Embodied Understanding of Abstract Concepts: Learning Through the Body

When we consider concepts like adaptability, resilience, or integrity, we may have a general understanding of their meanings, but they often remain abstract. Experiencing them physically instead can be highly effective. An embodied understanding fosters a much deeper connection to what these concepts signify, allowing us to internalize their meaning at the level of reflexes.

This approach is at the core of EightOS practice and it is what makes it not only a body practice but also a mind practice, because it allows the participants to work through their behavioral patterns and psychological issues using the body.

For instance, let’s consider the notion of resilience for a moment. Broadly understood (outside of the physical context), resilience is an ability to withstand, to weather through turbulent events, to be able to go on despite difficulties. However, this definition tells us WHAT resilience is but it doesn’t tell us HOW it works. So knowing about resilience does not necessarily make us resilient.

This changes when we explore resilience as a physical concept. In the EightOS practice, we often engage in an exercise where participants form pairs, and one person gently pushes the other at various points on the body. The most common automatic response is to become either too rigid or too loose, reflecting the typical patterns we use to respond to external impulses in general. Excessive rigidity leads to tension and escalation, while too much looseness makes one easier to manipulate.

This can be felt by the participants directly through the body. Rigidity is not anymore the abstract “stubborness”, it has a concrete physical shape and form, it has a feeling — it can be forceful, tense, painful, but also allows you to literally “stand the ground” (although at the expense of hightened stress). Physical looseness and the associated “leniency” is not anymore something abstract, but it actually feels like something where you might not have control, where you dangerously lose balance, but where you can also get into a pleasant flow and where you feel flexible.

In that new embodied context we can start practicing what it’s like to be neither too rigid, nor too loose. We explore resilience as a physical concept: the ability to return to original shape. We start exploring how we can shift our physical body with an incoming impulse, temporarily let go of our original state, shape shift, and then come back to the original form. It’s neither rigid, nor loose, it’s somewhere in the middle. Resilience is then experienced through the body, it has a feeling, a dynamic shape, it is something that’s felt, not only thought.

We then work on carrying that feeling and trying it in different contexts. Starting from changing pairs to explore it with different bodies. Then changing the exercises to experience it in different physical concepts. Finally then trying what resilience would feel like outside of the physical context, when we talk about psychological situations or more abstract states.

This helps us make the full circle: starting from an intellectual understanding and the associated signifier, then shifting it into the physical realm, exploring it through the body, then taking this renewed understanding back with us and extrapolating it outside of the physical context into our relationships with the others, ourselves, and our environment.

In that context, resilience is not just about recovery. It enables the capacity to let disturbance teach the body a finer way of sensing, so that what once felt like stress becomes information, and what once required control becomes relation.

Subsequent exercises allow us to deepen our physical understanding of this concept and to explore various aspects of it. For instance, it is a well-studied fact that resilient systems have a certain level of “adaptive” variability that has fractal dynamics. To better understand this dynamics, we invite the participants to wear movement tracking sensors and use our SelfSense app in order to get direct live feedback on how adaptive the movement is. This helps practice resilience from the dynamic perspective, where we focus less on the quality of the body (tension / release), but on the way it moves.

Adaptive movement variability then helps cultivate a new kind of sensitivity where fractal motion is not only a sign of health, but a practice of perceiving complexity without collapsing into rigidity or noise.