley, Schuyler Brown and more
Announcing our new course ‘Embodiment & Flow’ with John Vervaeke, Schuyler Brown, Nicola Price, Roger Jackson, Dr. Shama Rahman and Tom Morley. Including breathwork, mindfulness, movement, rhythm and flow training. You can find a time-limited 10% discount at the bottom of this article.
You’re reading this text with your whole body. As your eyes move across the letters, your heart is beating, neurons are firing, and your body is adapting to its environment in countless subtle ways. Everything we experience in life, and every aspect of how we make sense and find meaning is mediated through the complex interplay of our senses.
If we wake up to this, we soon realise we’re not watching the world go by: we’re deeply embedded in it. John Vervaeke calls this participatory knowing - a sense of deep connection and unity with reality that transforms our conception of who we are. But we can’t think or talk our way to it: we have to embody it. With that in mind (and body), we’ve gathered an incredible group of teachers for our newest online course.
The more content we’ve created and courses we’ve run, the more we’ve realised that to really make sense and find meaning at a deeper level, we have to start with embodiment. Practices like breathwork, mindfulness, somatic awareness and movement can shift our whole perception, increase our health and help us make sense in completely new ways.
We’ve been talking about a course like this for years, but the thematic threads we’ve been exploring recently have made the timing feel right. In recent pieces we’ve put out with Mary Harrington, Paul Kingsnorth and N.S. Lyons, each has commented in some way on how our psyches are being split between the physical and the virtual. We’re increasingly disconnected from the rest of nature and losing ourselves in virtual worlds defined by identity games, theory, fantasy and avoidance.
The implications of this can’t be underestimated. If we lose ourselves in our own narrative games and don’t develop the capacity to be here right now, connected to our senses and one another, we have little hope of co-ordinating to find new solutions to the meta-crisis.
That’s why this course is almost entirely experiential. It will get you moving, breathing, connecting and flowing. For five weeks, we’re hosting live sessions with world-class teachers of breathwork, mindfulness, somatic experiencing, movement and rhythm.
Throughout, we’ll be linking these practices with cognitive science and neuroscience, drawing on research by John Vervaeke and others to contextualise what we’re doing in the bigger picture. We’ll link these techniques to the heart of ancient philosophies to explore how they can play an essential role in ‘stealing the culture’, and maybe even changing our collective trajectory.
We’ll explore how, under the right conditions, embodiment can help us enter a flow state. Flow is an experience of being 'in the zone', where time slows down and we move seamlessly with our environment, performing at the best of our abilities. Many describe flow states as the most meaningful and clarifying experiences of their lives. As Jamie Wheal explored in ‘Stealing Fire’, we’re looking for them all the time. Riding a bike through busy traffic. Playing video games. Engaging in a truly mind-blowing conversation.
The process will help you identify your own unique embodiment needs, and where you can bring flow into your life. Throughout, you will have the opportunity to deepen your own personal embodiment practice, with the option to find small groups of others on the course with similar objectives for support and accountability.
The process begins on Thursday, June 9 with a session with John Vervaeke and Rafe Kelley, hosted by Alexander Beiner. Vervaeke will explain embodiment in terms of '4E' cognitive science, which theorises that our experience of the world isn't just processed in our heads, but is also embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended. He'll also explain how we can create the conditions for flow in our day to day lives. Rafe Kelley, parkour pioneer and founder of Evolve Move Play, will build off Vervaeke's framing to provide a series of exercises you can do day to day, including a 'movement diet' you can develop throughout the course if you want to.
After that, you’ll dive into your own personalised process with the support of the faculty and other participants from around the world. Neuroscientist and artist Dr. Shama Rahman will provide unique flow and creativity exercises you can practice throughout the course, as well as an accessible introduction to the neuroscience of these unique states.
Somatic Experiencing therapist and bodyworker Roger Jackson will guide you through techniques to help you start to listen deeply to the inner wisdom of your body. Renowned breathwork teacher Nicola Price will guide you through a breathwork session and share how to create your own breath practice.
Embodiment coach Schuyler Brown will host a session on 'Cultural Embodiment' - taking a live cultural conversation and teaching you how to make sense of it through an embodied lens as a group. We'll bring it all together in our final session, Rhythm, with drummer and facilitator Tom Morley showing you how to come into flow as a group, and why it's such a wonderful tool for cohesion and collaboration.
Whatever it is you want to embody, and however you want to flow, the course will give you practices, support and a theoretical framework to bring it into your life.
For 72 hours, we’re offering all free Substack subscribers 10% off the ticket price with the code Substack_10 (expires Friday at midnight UK time).