Ep 54 with Christine Caldwell

Ailey Jolie: 00:00

Welcome to In This Body, a podcast where we dive deep into the pope power of embodiment. I'm your host, Aile Jolie, a psychotherapist deeply passionate about living life fully from the wisdom within your very own body. The podcast In This Body is a love letter to embodiment, a podcast dedicated to asking important questions like how does connecting to your body change your life? How does connecting to your body enhance your capacity to love more deeply and live more authentically? And how can collective embodiment alter the course of our shared world? Join me for consciously curated conversations with leading experts. Each episode is intended to support you in reconnecting to your very own body. This podcast will be available for free wherever you get your podcast, making it easy for you to stay connected to In This Body, the podcast with me, Aile Jolie. Welcome back to In This Body. I'm Aile Jolie, and today I'm with Christine Cadwell, Somatic Psychotherapist Movement Specialist, and the founder of the Somatic Counseling Program at Naropa University, one of the first programs in the United States to blend Western psychotherapy with Eastern contemplative traditions. Christine's path began over 40 years ago with studies in anthropology, dance therapy and gestalt work. As a young student watching films of healing dance rituals from different cultures, something awakened in here. Something awakened in her a recognition that the body held capacities for transformation that Western psychology had largely ignored. She went on to develop the moving cycle, a body-centered approach to healing, and coined the term bodyfulness, which she describes as the embodied version of mindfulness. What makes Christine's work so compelling is how she bridges the contemplative and the clinical, the personal and the political. As an advanced student of Zen Master Tiknatan, she sees embodiment not just as a path to individual healing, but as a form of activism, a way of reclaiming what oppressive systems have tried to sever us from. Today we're exploring what it actually means to be bodyful, how our culture teaches us to abandon our bodies, and what becomes possible when we learn to trust what our bodies know. I hope you enjoy this episode of How to Be in This Body with me, Ailey Jolie. So my first question for you today that I always tend to start the podcast with is I would love to hear from you, what does being in your body mean?

Christine Caldwell: 02:44

I don't think of myself as being in my body. I think of myself as my body. And so, you know, watch out for the possibility of that Cartesian split, you know, that there's this immaterial me that sits in a container and then the body becomes a container. And I think the body's more than a container. The body is an active producer of identity and thought and feeling and all of that. So I would say, as I am my body, the more that I hold that idea, uh, the more I feel like I am able to investigate my physical

Christine Caldwell: 03:27

experience and see it as a source of wisdom and intelligence. So that there's in a sense multiple intelligences going on in us, and one of which is cognitive, um, but there's so much intelligence that is when it's generalized, it's also embodied. So a quick teaser on that one.

Ailey Jolie: 03:51

I would love to hear from you for the listener who's maybe really new to your work. What led you to the realm of embodiment or even the definition of being the body that you just gave there?

Christine Caldwell: 04:05

I was living the life of the mind. I was sort of set to do that in college and kind of budding intellectual. And I went to a gestalt therapy group because I had these really bad neck pains and very tension-based neck pains. And within a couple of weeks of going to that gestalt group, the neck pain disappeared. And so I realized that the body is holding material or the body is holding its own sort of physicalized version of stress or historical material or um trauma, etc. And that just, you know, that personal experience just really drove me, uh, as well as I grew up in Los Angeles area. And in that area at the time, there were so many people who were asking the same questions I was and who were beginning to teach this kind of thing. So I was able to mentor with a lot of really brilliant people at that time. So that helped too.

Ailey Jolie: 05:14

I know that you've created a program at Naropa that kind of is a combination of many things. And I would love to hear a little bit around what inspired you to create that program. What is the program? And what you really blended together because I know it to be quite unique. And I know when I was at Pacifica, it was often referenced as being something quite unique and very um collective and different in regards to what you really brought together. Um, because even though they're intellectually, there's things seem to merge together. You were one of the few who really brought them together in a more experiential way to study and learn and also embody. Yeah, yeah.

Christine Caldwell: 05:52

Well, it's quite funny because my link to Naropa happened quite almost randomly. I had decided to move to Boulder with no job, not knowing anyone, nothing. I just sprinkled my CV around town and Naropa picked it up. They were very young at that time. They were only about four years old in terms of doing any kind of program at all. And they had been getting a lot of inquiries about a dance therapy class. And so when my CV hit and I was a dance therapist, they contacted me, which was very unusual for them because I was not a Buddhist. And at that point at Naropa, it was running on the generosity of the local Buddhist community. So I was really one of the first people they ever hired that wasn't Buddhist at the time. Of course, over time I became Buddhist.

Ailey Jolie: 06:46

So what were some of the pieces that you integrated maybe into that program that were outside of what would traditionally be part of maybe a dance therapy program?

Christine Caldwell: 06:57

Yeah, yeah. Well, I was very early on exposed to a lot of different traditions. Uh, particularly, I was, you know, I was exposed to dance therapy at school at UCLA because it had a program, one of the few programs. And then I was exposed to psychology because I was hanging out with people who were Gestalt trainers in Los Angeles. And then I was also, they were all interested in body work. So they were like some of the trainers were becoming Rolfers, and so there was this connection to body work. And then there was this field that I started hearing about that was called body psychotherapy, and that seemed like it really had a lot going on. So there

Christine Caldwell: 07:40

were all these influences that were seemingly separate, they were separate fields, and I couldn't see them quite as separate. Plus, my anthropology background, I couldn't see that as separate either. So I really started to put them together really from the beginning while I was still studying a lot because I felt that dance therapy had a kind of blind spot in that it didn't really was so stressing movement that it didn't really pay attention to sensation or what the flesh was actually doing. And then body psychotherapy didn't seem to care much about movement. It was all about sensation and emotion for them and physical structure. So I felt that they both, in a sense, had blind spots. And so it always felt more comfortable to me to be more of a synthesizer of a lot of seemingly disparate fields. So that's sort of a quick rendition of how I came to it.

Ailey Jolie: 08:44

One of the pieces that I really appreciate about your work is how sometimes subtly and sometimes not so subtly, there is this kind of sociocultural critique that's that's in there. And because that isn't always in there. For me, it's really hard to imagine it not being there, but I know that it it can exist without it. And I would love to hear a little bit around how maybe your background in anthropology played into that, if that was maybe what gave you some of that lens, because it is something that has really stood out to me as quite unique. I can find it in your writing, but I also know that I might be wearing similar glasses.

Christine Caldwell: 09:19

Yeah, good point. And then that said, I'm gonna put mine on so I can see you better. Okay. Well, I think you're right that the first way that I came to the body as a political issue and as a social justice issue was through anthropology. And it was also through the fact that I was in Los Angeles in the 60s and I was going to school. I was going to college in the 70s. And so there was so much political activism going on. There was so much concern for uh events and the misuse of power that was going on around the Vietnam War, all of that. So I was really marinating in a political environment. And then I was taking on the body. And it occurred to me very quickly when uh folks would begin to talk about racism or sexism, that I could feel that there was a, you know, what they were reporting were was that fundamentally their bodies were being made wrong, and that there was a kind of shame around, you know, that you had certain lips or certain skin tones or certain postures or gestures uh that you moved differently. And uh that I was able to put a lens onto that from anthropology, given how there were people in anthropology at the time that were really studying how people moved, and particularly how people moved in dance culture as well as just daily culture. And even though anthropology was really rife with a lot of racism, uh its own kind of internalized racism at the time, and didn't understand particularly how you could harm culture by studying it and appropriating it and taking advantage of local knowledge and just taking it away. And so anthropology's really grown up in that way uh the last few decades, but it did provide me in a perspective that uh started out as a cultural question.

Ailey Jolie: 11:33

I would love to hear from you, and there's no pressure that you do have an answer to this question because you might not, but it's something that I often think about. Um, the realms of obviously anthropology, communication studies, cultural studies oftentimes don't merge or are kept quite silo from the realm of like dance movement therapy or somatic studies. And for me, the two seem so interwoven and they seem so linked. And I know you spent a lot more time in this area and were one of the first people who kind of really brought them together in a way why they maybe have been kept so siloed or why they don't come together. Because to me, the intersection is where things get really, really juicy, but there's also so much possibility

Ailey Jolie: 12:16

for change when we do bring in and that additional lens.

Christine Caldwell: 12:21

Yes, yes. I think you're really bringing up a really interesting point there. And I would take a kind of a wide or a long view on that. And when we see a lot of, let's say, pre-industrial cultures were very synthesized, very integrated, knowledge was very integrated. There wasn't this thing called mental health. It was health in general, and something that was coming out as a uh psychological issue, had physical correlates and spiritual correlates and all of this. It was all one piece. Part of the Enlightenment, I think, and part of Descartes' influence was that you wanted to study things, and so you started to parse them out and separate them because it was more efficient to study them that way. Now, some of the early scientists, back when they called science natural history, some of the early scientists were really polymaths. They were really, like you were saying, people who studied a wide variety of topics and were interested really cross-disciplinary methods. You know, two of our founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson and and Benjamin Franklin, were that way. They were really all over the place. And I think industrialization, probably capitalism and the quality of having to deal with larger and larger populations of people, I think led us to start to separate things out and then see them as very separate. Modern medicine is based in this. And you see a lot of modern medicine going astray because it's not, it's so siloed, like you were saying, in just looking at one symptom and not in one system of the body and not seeing that the other systems are completely connected to it. So I think a kind of a rhythm that we see historically where there's generalists, specialists, and there's a tension between generalism and specialization. And I've always, one of the reasons I went into academia was it was a place where I could flourish in terms of being able to think that way, because in academia, you are uh at least I was allowed to think in cross-disciplinary ways.

Ailey Jolie: 14:39

What do you feel like changes to the realm of how we understand embodiments or somatics when we do put that cross-disciplinary lens on it?

Christine Caldwell: 14:50

Yeah, well, I think in the first place, it teaches us that there's more than one lens. So we're always looking through lenses. There's no getting around that it's in our nature to create lenses to look through. It helps in many really, you know, important ways. We couldn't do without it. But it helps us to understand just in the first place that lenses a lens is there. And I saw this clinically when I was working clinically quite a bit, that I would get stuck with a client. And then I would realize that if I if I took off the lens that I was looking at the client through and put on a different lens, that I could in many ways get unstuck. So if I looked at the lens of a kind of Freudian dynamic of their childhood and childhood development, I saw certain things in the client. And when I looked at it from a sociocultural perspective, I saw different things. And that ability to realize that you're wearing lenses, that you can take them on and off, and that they both sharpen and limit perceptions and guide our perceptions, and that it's incumbent on us, I think as self-reflective beings, to regularly clean our lenses and accumulate this ability to really look at it, particularly from the perspective of peoples that are different than us. And so through the lens of difference, I think this is how we can really do, let's say, social justice work is to not try and see it exactly the way someone else sees it, but to be able to stay in attunement with someone when they are in a different lens and to appreciate that difference.

Ailey Jolie: 16:46

And you'll correct me if I'm wrong, because I might not be hearing you exactly, but I know for myself having those multiple lenses and being in the practice of uh of psychotherapy or doing somatic experiencing with clients and

Ailey Jolie: 17:00

having that background in more uh training in social science or spent some time in what we'd call hard sciences when I was, yeah, a different, different lifetime. But having those allowed me to to not fall so quickly into the prescriptive of like, oh, their body is doing this, this means XYZ, or they're bracing, and so I should go here, which is sometimes what sadly I feel like is has started to happen in the realm of somatics, it's become quite prescriptive. And that's one of the reasons why I really wanted to talk to you because I absolutely loved your book when I first read it at Pacifica, because I loved the spaciousness. It was one of the first books that I picked up in the realm of kind of somatics that didn't feel prescriptive because at that time there was a lot of the body keeps the score, the body says no, body equals blah blah blah. And so I would love to hear from you because you kind of coined the term bodyfulness for the listener who is so new to your world and your work, what that means, how it's different, and how do we know we're in a state of bodyfulness?

Christine Caldwell: 18:07

It's interesting. I, for whatever reason, in terms of my particular nature, I tend to choose projects as a result of being pissed off. And so I was pissed off when mindfulness started to become a thing. And I was, of course, as a professor, I was reading a lot of the research that was coming out about that, and I was real excited that there was all this research happening, and finally it was a kind of legitimate area of inquiry. But what started to really bother me was one, was they thought this was about waking up in a mental sense. But when you looked at the research, the research projects were trying to study mindfulness by doing physical things. And so you see, like John Cabot Zen was researching his work, which is brilliant work. He was doing yoga with people, he was, you know, doing breath work with people. And I'm going, wait a minute, you know, this is give the body its due, right? It's the body that has this capacity to wake up. And that the concept of wakefulness, I was worried was a kind of seen as almost like an immaterial thing. And so, out of a sense of huffiness or whatever, I started playing with this. What how can I counter or push back against the blind spots uh that were occurring in the field of mindfulness? And so that's how it got started. And then what of course happens is you're stuck with, okay, now what I invented this word, which I probably didn't invent, but at least I think I popularized it. So, but you know, now that I've invented this word, how do I define it? How do I operationalize it? What, you know, and that's been tricky because I find that our our language, at least the English language, and I think a lot of languages, particularly in Western cultures, are hobbled by terms that really suck us into a mind-body dualism. And so it's really actually hard to talk about bodyfulness because our language is so limited that the words that we choose are not even a good idea. And this is what took me into the philosophical area of phenomenology, because in phenomenology I felt like, oh, I have a home here, even though I had never read phenomenology and didn't study it or anything. I realized that really what I was was a kind of garden-grown phenomenologist because what I was interested in is was direct experience, experience that doesn't use words or uses words in a different way. And so the other thing that was really important about that is that is picked up also by mindfulness, is this tendency to categorize. So the tendency to some kind of experience comes in and you have a certain experience, and then you immediately rush to finding an explanation for it, finding meaning, of course, that is important from a survival standpoint. You have to interpret something that's happening so that you can keep yourself safe. Our evolution is carrying us further and further into an overuse of that and getting farther away from just the wisdom that's embedded in a kind of wordless direct experience. And so, bodyfulness really to me. Has to do with being awake in that kind of wordless direct experience. And when you are awake in that embodied experience that you're not categorizing and you're not feeling the need to put words to, what happens is that the body immediately responds and says, Oh, you're listening. Well, here, I have something more to say, you know, that so the body starts bringing up different material that you can work with, whether it's towards creative process or therapeutic process or social justice process. It was really quite freeing for me to begin to use that word and champion that word. I've been very um appreciative of, you know, folks like yourself who are really taking this on and really working to digest this material. I've, you know, people have contacted me that they're in book clubs about it or that they're uh, you

Christine Caldwell: 23:03

know, doing uh different readings of it and things like this. And so it's been really so um satisfying and you know amazing to see that it struck a chord. However, I would say that there's still a long way to go. So, you know, the forces of particularly I think the forces of technology and consumerism are really ascendant in most cultures, and that is a force that is frequently disembodying. And so we never needed it more. Part of the issue for me is that a lot of technology and consumerism is so based and kind of uh disembodied processes.

Ailey Jolie: 23:55

I love the language of it, and I really enjoyed how when I bring it to my clients, how well it's received, because it does seem like now, more and more with technology and AI, people are becoming more and more aware of being disembodied or disconnected. And also, I think most people have tried mindfulness enough to know that it doesn't necessarily lead to optimization or greater productivity, that there's actually something deeper here. And so I would love to spend a little bit of time with you, maybe even speaking about bodyfulness as a practice or a way of living, or I even just kind of see as a little bit of a philosophy because it's a little bit of a pushback on a lot of capitalist wellness things, can be a pushback against capitalism or commodification, just the factors that keep us out of our body. If you have any kind of political critique that maybe you've noticed bodyfulness allows people to put in play.

Christine Caldwell: 24:51

Yes. Well, there's a few of us that are really interested in this area. Um, my dear friend Ray Johnson, uh, who's in Toronto, is another person who just does amazing work in this area. And we regularly uh hang out together for days and uh think up, you know, all kinds of trouble to get into uh about this topic, because I think it is really challenging. What both Ray and I have talked about in terms of concerns is watching different political movements, different political organizations, and different political topics take on a stance that is disembodied. And so that there's this quality of remembering how activism is based in action, and action is what the body does. And so the body's actually wired up, and I frequently call it that sensory motor loop, which a lot of different traditions will talk about, particularly body psychotherapy traditions. So there's this sensory motor loop that is how our bodies are basically structured. A lot of us can get sucked into what do I need to do? What do I need to do? Because there's so much to do. And we forget that the wisdom of what to do comes from an embodied experience of oneself and both oneself alone, but also oneself in relationship and community. The action gets disembodied if it's not based in an ability to really be with my direct experience and to use the wisdom of that to shape my activism, to shape what I do. So that's to me, sort of the essential issue.

Ailey Jolie: 26:49

I love that you brought in the realm of activism into the just the conversation around embodiment and and being the body, because oftentimes it gets missed or it put aside. So, really, just speaking about your relationship to activism and how that's rooted to your experience of being in your body, if that feels like it's quite, you know, heady, I experience something in the news and I have a body-based reaction, and that feeds my activism, or actually I notice a sensation in my body, and that leads it there. Because a lot of how cinematics is framed now, at least how I see it presented, is it's totally missing that piece when I know for myself, people like Stacy Haynes were some of the books that kind of grab me the most. And I was like, yes, this is different and interesting. And there is a really deep theme of activism in my understanding of embodiment.

Christine Caldwell: 27:37

Yes, absolutely. Because, in a sense, well, my work has always been based on the uh, you know, a concept called the moving cycle. And this is a kind of four-phase process that begins in just waking up and waking up in the body. It's the ability to explore body experience in a way that could lead you toward creativity or healing or activism, etc. Then the next phase of that is a kind of what I call it an appreciation process, where, but it's really a kind of integration process. So you have explored

Christine Caldwell: 28:16

your direct experience and then you integrate it into your various identities and your various relationships. And then only then does action arise on its own, and it arises organically from what your body is oriented towards what it wants to do with what it's aware of and what it has processed in your own experience. So activism always comes from your own experience, it's not something that's sort of up in the clouds and is theoretical. I think when activism comes from theory, I mean, theory is wonderful. I, you know, I'm a nerdnik way back, so I love theory. But when your activism just comes from theory, there's a possibility for violence, actually. Violence towards other bodies, violence towards other people, and violence towards one's own cause. Embodiment really helps us find activism that is deeply meaningful personally and relationally, uh, but also is based in a kind of ethic, a kind of embodied ethics, keeps things based in a sincere wish to really be together and go forward together in a really productive and healthy way.

Ailey Jolie: 29:49

In your answer there, you spoke about something you developed, which is the moving cycle. But I would love to spend a little bit more time just hearing more about the moving cycle and how it can be used in a way to really facilitate healing or sense of coming home to the body.

Christine Caldwell: 30:04

Well, it it all began when I was uh working as a dance therapist in a state mental hospital back when they had state mental hospitals in Maryland. And um, I was in my office one day and I was arranging papers and I got a paper cut and I went, ah, you know, meh. And and then I thought, what's the problem? This paper cut will be gone in a couple days. So, you know, sort of relax, Christine. And then I thought, yeah, because the body knows what to do. The body knows how to heal itself in so many situations. Constantly across our day, the body is already healing itself as an automatic function. It already knows what to do. So that got me really interested. I thought, well, what if I could develop a way of doing therapy that was modeled from how the body already knows how to heal itself? So I went back to my anatomy and physiology and I studied the immune system more deeply and realized that the immune system has phases of response. So when you cut your finger, there's these phases of what the body does to so that that finger cut isn't going to be there in three days. So I initially started to play with or experiment with these sort of overlaying these phases onto what it might look like in a therapy session. And I was working with mostly a lot of my students. So my students uh helped me create a kind of laboratory for well, the first thing that the immune system does is it wakes up. There's cells that are circulating. Their only job is to just wake up the immune system when it's needed. And so they just go, nih, nih, nih, you know, and then the immune system goes, well, okay, let's get going. That's where the awareness phase came from. And so the the other issue was that I was at that point at a university that had been founded by a Buddhist monk, and I was also marinating in Buddhism and then beginning to study uh a different tradition than they were using, but a Buddhist tradition that to me felt much more embodied than the one I was um sort of in at Naropa. And so the moving cycle came very organically out of all these influences and creating a laboratory that said, I want to watch what actually happens in a session when people feel better afterwards. What actually happened? And can I sort of systematize that just a bit? And just a bit is an important phrase there because there's a lot of what I discovered was that it was this kind of only loosely structured immersion in and trust of the present moment in the body experience that was healing.

Christine Caldwell: 33:08

And so it wasn't trying to figure out who did what to whom, or you know, uh what is this about, or where does this come from? Insights groovy, you know, it's kind of fun, but in a large part, it doesn't actually do the heavy lifting of healing. I saw that in my PhD internship when I was working with addicts. I was working with folks that were just recently out of detox. And I could see that talking about their addiction, you know, the insight was great, but it didn't do anything, nothing. And so, in a way, we are all working with identities that we've become habituated to. And those identities have benefits and costs. And so when you become uh an adult, you know, you want to lessen the cost and increase the benefits. So you do personal change in order to do that. And to me, it was very clear that these four phases that were, in a sense, trying to replicate natural processes really seemed the most effective for this ability to align with the present moment and rest into the present moment in a physical way, such that the body then could begin to say, okay, now you're listening. Now I want to say this. And it's not what you were thinking, and it's not what you were believing. It's something different. And so I was always fascinated and very grateful to clients who would who would encounter material that was surprising and not what they were thinking, not what they thought about it.

Ailey Jolie: 34:54

I would love for you to dive into that last piece that you spoke about there around the experience of going into the body and being surprised, or maybe even uncovering a story that your mind hasn't been aware of or has held maybe differently. Because I would really love for you to share from the listener what that experience is, what creates that experience, how our body can truly hold stories that our mind has no recollection of or has written in a very different way. Because I I really appreciate how you weave that throughout your book and your work.

Christine Caldwell: 35:30

Well, one possible handle that would be fun to play with for a few minutes is the concept of what I call physical free association. And so Freud was, you know, Freud was a pretty smart guy. He was a smart dude. I mean, he had huge blind spots, but you know, you got to give him that his time and place were influencing him. One of the things he did was he talked about how to access the unconscious. And one of the things that he felt was the most important strategy, therapeutic strategy, was free association. So the client would lie on the couch and he would just let them begin talking and they would just go blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And and they would just he encouraged them not to feel like they had to make sense, just sort of let one thing flow into another. And what he was discovering there was when you removed the rules of grammar, when you removed the rules of logic, you relaxed the defenses, and material from the unconscious had then an opportunity to kind of sneak in. And so he would study the words that people would use or this the sort of left turns that they would make as material from the unconscious. And so that was, you know, that was pretty darn brilliant. But it was verbal and it was intellectual. And so where I got going was this idea of how do we do that in the body? What's the physical equivalent? And so, for instance, I might start with a client and say, you know, what are you noticing in your body right now? And they might say, Well, I notice that my throat is tight. And then I would maybe say, Yes, you're reporting your throat is tight, and I notice that your hand is coming to your throat. Could we study that for a minute? Let's just be with that. Don't try and take the tension away, the tight throat away, because it's holding a lot of information. It's holding body stories, it's holding the unconscious material. So you stay with the tight throat. You don't try and exaggerate it and you don't try and control it. And you just notice what comes up. And I might say, you know, just go ahead and let your hand be there and just notice what happens. Are any words or images or sounds or emotions or memories coming

Christine Caldwell: 37:57

up? And they might say something like, Oh, I just had this memory of wrestling with my brother when I was a kid, and he kind of sat on my chest and he he cut off my air, and I remember starting to choke. And so the body's bringing up a body memory. And or it could be that I see the color blue, you know, who knows? And it's like sometimes it seems like really out of nowhere or not connected, but they're connected. And so you say, Oh, it's just stay with that, stay with the tension in your throat. And now let's add in the color blue. Let's see what happens, what comes up next. Then they say, Well, my my stomach gets tight. I said, Okay, let's stay with that. Be with your stomach. See what your stomach wants to do, see what your throat wants to do, see what your hand wants to do. Stay with it and see what they could do if they could express themselves directly. And so it might be a sound, it might be an uh, or it might be a touch, or it might be a a kind of rising and expanding quality, and all of a sudden the body's starting to talk in its own language system, which is movement. And so you really greet that movement and say, Yeah, now see where what does it want to do next? And so it kind of might come here or go here, and then or then here, or and you don't know where. That's the phenomenology of it. It's just emerging experience. But the body begins to come up almost like a popcorn style with emergent experiences that are not always coherent. And that's why we don't want to try to rush the meaning right away. We don't want to put an explanation on it or a judgment on it. We just say, yeah, just stay with it. And if you stay with it and you let the hands rise, and then now they seem to want to grip, and now it becomes like this, and there's a face with it, or and I'm making all this up, of course, and uh then it seems to go here, and I wouldn't have expected that, and then it goes here, and then it goes here. The body's starting to get more coherent in its storytelling, and so that that gradual allowing for coherence to emerge is what is so brilliant about working with the body, because the body finds its own meaning, we don't have to impose it from uh an intellectual or historical lens on it, and so we're actually in the business there of not only just taking off old lenses, but actually creating new ones, and the body creates a lens, and the body is moving in such a way that it begins to be this master storyteller that it creates a kind of increase of co self-coherency that then is of itself very healing and goes along, by the way, with how the the immune system operates.

Ailey Jolie: 41:14

I really wanted to spend some time with you just exploring the role of Buddhism and how that's maybe influenced your relationship with your body or how you understand embodiment, because it's something that's also again stood out to me and it's such a big piece of your work as well, and I find it quite unique. And so, for again, for the listener who's maybe quite new to you and your work, if you could share a little bit of that journey you named coming to Naropa, weren't a Buddhist, named becoming a Buddhist, how what your path was, and how do you feel like it's maybe changed your experience of embodiment?

Christine Caldwell: 41:48

Yeah, I was raised Catholic and I was uh really at that point, you know, what we all laugh and call a recovering Catholic. I was uh sort of appalled at the what a you know organized religion could do to cause suffering as well as spiritual pathways. So I was very anti-religious, almost from a political standpoint, very strongly anti-religious. And I bristled a lot at the religiosity of Buddhism, but I was fascinated by the philosophy of Buddhism. And uh I was also fascinated by sitting meditation, because I, of course, you know, at one point got invited to just go do a little sit somewhere with instruction. And I was uh the first time I I meditated on a cushion, that kind of standard meditation, I was appalled, appalled at the lack of discipline in my ability to pay attention and my ability to hold my attention in a certain way so that I could be with the space between my thoughts rather than identify with the

Christine Caldwell: 43:01

thoughts themselves. And so I was, it was a real head smacker to realize how undisciplined my my ability to pay attention was. So as I began to look at this need to train my attention, I was studying that both from a scientific perspective, and so I was looking at like the physiology and the neuroscience of attention, and I used to teach that quite a bit. And at the same time, I was really sort of struggling with how to understand the wisdom in the Buddhist tradition without getting sucked into another religion. And I then discovered Tiknat Han. And to me, he was the answer. He was the one who I kind of joke that he allowed me to be a bad Buddhist because there was the sense of in some Buddhist traditions. You know, particularly ones that are very intellectual, there's a real strong and very precise and detailed explanation of how the world works. That just didn't sit. I couldn't do that. I couldn't like memorize, you know, the 47 days of the Bardo and you know what happens when and all of that. And it it just, I couldn't do it. So with Tichnot Han, he was interested in your family. I had a young son at the time, and you could go to France, the south of France, where he had his village, was called Plum Village, and you could take your family with you and you could go to Family Month. And practice was embedded in your daily life. Practice was embedded in how you sat under this big linden tree in Plum Village and just talked with people. There was a walking meditation that was literally this big loop through the forest. And part of the walking meditation was just to just soak in the beauty of the trees and the loam on the on the forest floor and the smell and the, you know, the people around you. And so it was very, there wasn't these sort of marathon sits either. So sitting was really something that was done. Sitting meditation was done, but it wasn't this kind of athletic thing. The athleticism was actually in the present moment of chopping a carrot, you know, creating a stew, interacting with your son, all of these things. So he really brought in this element of being in the moment in your experience and resting into your experience in a way that I found so nourishing. And so that's why I kept studying with him.

Ailey Jolie: 45:52

One of my last questions for you is I know that you write about the enlightened body and body wakefulness. And for someone who's maybe new to those words, if you could just give them a little sprinkle or a little taste of what you mean by that to maybe inspire them to keep going and to maybe explore themselves.

Christine Caldwell: 46:10

Well, again, it comes from this idea that most of us have this idea that enlightenment is a kind of mental phenomenon. And that waking up, you know, because Buddhism, the word Buddha means awake one, one who is awake. And that wakefulness is a kind of almost immaterial experience. And truth of it is, is that wakefulness is based in the body. Wakefulness is uh you don't you don't wake up without your body being awake. And the more you allow your body to be present in this kind of simple, oh, there's that sensation. Let me just hold that sensation. Don't try to push it away, don't try to make it bigger, just hold it, see how my body wants to move with it. So all of that is what I think of as enlightenment.

Christine Caldwell: 47:12

And in a sense, there's that a quality of sometimes we call it lightness in the body, where the body isn't burdened by holding ideas and actions and attitudes and emotions that aren't actually about what's happening right now and what I am actually embedded in. They're, you know, gifts from the past that may or may not still have some relevance, but the quality of how the body holds on to the past, and then the body is so intimately constructed to create perception. And so we have sensation, which, you know, is just a neuron firing and being processed either by the spinal cord or the brain, and either a small part of the brain or the whole brain, that creating then action because the sensory parts of the brain are always hooked up to the motoric parts of the brain. So the body's constructed to I feel this and I want to do this about that. You know, that's really the way we're wired. So enlightenment to me is the ability to be awake all along that loop. So that you're awake as you sense, come into this idea of perception, which does involve the central nervous system, that perception can be driven by, in a sense, the actual sensory inputs. Sometimes in neuroscience is called appraisal systems, you know, how you figure out the way the world works and you have these stored ideas of how the world works, by being sort of distorted by old appraisal systems. And therefore, the action that comes from it doesn't really prove effective because it's not actually operating on what it, you know, what's really happening. I don't know. I got a little nerdy about that.

Ailey Jolie: 49:17

For my last question for you today, for someone who's maybe spent most of their life in their head or is just beginning the journey of being in their body, even though I think we're all just at the beginning of that process moment by moment of being right here. I would love to hear from you from all of your time in this realm being in your body or being of the body, if you have maybe one doorway or one little path of inspiration or practice that you would like to leave the listener with today.

Christine Caldwell: 49:50

I think that you can't go wrong with what I call the therapeutic triangle. And so that's breathing, moving, and sensing. And so when we value and pay regular attention to breath, to our body moving, tiny little tiny, teeny, tiny movements as well as big large ones. And when we stay very connected to a inquiry as to what we're feeling, physically feeling, and then emotionally feeling, we are we have a resource for being in the present moment. And the present moment will then teach you everything you need to know. So I think that therapeutic triangle might be one of my favorite doorways, not the only one, but one of my favorite doorways. Uh, because then that what happens in that triangle when you can use breath to support movement, use movement to support breath, breath to support sensation, sensation to support movement, that they occur together. They're not always like one third, one third, one third, but they're really always relating to one another cooperatively. That when you do that, there's a sense of ease that can come into your experience and a sense of resting into the details of your physical experience that I find really healing, uh creative, and uh motivating for how I want to take myself out into the world.

Ailey Jolie: 51:30

Thank you for your answer and for your time and all of your wisdom. I've really appreciated spending time with you, but also deeply appreciate the work that you've put out into the world. I always ask uh guests if they have anything upcoming that they want the listener to know about your book and all your info will be shared in the show notes, but if there's anything coming up.

Christine Caldwell: 51:51

Well, thank you. I do have a subsequent book that came out, which is called Conscious Moving. And so it really sort of positions uh why I have, in a sense, specialized in moving. Like if you think of that triangle, sometimes people really specialize, you know, they do breath work or they they do sensory awareness. And why did I choose movement as the one to really try and articulate in a lot of detail? And I also wanted to pass off to my students the torch of this work. And so in the middle of the book, um, many of my senior students are actually writing uh the chapters in terms of how they look at conscious moving from a moving cycle perspective, but also in their own work, which is in very different, you know, doing very different things than I do. So conscious moving is the thing that's out now that's hot now. And uh we're still doing trainings in different parts of the world and Europe and uh Australia and Korea, and it's really super fun. And we're also branching out because I because I was in a, you know, doing a counseling program and being very serious about helping people train to be licensed counselors, the moving cycle really spent a lot of time looking at healing and therapy. But now I'm actually much more interested in things like creativity and activism and education as ways that the moving cycle can be and conscious moving can and bodyfulness can be in the world. So it's not just about healing.

Ailey Jolie: 53:34

Again, thank you. And we'll find that book and put it in there and have some trends available to you as well.

Christine Caldwell: 53:40

Thank you.

Ailey Jolie: 53:40

It was lovely to spend time with you. And lovely to be with you. What really stayed with me from this conversation is how simple Christine's invitation after 40 years of doing this work is breathe, move, sense, let those three stay in relationship. That's it. She called it the therapeutic triangle. And what I appreciate about it is that it doesn't require special conditions. You don't need a retreat or a therapy session or an hour of silence. You just need to notice how am I breathing right now, what sensations are here, is there any movement my body wants to make? I think that we can all overcomplicate this, and I know I have. There's a pull toward believing that real embodiment happens somewhere else, in the perfect place, the right container, the moment when life finally slows down enough, or our inbox is empty. But the body is already here. It's here in the ordinary moments, in the texture of your morning, in the weight of your feet on the floor. And maybe that's the real practice, not achieving some state, but simply paying attention to what's already happening. Letting breath and movement and sensation do what they're already doing and just simply noticing. If you want to go deeper into this type of work, that's what we explore in embody. You can find out more at www.embody method.com. If you want to go deeper into this type of work, that's what we explore in embody. But you can also find more of my writing on topics just like this on Substack. Thank you for listening and also being on a process of coming home to your body. If you found value in this episode, it would mean so much to me for you to share the podcast with friends, a loved one, or on your social platforms. If you have the time, please rate and review the podcast so that this podcast reaches a larger audience and can inspire more and more humans to connect to their bodies too. Thank you for being here and nurturing the relationship you have with your very own body.