Radical Hope #5 Your Body Knows What Your Mind Doesn’t

‍ ‍You’ve been sitting with the polycrisis — the weight of it, the scale of it.

You’ve felt the pull toward a different way of being in the world — the lived, felt experience of being part of an interconnected whole, which I have called systems consciousness.

Perhaps you call this by other names: mindfulness, meditation, presence, embodied presence, body–mind, nature-mind, contemplative practice, non-dual awareness, Creative Mind, the COACH field (1 ) and generative presence amongst many.

Last time we looked at the gap between knowing this and being able to live it.

This time we explore systems consciousness, or presence, as body awareness.

Do you experience who you are as a body, or do you observe your body from a distance?

Because here is what I have come to believe: the shift we are talking about happens mainly in the body. And the body — this neglected, extraordinary living system — is your local piece of nature.

Instead of “I think therefore I am”, what about “I am this body, and therefore I think”?

Your body IS nature. Become an environmental activist inside yourself!

Decolonise yourself!

Most of us have learned, often very early, to treat our bodies as machines to be managed by the rational mind. We route everything through analysis and narrative. We have become, in a very literal sense, top-heavy.

This is the internalisation, in our own bodies, of the same separation consciousness that creates social division, war, and ludicrous spending on the arms race, while destroying the larger environmental ecologies we depend on.

Learning to inhabit the body differently is not self-indulgent. It is decolonising yourself from the imperial capital of the conscious cognitive mind.

Iain McGilchrist’s argument — explored in Blog # 2 — is that the right hemisphere, which perceives context, relationship, and the living whole, should be the master, with the left as its useful servant. The servant has usurped the master. The task is restoration

The body is not a single system run by a brain. It is an ecology.

‍ We are not one organism but a community — trillions of organisms in relationship, multiple intelligence centres in constant conversation. The heart has its own neural network and the gut has more neurons than the spinal cord — both capable of independent processing and decision-making. Connecting all of these is the vagus nerve — a two-way information highway. Roughly eighty per cent of its fibres carry information upward, from body to brain. (2)

The body is not even built like a machine. It is a tensegrity structure — bones floating in soft tissue, held in shape not by one thing stacked on another but by the dynamic balance of tension and compression across the whole system. (3) The body is already doing systems thinking. It always has been.

Consider digestion. We imagine it as a simple sequence: food goes in, nutrients come out. But the digestive system is not a pipe — it is a living ecology of organs, microbes, hormones, and neural pathways in continuous conversation with each other and with the brain, the immune system, the liver. Roughly seventy per cent of the body’s immune cells line the gut wall. The enteric nervous system — the “second brain” — independently controls movement, secretion, and blood flow, and sends constant updates upward. This is not mechanism.

This is intelligence. And it is happening inside you, right now, without your conscious involvement.

The Magic of Attending to Both the Whole and the Parts

What I have been learning — and what somatic practitioners have known for decades — is that the more you move your awareness between attending to the whole and attending to a single part, the more the whole becomes available.

If you obsess with healing a single part, you may miss how the problem with that part is actually its relationship with other parts. In September 2025, I hurt my left knee and it stopped me from dancing and practising Aikido. After working with a somatic practitioner, the pain suddenly transferred to my right knee. The issue was transferred pain from trapped nerves in my back that run down both legs. Once I worked to relax the muscles around my lower spine, the knee problems stopped.

‍Alternatively, if you pay too much attention to the whole, you may miss something that needs attention in a subsystem. The bliss of whole-being meditation can sometimes lead me to ignore a difficult or vulnerable emotion that needs addressing.

‍The secret is to move between the whole and the parts and discover how the parts relate with each other. To do this we need to delve down into our skin, fascia, muscles, tendons, ligaments, bones, organs, and cells — to experience ourselves from the inside, rather than observe from the outside.

The more precisely you attend to a single part — one organ, one area of sensation, one quality of holding — the more the whole becomes available. Differentiation leads to wholeness. You don’t find the whole by skipping the parts. You find it by going more deeply into them.

‍Linda Hartley, somatic educator, Body-Mind Centering® teacher, and founder of the Institute for Integrative Bodywork and Movement Therapy — describes a moment in her own training with Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen when, after weeks of learning the parts — bones, muscles, organs — something shifted (4):

“I could feel myself as a whole again. It was through having gone through enough differentiating, getting to know the unfamiliar places.”

I personally find that gently moving in my body — on the floor or standing — draws my attention inside. There is so much body sensation held in awareness that the past and future disappear for a while. Often a sort of gentle bliss suffuses my being. I feel close to myself. I feel home.

When I do this, I come home to my body in the present moment and often feel relaxation and pleasure. The body’s astounding self-healing capacities begin to work without my managing them. And I am learning, in my body, how nature and life work as ecosystems rather than as linear processes.

Listening to What Has Been Ignored

There are different layers to this unconscious. Not all of it is psychological — much of it is simply the body’s vast ongoing intelligence, sensing and regulating and communicating continuously beneath the threshold of awareness.

When you begin to listen, you are not creating something new. You are opening a door that has always been there.

Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen — movement artist, somatic educator, and founder of Body-Mind Centering® — has spent more than fifty years exploring how consciousness arises through the living tissues of the body. (5) Her work does not begin with concepts or theories. It begins with the felt intelligence of cells, fluids, organs, and developmental movement patterns.

Rather than diagnosing or correcting, she offers something quieter: let us listen to the parts that have been ignored and bring them back into relationship. Awareness, for her, is not passive. It is a kind of inner touch — and when you bring it to a part of the body that has been braced or compressed or simply unnoticed, something responds.

Linda Hartley, who trained extensively with Bainbridge Cohen, describes it this way (4):

“When you visualise and pay attention to a particular organ, it awakens. It kind of knows. You’re witnessing it — it wakes up and knows. Something energetically changes in that organ, that system. It becomes a little more two-way… They are just waiting there for us to notice them. And normally we don’t, until there’s a pain or a problem.”

‍The body already knows how to be in relationship. We are simply learning, again, to listen.

Body Psychotherapy Touches Parts That Other Therapies Cannot Easily Reach

Much of what shapes us happened before we were three years old — before language, before story, held in the tissue of our bodies. Healing early life wounding is the great revolution offered by somatic psychology. In my work with clients, I find that attending to what is held there, without needing to know the narrative, can shift something that years of talking has difficulty touching. If this resonates, get in touch.

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The Body as Training Ground

There is something here that matters beyond personal healing.

When we learn to follow the inner ecology — to let the gut’s knowing arrive before the head has decided what it means, to sense the body’s signals without immediately reaching for a concept to contain them — we are training something. A capacity for listening that, once learned here, begins to become available elsewhere: in relationship, in the way we hold space for others, in community, in the way we attend to the living systems we are part of

Somatic practice is how we develop that quality of attention in ourselves.

In  Blog #3, I wrote about the chickadee — the bird whose listening becomes the nervous system of the whole flock. Other species learn to trust its alarm calls more than their own. The chickadee doesn’t lead through strength. It leads through listening. We will return to this. For now it is worth noting: the quality of attention we are cultivating here, in the body, is the seed of that kind of presence in the world.

What we are learning to do here — bringing curious, unhurried attention to a part of a living system so that it can find its own balance — turns out to be the same move that living systems make at every scale. We will come back to this.

For now: the body is the door.

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A Practice

Before you read on, pause for a moment.

‍What practices do you already have that bring you into the body? (6) And are they interoceptive — taking you into inner sensation, organ, breath, the subtle interior — or do they tend to orient you outward, toward the environment or toward movement and coordination? It is worth knowing where your practices are on that spectrum, and whether something more inward is calling. I notice in my own practice a slow drift inward — from Aikido and dance toward Feldenkrais and Body-Mind Centering inspired work — and what I find there continues to surprise me.

‍And then, wherever you are right now:

Linda Hartley teaches that there are two anchors that are always available, whatever else is happening, wherever you are. ‍

The ground beneath you. Feel the weight of your body resting on it — through your feet, your sitting bones, wherever you are making contact. Let yourself be held.

The breath moving through you. Not controlled, just noticed. In. Out. The simple fact of it.‍ ‍

From that place of ground and breath, ask the body a question rather than the mind:

‍What is here, right now?

Not what do I think, what do I feel, what should I do — but what is here, as sensation, as aliveness, as quality of presence.

Notice what happens when you wait for the body’s answer rather than supplying one

Notice too if the mind moves in to interpret, explain, or dismiss. That movement is not wrong — it is simply the habit we are learning to loosen.

The body already knows more than it has been asked.

‍Next blog: The Field That Holds Us. As this quality of attention deepens in the body, it begins to extend outward — into relational space, the more-than-human world. The boundary between self and world starts, slowly, to become permeable.

What’s the one thing from this blog that’s staying with you?‍ ‍

How does this land with you? What is your view?

If something has resonated, or troubled you, do write to me: julian.russell@lifetalent.com. Also, write to me if you want to join our WhatsApp and participate in the discussion.

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Julian Russell is a psychotherapist, executive coach, writer, and committed fellow traveller through the territories of inner work and public life. Drawing on decades of somatic and contemplative practice, he helps people access the capacities they already carry. He is a co-founder of the Generative Citizen community, a gathering of people who understand that how we are matters as much as what we do. His forthcoming book, Standing at the Edge of Hope, explores why personal and spiritual development is not a retreat from the world’s crises, but the very ground from which transformative engagement becomes possible.‍ ‍

‍Notes

‍(1) The COACH state — Centred, Open, Aware, Connected, Holding — is a framework developed in generative change work by Robert Dilts and Stephen Gilligan. See Robert Dilts and Stephen Gilligan, Generative Coaching, Volume 1: The Journey of Creative and Sustainable Change (Santa Cruz, CA: International Association for Generative Change, 2021).

(2) Stephen W. Porges, The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011).

(3) Tom Myers, “Tensegrity Applied to Human Biomechanics,” video interview, YouTube, https://youtu.be/xzX-PeU_MTo. See also Thomas W. Myers, Anatomy Trains: Myofascial Meridians for Manual and Movement Therapists, 3rd ed. (Edinburgh: Churchill Livingstone/Elsevier, 2014).

(4) Linda Hartley, conversation with Julian Russell, April 2026. Hartley is the founder of the Institute for Integrative Bodywork and Movement Therapy (IBMT) and author of Wisdom of the Body Moving (1995), Somatic Psychology (2004), and Embodied Spirit, Conscious Earth (2024). See also ibmt.co.uk and lindahartley.co.uk.

(5) Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, Sensing, Feeling, and Action: The Experiential Anatomy of Body‑Mind Centering®, 3rd ed. (Northampton, MA: Contact Editions, 2018).

(6)  One of the most useful ways to understand the diversity of movement and somatic practices is through the lens of how we pay attention. Researchers often describe three primary modes of bodily awareness: sensing the outer world (exteroception), sensing movement and position (proprioception), and sensing internal bodily states (interoception). See Peter Payne, Mardi Crane-Godreau, and Peter Levine, "Somatic Experiencing: Using Interoception and Proprioception as Core Elements of Trauma Therapy," Frontiers in Psychology 6 (2015).

‍Outer world: Some activities draw our attention outward, into the environment and its demands. Team sports like football rely heavily on reading space, anticipating others' actions, and responding to rapid changes around us (exteroception). The body is engaged, but the focus is on the field, the ball, the opponent — the relational world outside the skin.

Movement and position: the organisation of joints, balance, coordination, and whole-body flow (proprioception). Tai Chi, Aikido, and contact improvisation live here: they cultivate a sense of the body as a single, coherent system moving through space. These practices bridge inner and outer worlds, training us to feel how the whole body organises itself in motion.

Inner world: practices that refine attention even further, inviting us into the subtleties of internal sensation. Scaravelli-inspired yoga, Feldenkrais, Alexander Technique, and technical Pilates work by differentiating small parts of the body, refining neuromuscular patterns, and increasing the resolution of our internal map. Authentic Movement, organ-based somatic work, and Body-Mind Centering go deeper still, asking us to sense tone, weight, breath, organ movement, and micro-shifts in the body's internal landscape. Somatic Experiencing works specifically with the body's trauma responses, tracking tiny shifts in sensation and activation. See Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, Sensing, Feeling, and Action: The Experiential Anatomy of Body-Mind Centering®, 3rd ed. (Northampton, MA: Contact Editions, 2018).

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