Your Body is an Octopus Brain
The movement of embodied empathy
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“One of the reasons I keep coming back to the body—I am a researcher. I have done scientific research, I have done humanistic research and I am an artist. I have always been both. And on each side, I always keep coming back to the body because I’m really interested in intimacy. And one of the first things that happens both physiologically and psychologically in a moral act is empathy for the feelings of others. And a huge amount of empathy, then, is simply imagining the bodies of others. We become more moral when we imagine the bodies of others in all their pain and suffering and joys. I think the brain is […] always embodied.”
-Cat Bohannon, author of Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution
This is the whole thesis of Vera Monstera. When I heard Cat Bohannon say these words in an interview, I threw up my hands in joy and defeat. She said in 5 sentences what I’ve been trying to say all these months. So, there you go! Vera Monstera is over. We can all go home. Thanks a lot, Cat Bohannon! And I can’t wait to read your book. I know I’ll dig it.
Class dismissed! But wait. We might be octopuses.
Octopuses. It’s the plural of octopus (I looked it up!). And we might be them, in a way. Their brains behave differently than ours, but in our highest, 8-limbed dreams, we can emulate them. A majority of their neurons are in their arms in addition to neurons in their heads. When an octopus is in its right mind, it feels things in the world with its arms. Contact. Connection. An ever-evolving dance of sensing and shapeshifting.
We don’t have that very cool luxury of neuron-y arms, but I like to think that, in a way, we do. Through that big, old imagination that Cat Bohannon was talking about, we can send our attention and breath to different parts of our bodies. When we stop being all heady about everything and sense the world through the rest of our bodies, we have access to many different kinds of intelligence.
“But our bodies can’t think!” says my kid while looking over my shoulder. I give her my maybe-we-can-be-like-octopuses-and-isn’t-that-cool-spiel, and now she’s drawing a thinking octopus for me. From the other room, I hear, “I’m makin’ a Brain Body!” Yes! That’s what I’m talking about!
Dancers communicate in movement languages. Currency is rhythm, patterns, nuances of physical tone. It’s not just what you say, it’s how you say it. Picking up movement through visual, audio and tactile signals is second nature. There’s a conscious/unconscious, ongoing inventory of your environment and the beings in it. An intelligence arises that is body-first. Muscle memory mixes with emotional memory. Ideas are exchanged and embodied. Empathy happens without words. Feeling is thinking is being.
What does that mean in a non-dance world? I think we all might have access to the idea of neuron-y octopus arms, to our body as a brain and our brain as a body. To think-y feelings and feely thinkings.
But in our day-to-day, why do we so often feel separate from our bodies? Why do we consider them as not who we are? They are something we dress up, but our brain gets all the credit. Even with my long history as a movement teacher and practitioner, why do I still limit who I am to the tiny spinning hamster wheel in my skull?
We all have our reasons to distance ourselves from our bodies, and those reasons are real. Survival. Protection. Fear. Numbing. Self-judgement. I get it. It’s okay. I see you, I see me. Bodies are fragile and failing and fearful and fickle and fragmented. They are also fierce and fabulous and fighters. They know so much. They have so much to say.
We have an ever-evolving relationship with our brainy bodies. Lots of feelings back and forth all day every day. Feeling at odds. Feeling whole. Feeling at odds again. Half-hearted, whole-hearted.
Is there integrity—and a kind of integration—in considering ourselves thinking bodies? Bodily brains? As a being with a heart everywhere everywhichway? What if we float the idea of cephalopod movement moments?
Oh, get this. I just looked up cephalopod to double check that I knew what the heck I was talking about (do I?), and “cephalopod” (an aquatic invertebrate like an octopus, squid or nautilus) is Greek for “head foot.” So good! Let your feet drive for a little bit. Get grounded.
If you allow your body to tap into physical intelligence, what could you discover? Like a baby, every sensation is new. Delight in the breeze as you spin on a ferris wheel. Put your toes in the sand. Get your nose in that freshly opened peony.
We are our bodies.
We are our imperfect, aging, strange, beautiful, tired, gut-wrenched, sun-drenched, in-progress, unpolished, stunning bodies.
What’s that old saying? If you can’t love yourself, how can you love someone else? If you can’t love (appreciate, connect to) your body, how much intelligence and life is lost? How closed off are we from our unimagined, curious octopus arms? Are we missing a kind of knowing that we don’t even know about?
Maybe because our bodies are always in motion—as in aging, as in changing—we think of them as more unmoored. We think of our brain as set in stone, fixed (although it isn’t). We think of our sense of self as fixed (although it isn’t). We even see our moral compass as fixed (although we could all use some tweaks).
My kid and I talked about a moral compass yesterday. We talked about how and why you should stop kicking people. Especially when you’ve been kicked yourself. It’s an interesting thing to explain a moral compass from a secular, witchy spiritually-minded perspective. We are stardust. We are all made of the same elements. We are all in this because we are all in this. We are all the same stuff.
Which brings us back to empathy. What did Cat Bohannan say about it again?
“…a huge amount of empathy, then, is simply imagining the bodies of others. We become more moral when we imagine the bodies of others in all their pain and suffering and joys. I think the brain is […] always embodied.”
I love that connection is a function of both imagination and physicality. Imagination becomes a physical conversation of connection. Mentally and physically putting yourself out there. It’s a process of stretching to open yourself up to the worlds of others. We literally imagine the bodies of others. We consider them. We thinky-feel and feel-y think. We are not stuck, we reach out.
Here’s an oldie but a goodie animated RSA short where Brené Brown breaks down empathy. How do we respond when one of us falls into a pit (of despair, isolation, tragedy, trauma…name your poison)? The physical imagination of the characters in the animation is very telling. One friend shouts down abrasively from the top of the pit. The other has the imagination to physically climb down into the pit to be next to the fallen friend.
And while we’re at it…
Maybe—maybe!—some of that imaginative physicality of opening up becomes empathy for ourselves. Our own bodies. Us. You. Me. Maybe that’s the beginning of reaching out.
Now that we’ve gone down this limb-y, limbic road, I’ll be honest. I don’t know how much octopuses think (feel!) about empathy. Probably not at all. But isn’t this fun?
There is something embodied that we all need to say. All of our most urgent and important decisions come from our body. “I made a gut decision.” “I just had a gut feeling.” “I finally followed my heart.” “I got chills when I said that.” “The hair on my arms is standing up.” “I feel a shiver up my spine.” “Everything in my body said yes.”
Our bodies are not some separate entity that we ignore, hide and puritanically punish. We don’t have to arbitrarily separate the brain and the body. We are not disembodied heads. We do not need to apologize for who we are. It’s like crushing our own beautiful, omnipotent octopus body-brains when we self-lacerate.
What happens when we don’t ignore bodies? What happens when we go out on a limb and embrace them with all of our arms?
Know any movers, shakers or art makers who would dig this?
"Even with my long history as a movement teacher and practitioner, why do I still limit who I am to the tiny spinning hamster wheel in my skull?"
For me, it's a mouse wearing a top hat!