Philip Shepherd

Philip Shepherd (00:00) So Joseph Campbell, whom I revere, described the mythological tyrant as the man of self-achieved independence. Now, you sort of roll that phrase around on your tongue and that feels pretty good in our culture. That's what the American dream is. I don't think you could come up with a more succinct description of the American dream than self-achieved independence. There's a problem with the phrase because there's nothing that independence refers to in the whole of our cosmos. You can't show me one example of independence. Everything relies on everything. Everything depends on everything else. Everything influences everything else to a level of subtlety that is beyond our ability to grasp. And yet we aspire, we're drawn towards independence and we seek to

Dmitrij Achelrod (01:06) Welcome to Inner Pioneers, a podcast for those who feel the call to break new ground within themselves. Join us as we dive into real stories of transformation and learn from leading voices in psychology, science and human development on how to move through inner shifts and seasons of change. I'm your host, Dmitrij Achelrod and now let's begin pioneering.

Dmitrij Achelrod (01:33) Philip Shepherd is an author and internationally recognized teacher in the field of embodiment, known for his work on restoring a deeper felt sense of connection between the thinking of the head and the intelligence of the body. His books including New Self, New World and Radical Wholeness have influenced a global audience seeking a more integrated way of being. Challenging the dominance of a purely cognitive culture, his work explores how disconnection from the body shapes our perception, relationships and sense of self. Through decades of teaching and writing, Philip offers a powerful invitation to rediscover the body as a source of wisdom, coherence and belonging.

Dmitrij Achelrod (02:20) Philip, welcome. It's a real, real pleasure to have you here. I told you already before off record that your two books, "Radical Wholeness" and "New Self, New World", were really transformational and pivotal for my own personal journey. I'm honestly very excited to have you here on board. So welcome.

Philip Shepherd (02:44) Thank you. It's such a pleasure to meet you, Dmitrij and I'm so looking forward to wherever the conversation may take us.

Dmitrij Achelrod (02:51) Wonderful. So, Philip, I would like to start talking about what you wrote in your book, "New Self, New World". And I found this book so captivating, not because it was just an accumulation of certain exercises or tools, but it went way beyond that in the sense that you provided what I consider a very sharp and sometimes also painful social and cultural critique. And you uncovered what I think are one of the deepest and most fundamental assumptions that we in our modern Western cultures hold. At the same time, these assumptions, they are kind of hidden or often implicit and they create the world that we live in, but we rarely actually become aware of, think of them. And so I would like to spend some time on this before we then dive deeper into the techniques and intricacies of embodiment. So you write about this division or this lesion between the body and the head and you describe it as one of our main cultural melodies or conditions. So can you tell us more about this rift between our minds and the Soma?

Philip Shepherd (04:16) Yeah. Um, I might tweak the language a bit — when you say mind and Soma, because for me, Soma is mind. What I feel is my mind suffuses every cell of my body. So I'll talk about the lesion — which is a nice word — between our thinking and our being, or between our head intelligence and our body intelligence. It is a wound that we are inflicted with systematically. And by that I mean, you know, we might point to the typical education system that we put our young innocent children through. The instruction basically is: sit still at your desk. If you can't sit still, you are likely punished. So to sit still is to put the body's intelligence to sleep. In the meantime, if you can fill your head with the right information, you will be rewarded. And you're in that system for 12 years. And I remember coming out of that system believing that the almighty head could think through anything. It's like dull myself to the sensations below the neck and let the head take over. The reality of our nature, of our human nature, is that — well, I've got a new book that I've just finished the first draft on that draws a distinction between cleverness and intelligence. And we have put all our eggs in the basket of cleverness to the extent that we no longer recognize our own intelligence. There are so many ways of coming at that. One way of showing it up is that there has never been a culture as clever as ours, on the one hand. On the other hand, we have forgotten how to live intelligently. We are despoiling the planet. We are at war with ourselves — internationally as well as within our own bodies. We've lost the ability to come to rest on the earth. We've lost a sense of our own fluidity. I mean, we're 65% water. There's an inner ocean within us that facilitates all the exchanges that keep us healthy and give us life. And we stultify that. We harden it. There's so many ways in which we detach from the body's intelligence. If the intelligence of the head draws on a swimming pool of information, the body's intelligence draws on an ocean of information. The body processes more than a billion times the amount of information that we can be consciously aware of. We lose sight of this. And it's only by returning to indigenous cultures that we glimpse what we have lost. I can give a couple of examples just for context. So there's the Unangan culture, which lives on those islands that trail off Alaska towards Russia. It's a seagoing culture that is phenomenally attuned to their world. And their main sustenance is the sea lion. And in the same way that the Plains Indians had a sacred relationship with the buffalo — there's one amazing elder, Ilarion Merculeiff, who was raised completely in the traditional way, but also later went to university in a Western modality. So he's like this bridge between our world and the indigenous attunement. So as a kid, he would join the hunters. What did the hunters do? They're at the edge of the ocean, sitting on these massive basalt rocks in silence, in stillness, not daydreaming, not drifting, just attuning, and it might be hours. And eventually one of them would say "sea lion coming", and all the heads would turn and look in the same direction. The sea lion can be five or 10 miles offshore. They feel its presence, specifically, tangibly. And without that sensitivity, they would not survive. It's the same sensitivity that enables indigenous cultures to feel the medicines that plants are offering. There's another author, Robert Wolff, who wrote this beautiful little book called Original Wisdom. And in it, he recounts his experience with the Senoi culture in Malaysia. It's like they are doing things that are impossible and he feels drawn to this culture to understand it. Like he'll wake up on a Saturday morning and decide to go visit one of the three villages that he had a relationship with. So he drives for two hours and walks for an hour and a half along the jungle path and there's somebody waiting to meet him. And they stand up and escort him into the village. I mean, he didn't know he was coming. How did they know he was coming? There's a really compelling story that he tells where he took an elder back home for the night with him and he lived on the sea. Now for the Senoi culture, the sea doesn't exist. They live in the jungle. They have no word for ocean or sea. And Robert Wolff woke up in the morning to see this guy standing like a hundred yards from the edge of the ocean, just standing there. Eventually they drove back to the village and he announced to his community: we need a meeting tonight. I have something very important to tell you. And so Robert Wolff was there as they gathered and he is describing the ocean. It's not dangerous like our rivers. It doesn't come up and swallow you. It remains where it is. But there are mountain ranges within it, bigger than the mountains we know, valleys deeper than the valleys we know, currents that run within it and there are fish that ride those currents and there are some fish with great wings. He described like a manta ray and he described a whale — and he could feel this world standing at the edge of the ocean and describe it in detail. So our bodies — what they most clearly feel is the present and what they most clearly understand is that they belong. So if I truly feel the presence of a tree, I have a sense of a mutual recognition between us and we belong to each other. There is such a deep, deep sense of that. And the body also understands that everything is alive in a way that the brain and the head rejects. I can hold a pebble in my hand and feel its aliveness to the world. And my body knows that in a way that my head will say, that's ridiculous, it's not alive. So what we've done in this schism — we've chosen to live in the head, we've chosen to forge our way forward using our cleverness. And it's resulted in a depleted sense of our own aliveness. It's resulted in a disharmonious relationship with the world around us. And we're striving to solve our problems with technology and it's an inappropriate solution. Our deficit is a deficit of self-knowledge and no technology will show us the way back to ourselves.

Dmitrij Achelrod (12:47) Thank you, Philip. That is so much to unpack here. And I will absolutely return to the topic and almost like enigma of how there are people on this planet that can tap into this intelligence, this deep ocean of somatic or bodily intelligence, which to me — and I would say, well, conditioned and also maybe a victim of the Western educational system, and I've spent more than 12 years, I think I've spent like 18 years or longer in that kind of world — I found it difficult to even imagine or to think in these kinds of terms, right? And that, I guess, tells a lot about how my mind was conditioned to work and think. What I would like to focus now on is really what kind of consequences it has for our world when we created and were created, shaped and were shaped by a culture that separates our head and our body. And you wrote in your book that this creates a dichotomy, a duality that has an implicit hierarchy that says — it's kind of the head steers the body, the male element over the female, the doing over the being, the ideating or thinking over the feeling. Right? So how did these fundamental assumptions shape our world?

Philip Shepherd (14:28) We live with tyranny as the go-to strategy. So let me back up a bit. All the dichotomies you outlined, I absolutely see in the world. The other one is mythologically the dichotomy between the hero and the tyrant. So Joseph Campbell, whom I revere, described the mythological tyrant as the man of self-achieved independence. You sort of roll that phrase around on your tongue and that feels pretty good in our culture. That's what the American dream is. I don't think you could come up with a more succinct description of the American dream than self-achieved independence. There's a problem with the phrase because there's nothing that independence refers to in the whole of our cosmos. You can't show me one example of independence. Everything relies on everything. Everything depends on everything else. Everything influences everything else to a level of subtlety that is beyond our ability to grasp. And yet we aspire, we're drawn towards independence and we seek to achieve it. And you know, you think of the billionaire with his mansion and security guards and people to do his laundry and feed him and do his dishes. It's like a retreat from responsibility. And if you're a billionaire, you're responsible to no one, because you can do whatever you want. Responsibility — you think about the word, the ability to respond, to respond to the world around you, to feel it, to be guided by it. But with this exit from the body as we live in the head, we lose the touch of the present that is always there to help us forward. So I can liken it — I've got this singing bowl, and I touch the singing bowl and it sings. In the same way, the body sings to the present. The body is a resonator. And what happens in our culture is we take this singing bowl and we stuff it full of our anxieties and our beliefs and our concerns and our dogma and our way of doing things. So now the present is still going, but we don't feel it. We have no connection to it. And all we can do when this happens is guide ourselves, because there is no felt guidance anywhere else. So we sit in our heads and weigh the pros and cons and sort of suffer through decision-making and drive ourselves nuts. And so for me, embodiment is largely about integrating those stuck energies in the body so that it can once more sing to the present. So the tyrant of mythology — his castle is the head. We have fortified the head and the strange land outside is both the body that we live in and the body of the world around us. And counterposed to the tyrant is the hero. And Joseph Campbell describes the hero as the man of self-achieved submission. Now that's very curious because who wants to submit, and don't you lose yourself? And like there's so many cultural questions around this act of submission. But the reality is that we refuse to submit to our world as it is and ourselves as we are. So the surrender, the submission, is to the whispering of the world that guides us forward. It's also to our own nature. So, you know, in this tension that you spoke of between doing and being, we've given huge value to doing and have diminished the value of being to the extent that it is dwindled away into the remote background of our lives. Being is the body, is our sensation of being alive, is our moment-by-moment exchange of energies with the world. And the dwindling of our own sense of our being shows up when you look at the qualities of being itself and reflect on how they show up in you. So for example, fluidity. Being is fluid. Everything around me is in flow. Some things are — the tea in my cup is flowing more quickly than the molecules in the stick. But everything is in flow. Granite is in flow. Mountains are, you know, waves moving across the landscape. And we are, as I mentioned, 65% water. And we lock up our fluidity. We are afraid of our fluidity. That letting go that opens us to sensation is something we guard against. So fluidity is not something to achieve. It is something to surrender to. It's there. It's your reality. There's the heroic submission to take that risk of feeling yourself in that way. Another quality is spaciousness. I read that if a hydrogen nucleus were the size of a basketball, the nearest electron would be more than a mile away. All there is is spaciousness — and your spaciousness is your living potential. It is out of your spaciousness that newness and possibility are born. And yet, like the singing bowl, we lose our spaciousness. We want a consolidated body because it feels safer to brace against the world than it does to submit to it. And again, it's the submission to not just your reality, but the reality of the world — to risk feeling the spaciousness and feeling it open you to possibility. Groundedness is another thing. Since the day we were born, we have been at rest on the earth.

Dmitrij Achelrod (21:30) Hmm.

Philip Shepherd (21:38) And when was the last time you truly felt at rest on the earth? In our culture, we don't. We've internalized a value system that says up is good, down is bad, heaven is up, hell is down. And this ability to feel ourselves at rest, as it diminishes, we lose the sense of our own being and our own wholeness. And again, it's not a matter of this is something to achieve or to do. It's the surrender that brings us home to ourselves in a way that we cannot know ourselves without — giving in to the reality of being at rest on the earth. Another quality is centeredness. Everything has a center. If I throw the stick in the air, it'll rotate around its center, and the earth has a center that we're all aligned with, and the earth turns around the sun at the center of the planetary system, and the galaxy has a black hole at its center, and nature moves in this marriage of complementary opposites that expresses itself everywhere in spirals. And every spiral has a center. And we have a center, but we've displaced our center and tried to locate it in the head. And then we wonder why our lives feel off balance. And to come back to the body, to our true center, is to once again be able to locate ourselves in the present. And again, the center is there. Can you surrender to it? And another quality is attunement — that in reality, everything is affected by everything else. There's a theoretical experiment that was done by a mathematical physicist who said, what if the gravitational field of a single electron disappeared? And he said, let the electron be at the outermost fringe of the universe. And he realized that if that happened and you were tracking a molecule through the air in this room, it would go through about 50 collisions that it would otherwise have gone through and then it would miss a molecule that it would otherwise have hit. That takes less than a second. After that moment, all the collisions amongst the air would be different inside and out. And if you went outside tomorrow, you'd feel little gusts of wind that would be different and you'd see clouds that would be different because the gravitational field of a single electron had disappeared from the universe. So this sense of being held by the world around you and being able to attune to it — that's what the Unangan sea lion hunters were tapping into. That's what the Senoi elder by the ocean was tapping into. And for me, all the first qualities of being — the sense of your own fluidity, your spaciousness, your groundedness, your center — all of those make attunement possible. So what have we lost in this ascent up into the head? We live in a hallucination of our own making. And then we feel our lives fretful, anxious, disconnected, alone. All the qualities you'd describe to a tyrant — uneasy lies the head that wears the crown, as Shakespeare put it. And we have lost our sense of belonging and we feel ourselves alone. And aloneness to me, like independence, is a fantasy. There's no such thing. You're known by, held by everything around you. You are living in this rich companionship. And yet we feel ourselves alone.

Dmitrij Achelrod (25:44) So much to process. When you describe the mythological tyrant and the real world representation in the form of the modern billionaire who is basically hoarding wealth and trying to make himself independent from everything else, protecting himself from the winds of this life by acquiring wealth and power — building a castle around him. And if you think about that and you read what the world's richest people are doing, right, they are literally building bunkers around themselves in New Zealand and buying up islands in Hawaii in order to shield themselves from the world, make themselves independent. So it's literally what Joseph Campbell described as the man of self-achieved independence. And it is exactly that independence which supposedly should give us safety and relaxation that is actually just contributing to our anxiety and to our sense of unease. And I was wondering, and you also addressed this, how also science —

Philip Shepherd (26:59) — you —

Dmitrij Achelrod (27:13) — and oftentimes it's called reductionistic or materialistic science — has contributed to that worldview. Thinking about Descartes who said, I think therefore I am, right? Reducing everything to our existence, to ideas, to the workings of our brain, and the body becomes mere apparatus, a machine that follows instruction from the top, from the cockpit. And I find it interesting, Thich Nhat Hanh — a meditation master who has passed — he said, well, it's probably more likely: I think therefore I am not really here, because when I'm lost in thoughts, I can't be present, right? And yeah, what is your view on how science contributed to this fragmented worldview and to our predicament?

Philip Shepherd (28:01) Yeah, I would rewrite Descartes' little dictum to say: I relate, therefore I am. It's only through relationship that our existence is deeply felt. And just to go back to the tyrant for a sec — the tyrant is obsessed with control and safety. And safety is a good thing: look both ways before you cross the street. But at a certain point the desire for safety becomes anti-life. Safety is contingent — it's contingent on the lock on my front door, it's contingent on the money in my bank account, it's contingent on the bunker in New Zealand. And you build enough contingencies and you're building yourself a cage within which you live. Life is not safe. You're going to get sick, you're going to get injured, you're going to feel grief and loss, you're going to die. This is life. It's not safe. And I think a lot of people have to understand that. But the conclusion they draw is, well, then maybe if I'm less alive, I'll be more safe. And so they make their lives smaller as a result. To me, security is the antidote to that tyrannical need for safety. And when I say security, I mean there is a security to my being. When I drop down into myself and come to rest in my center, I land in a security that is not contingent, that no circumstance can take from me. And when we live in the head, we deny ourselves that security and we must look out for safety. So to understand the extent to which safety is anti-life is to hopefully have a renewed interest in reclaiming the security that our culture has deprived us from. And then, eventually to work back to your question, science is brilliant. Science is wonderful. Science is extraordinary in its curiosity and its ways of finding out about the world. But science implicitly denies wholeness. Science is looking at the parts and their relationships. It's focusing on that narrow, tight focus that reveals interactions among parts. Science cannot know wholeness because you can't objectify the whole. You can't turn the whole into a thing — it's a process, and it's a process with so many strands of interaction, so many currents of energy that there's no way of objectively knowing it. So science turns away from wholeness, and the tacit assumption in science that we can build towards the whole by understanding the parts is grievously erroneous. It's just not the case. And what happens is we take on the assumptions of science — the assumption that the world is knowable, that if we just develop the right microscope, the right measuring instrument, we will know the world. And it's not knowable. The whole is not knowable, but it can be felt. And we deprive ourselves of that possibility. The Unangan sea lion hunters at the edge of the ocean — they were attuning to wholeness. Our culture is whole-blind. And the effect of science on us and its assumptions is contributing to our whole-blindness. We struggle to feel the present in its wholeness. We have to kind of go to a retreat and sit on a cushion for days trying to undo the neurological training that our culture has imposed on us so that we can begin to feel the wholeness. And then when you feel the whole, you feel its subtle guidance in every moment. So I celebrate science. I love it. And I think it's important to recognize its limitations.

Dmitrij Achelrod (32:55) Hmm, absolutely beautifully said. I think it was also Iain McGilchrist in his book, his most recent book, The Matter with Things, who described how reductionistic science basically tried to separate the universe into its distinct parts, but now doesn't know how to put it back together. And by assuming you will understand the whole through separating and breaking it apart —

Philip Shepherd (33:01) The Matter with Things.

Dmitrij Achelrod (33:19) — that we will find knowledge and truth is deeply erroneous in many ways. And also as you described, it's not one plus one equals two, but it's the wholeness, the entirety — basically the Gestalt — that has a different dynamic than just the parts that are broken apart from the whole. And so —

Philip Shepherd (33:45) Yeah, and just if I may add — The Matter with Things is a brilliant title, because we want to see things around us. All there is is process. So you try to understand a tree and you want to isolate it from its environment. How do you draw a boundary around the process of a tree? Well, the tree certainly includes the roots, but the process of the roots depends on the moisture in the earth and the minerals and the insects — so all of those are a part of the process of the tree, as is the rain that falls on the earth, as are the mountains that push the rain from the clouds, as is the sun that lifts the water up to the clouds in the first place. And eventually the process of the tree includes the whole of the universe. There is no boundary you can draw around the process of the tree.

Dmitrij Achelrod (34:48) Yeah, and that actually is a beautiful segue into a question that pops up in my mind. It's that when we assume a process-based view of life, it is something completely different than if we declare things to be static, right? Like we can view, as you said, a tree as a nomenclature in a certain species, subspecies, etc. And it is something kind of condensed — its aliveness is taken away — whereas when you look at it as a process, it becomes connected to everything. It's the same thing Thich Nhat Hanh again comes to mind when he described that the clouds are this piece of paper. Because if you look at it, we needed the sunlight and the clouds and the rain to produce trees that essentially power us to produce paper. So the entire universe is basically interrelated in this piece of paper — and so is with everything. As Iain McGilchrist says, relationships come before the relata. Relationship is fundamental in this universe. The relationship defines the things, quote unquote, that we look at. And so in this sense, I want to talk about this concept of self-knowledge. You described the symptoms that occur when we retreat into our head and think we can ideate and solve all of our problems with abstraction, with ideas, with concepts —

Philip Shepherd (36:17) Ahem.

Dmitrij Achelrod (36:25) — it comes with a lot of distress, it comes with anxiety and so on. And then what people are often being told is, you just need to know yourself. Even though it sounds initially like good advice, in your book you caution against it or you really define it in a different way. Maybe you can talk about that because I think it also relates to process versus something static.

Philip Shepherd (36:53) Yeah, yeah. And just to say — abstractions are wonderful. As a writer, I'm using words on a page. The limitation of an abstraction — the word abstract means to pull away from. You abstract something by depriving it of its context. And that's useful, but then bring it back into its context. And the way I do that is to let my ideas come back to my body. And in that schism between our thinking and our being, we stop feeling our thoughts and we stop recognizing the sensations of the body as thinking. So when thinking and being come together, every thought is felt through the cavern of the body, and as it rises through the body, it sort of sublimates into words, but it begins in what is felt. And every word is felt through the whole of your body. And similarly, every sensation in the body is a form of thinking. And the easiest way for me to contextualize that is to say — for me, a thought is the processing of a relationship. And I can process the relationship between the numbers one and two and add them and it's three, and subtract one from two, it's one, et cetera. The body is processing millions of relationships in every moment. Some of those relationships are its relationships with the world outside and it's reading the currents that are passing through it and making sense of those. So the brilliance of an abstraction only comes into its full value when it is brought down through the body. And it joins the ocean of your being the way a starling might join a murmuration. And as a starling joins a murmuration, it is adding a new sensitivity to the murmuration, a new way of feeling the world, another set of eyes, another set of ears. And the same thing happens when an abstraction is brought down through the body to be integrated. This — the title of Iain McGilchrist's book, The Matter with Things — we turn that on ourselves. We, in effect, turn the self into a thing by seeking to know it objectively. And what we come up with is almost like a grocery list: this is who I am, these are my beliefs, these are my values, this is my favorite color, this is what I like for breakfast. We identify ourselves in a way that renders the identification static. So we are no longer a process — we are a process within very constrained bounds. And then what happens is we have this self-knowledge, this grocery list, this identification, and if the universe or some person presents information that contravenes our self-definition, then we end up defending our self-knowledge, our self-definition, as though it were ourself. And we lose the understanding that the way we objectively know ourselves is different from the self. It's not that I'm against self-knowledge, I'm against the objectification. For me, self-knowledge comes through relationship. So if I come into relationship with a tree outside my window and I feel its presence — not objectifying it in any way, but being present to it through my body as fully as I can — I am illuminated by it, by that relationship. If I come into felt relationship with a child playing on the sidewalk, I am illuminated. I come into relationship with waves washing up on the beach. I am illuminated. The more deeply I come into relationship with the world, the more deeply I am illuminated as to who I am — specifically, individually who I am, is illuminated by the world. I'm not knowing myself in a self-achieved, independent way. I am opening to relationship and being illuminated by them.

Dmitrij Achelrod (41:35) So what is required to enter into relationship with the world?

Philip Shepherd (41:43) You are in relationship with the world. It's like one of those things — the surrender, right? It's not something to achieve. It's something that our culture warns us against. And so we have this resistance. Your bridge to felt relationship is the body. The brain is brilliant at known relationships. But here's the catch — I look around, I know what everything is, I can tell you what everything is. Everything I see, I know what it is. So then why the heck would I bother feeling any of it if I already know what it is? So that presumption of knowing is a bulwark against the sort of knowledge that can be felt. So coming back to this bridge between the brain and the world, which I call the body — one of the primary ways in which that bridge is illuminated is with the breath. And there's so much wonderful work on breath. My particular take on it is that there is no right way to breathe despite what some people present. But there's a principle for me that says the whole of the body can be available to every breath. And the breath washes through the body. If you understand that the body is a fluid medium, it makes sense that when the breath fills the lungs, there is a wave that is set up through that fluidity. And it's subtle, but I can feel the breath wave traveling down through my legs to the soles of my feet. I can feel it traveling up to the top of my head, down through my arms to the fingertips. And one of the primary impediments to feeling the breath that way is that we have locked up the pelvic bowl, the pelvic floor. We've taken this source of light and turned it into a pool of darkness. Part of that — it's a very, very old thing. This value system that says up is good and down is bad. And you're looking up today, Dmitrij, and there's no doubt in our culture what that means. In another culture, to say you're looking up might mean: you're looking a little flighty and disconnected, are you all right? Just as to say to someone you're looking low in another culture might mean: you're looking at peace with yourself and at rest on the earth — how wonderful. But we have — it's a very old story. 10,000 years ago, we felt our center in the belly. We felt ourselves at rest in the body, at rest on the earth. We were gathered around the mother culturally. We were representing nature as a goddess, feeling the female. And for me, there's a mirror of that within the body where I feel the intelligence within my pelvic bowl as a female intelligence and I feel the intelligence of the head as a male intelligence. Both are needed. But what happened as we discovered agriculture, as we started to domesticate animals and started to build permanent settlements, is we were shifting our dependence for survival from harmonizing with the world — feeling it through the body — to one in which we were taking control of the world. That relies on abstraction. You can't eat all the grain because we need to plant some of it in the spring. And so we relied more and more and more on abstraction. And as that happened, we began to rise up through the body. And you see this in art, you see it in literature, you see it in Homer. Homer's got a word, freen, or freenies, that means mind-diaphragm. And Richmond Lattimore, my favorite translator of Homer, preserves that in his translations. He'll have a character say, the mind within my breast understands your words. But what happened as we moved up into the head is we began to turn away from the mother and towards the father. We turned away from the goddess, towards the gods, we turned away from the earth and moved towards the sky and we demonized down and we locked up the pelvic bowl in neglect and darkness and tension. So in terms of opening and resensitizing the bridge of the body to the world around it, for me the pelvic floor, once it's released, it becomes a diaphragm — and it is a diaphragm. We just lose its participation in breath as we lock it up. So the diaphragm that we call the diaphragm moves in concert with the pelvic floor, but the pelvic floor can initiate each breath. And when the pelvic floor initiates the breath, it grounds me in wholeness. If the diaphragm initiates the breath, it tends to place my energy higher in the body and I lose that tap root to my being that is provided by the pelvic floor. In terms of those two intelligences — the male of the head and the female in the pelvic bowl — the male intelligence works by excluding. It excludes strawberry from the category of vegetable. It excludes everything it looks at from wholeness. The pelvic bowl is inclusive. It attunes to wholeness. It brings everything into relationship with everything, the way a murmuration brings every starling into relationship with every other. So to initiate the breath in the realm of the body that is inclusive is to issue an invitation to the whole of the body to join in every breath. So as the pelvic floor releases to the in-breath, there is this wave of release through the whole of the body, and similarly on the out-breath. So the journey back to the body's knowing — I don't know of anything more compelling than to find that release of the pelvic floor and to feel yourself drawn back in that surrender, drawn back to your nature and to nature itself.

Dmitrij Achelrod (48:58) It's interesting that you locate that female —

Philip Shepherd (49:04) So.

Dmitrij Achelrod (49:06) — center of intelligence in the pelvic floor. I've come across different meditation traditions and for instance, the Zen tradition works a lot with the hara, with the area beneath the belly button and probably beneath the pelvic floor. So I wonder — how did you discover this, what tradition gave you also the inspiration for falling into the pelvic area? Because I would say for most people — I've never thought about my pelvic area. Why should this be the receiving bowl for wisdom and intelligence?

Philip Shepherd (49:51) Yeah, I was very lucky. As a teenager, I left my home in Canada and went to England and bought a bicycle and headed off for Japan. And I was gone for two years. And when I got to Japan, I studied classical Japanese Noh theater. There is no performing art that is more deeply centered in the Hara, in that belly intelligence. And it shook me to my core. I saw a Noh play when I was 17 in Canada, and my soul was trembling at what I saw. I didn't understand how it had that effect on me, but now I understand — when an arm raises and it's raising from that place, the effect is completely different. When a head turns and it's seeing from that place, the effect is completely different. So that introduction to Hara as a teenager was absolutely formative. I owe a great debt to Noh theater and to the Japanese culture for that introduction. And then I've been an actor all my life. So the breath — if you're speaking from here, it's a very different thing from if you're actually accessing the pelvic bowl and the sacrum and the pelvic floor. And then I studied with an energy healer, Denis Chagnon from Quebec in Canada. And his story is compelling because he had cancer all through his body and was given three weeks to live, and went home and basically just felt and felt and felt and discovered a triangle in the body's energy, the bottom point of which is the perineum. So I studied with him for five years. The traditional center in the body is the dantian, the tanden in Japanese, the second chakra. But all of those centers were formulated or expressed thousands of years ago. Thousands of years ago, our culture had such a relationship to the earth. We worked it with our hands, we walked on it. Every sound we heard was a sound of nature that we lived with. I think most people, most of the time these days, are hearing machines. And that rhythm gets into the cells — they become jittery because they're being shaped by these mechanical rhythms. That center to me, the second chakra, the tanden, is no longer sufficient to countervail against the radical hyper-abstractions of the head. So for me, we need to drop down to the perineum to counterbalance the effects of our culture.

Dmitrij Achelrod (53:14) So what I hear is on the one hand, you're saying we are already in relationship, right? It's all we are, actually. We cannot define ourselves other than being in this flow of relationship. And at the same time, there is a deep, deep conditioning ingrained in our culture and in us, our neurobiology, that makes it harder to connect or to uncover these streams of relationships — to ourselves, to the world. And so while we are always being held in wholeness as you describe, we often are not aware of it or don't see it or often don't feel it. And we feel lost. We feel like a tumbleweed being carried around by the winds without any grounding. So for our listeners out there — how does one start, practically speaking, engaging in our wholeness and our relationality again?

Philip Shepherd (54:27) The quality that brings us into felt relationship most reliably is the quality of gentleness. So when I move a baby's arm into a sleeve, I'm doing it gently, right? Because then I can feel and dance that arm into the sleeve. Gentleness is something we don't afford ourselves. We're not gentle with ourselves. We're not gentle with the world. We live in this tyrannical mode that seeks to control and dominate and work from the head. So for example — how gently can you feel the breath in the body? And can you feel it more gently, and more gently still? How gently can you feel a pain in the body? And can you give it love? Because what happens — we brace against the present. We brace against ourselves. We brace against our own sensations in ways that create this subtle latticework of tension throughout the body. And to bring love to that — we deny ourselves the ability to feel good because we operate with this assumption: well, if I can get through this now, I will feel better later. And to me, the surrender to being, the surrender to the breath that allows me to come to rest in my body, that allows me to come to rest on the earth, that allows me to feel myself at rest in the present — that surrender always feels good. To allow the pelvic floor to release to the breath always feels good. I feel better. I've got a little snow globe, a little fox. And here's how we live with all our energy kind of floating around and agitated. And to let the body come to rest on the earth as it truly is, is to feel your energy settle and come home. And I like that the little fox is resting on his pelvic floor on the earth. You know, we've internalized "up is good, down is bad" to such an extent that when we are in a stressful situation, our energy goes higher and higher and higher until there's this storm going on in our heads. And it is so disabling when that happens. It is taking us out of wholeness. It is taking us out of our true power. It is taking us out of our clarity. And so to recognize this urge — once in a while somebody will say, would you give a talk and what would you like to call your talk? And I'll say, well, why don't we call it "lower your consciousness"? And every time I hear "raise your consciousness", I think, my God, you're so far out of the body, you're so high.

Dmitrij Achelrod (57:53) Hmm.

Philip Shepherd (58:02) It's toxic to go higher. Drop down, come back to the earth, come back to its companionship, come back to the reality of your being in this world and settle like that little fox in the snow globe. It's giving yourself permission to recognize how your neurology has been shaped, how we're committed to doing — and then returning to gentleness as a doorway into felt relationship. To me, gentleness allows, facilitates, felt relationship.

Dmitrij Achelrod (58:50) Yeah. You mentioned that our culture that only values ascent leads to sort of bypassing, right? Trying to live our lives without the connection to our body. And your words reminded me a lot of Francis Weller, who also speaks a lot about how the journey of the descent is where your soul is waiting — it's the journey into the earth, into our roots, right? Where germination happens. And you can't have a tree that reaches into the sky without roots that go down deep. But we need to seek a balance between our intelligence in the head — the brain intelligence — but also the intelligence that we harbor in the body. And you gave this very impressive example of that indigenous tribe in Alaska, and that they can somehow tap into this deeper —

Philip Shepherd (1:00:00) The Unangan culture.

Dmitrij Achelrod (1:00:09) — deeper ocean of intelligence and sense the presence of beings that to me sounds almost impossible. So I'm wondering — how can we cultivate this kind of intelligence beyond a simple experience, but cultivate it into a state, into a living relationship, where we can invite it more and more into our life? So you did mention connecting to the pelvic floor, allowing the resonance to happen there, inviting gentleness into our lives. And yet I can imagine, to many people, it still sounds abstract because it is such a radically new concept that sounds difficult to grasp with our analytical mind. Maybe this is what I'm trying to do right now — trying to draw something into abstraction which needs to be actually experienced.

Philip Shepherd (1:01:17) It is a surrender that is being asked of us. In my understanding, it's a life or death issue. We need a new way of being. The way of being to which we are currently addicted is toxic. A new way of being doesn't mean let's recycle — I mean, recycling is great — a new way of being is a new neurological sensitivity to the world around us. So the challenge — and it's not, let's take an online course and we'll get there in three easy steps. It's not that. It's a lifetime. I am deepening and deepening and there's no — I'm so keenly aware of my own limitations still that the challenge is alive in my life. To understand the challenge as one in which we are reshaping our neurology, then you look to what that requires. There's a feature in the brain called the nucleus basalis that facilitates plasticity. It facilitates new neural pathways being grown. And the nucleus basalis is running 24/7 with kids, but then you turn 10 or 11 years old and it starts to shut down — and that's why it's so much more difficult to learn a foreign language as a 20 year old than it would have been as an 8 year old. The nucleus basalis can be reawakened by a few different things. One is a shock, another is a novel situation — you've never been to Hong Kong and there you are and the nucleus basalis awakens. But the third quality is the quality of paying close attention. So you think of a stroke victim and the therapist gives the stroke victim a pen and says, pick up the pen. And he says, I can't, my hand doesn't work. Concentrate, pay close attention, pick up the pen. And it works a little bit and eventually he picks it up without thinking. The quality of paying close attention is one of the most difficult things to do when you can barely feel what you're paying close attention to. So I can raise one eyebrow. I can't raise the other one by itself. I could, if I spent hours — I could reactivate those neural pathways and raise just that eyebrow. It's a similar challenge to — we have lost the pelvic floor. Our neurology has withdrawn from it. We no longer feel it. So that quality of paying close attention goes hand in hand with gentleness and is in agony — to be with something and you can barely feel it, but to hang in there. But my God, the rewards are phenomenal. It bears treasure if you can stay with it.

Dmitrij Achelrod (1:05:00) Is this what you teach people in your Embodied Present Process?

Philip Shepherd (1:05:07) Absolutely. And the other thing too is — what impedes us in that creation of a new way of being is habitual ways of living that we don't notice. So what a lot of the practices do is they will help people bump up against a habit they're not even aware of. If you're not aware of a habit, you have no choice. You can't exercise any other possibility. You become aware of it and it's already started to change — in the same way that you can't observe a particle without changing it. You observe it, and it's like pulling it out of the darkness into the light, and then you acquire choice. For me, I would never tell someone what choice they could make, but boy, I want them to have the choice to make for themselves.

Dmitrij Achelrod (1:06:05) If we think about choices or difficult decisions, tensions in our lives, paradoxes we need to hold, the stresses that we need to survive — how could we allow ourselves to be guided by the wisdom of the body? How could we use it in this decision making?

Philip Shepherd (1:06:28) So I'm not aware of making decisions in my life. I find it curious — the word decision, you know, comes from a Latin verb that means to cut away, like incision comes from the same. I will weigh things abstractly for sure, but then I drop all that down into the body and I sit with it, and eventually it lands. What I should do lands beyond all doubt, all ambiguity. It just — the whole of my being is coherent in moving forward. So we are trained to think our way forward, all that abstract knowledge being brought to bear, and we make our decision. And we have a diminished kind of experiential knowledge of how to feel our way forward. But to trust your wholeness rather than that fractured grasping that the head deems all important — to come back to your wholeness, to allow your being to come into coherence the way a quarter of a million starlings can come into coherence in a murmuration — then decisions aren't needed. You just feel your way forward and there is such clarity to that.

Dmitrij Achelrod (1:08:15) Very interesting that this concept of decision making is not really present so much in your life, but the path unfolds naturally through sinking into the body. When I spin this a bit forward, I was wondering how that would shape our world if we collectively embraced more such a way of feeling our way forward instead of trying to brute force it with predicting and analyzing. I'm asking this question especially because a lot of our listeners and the people that we are working with are in positions of influence, right? They are in leadership positions. They are running their companies or are oftentimes senior executives. I wonder how leadership would change if such a stance was adopted.

Philip Shepherd (1:09:11) Yeah, completely. So if I'm in a divided state — which is the state of the tyrant, and the tyrant, just to be clear, tyranny is the result of the male element turning its back on the female element and going it alone. So it puts us in division — thinking and being, head and body, however you wish to formulate that. When we are in division, we are out of wholeness. Harmony is a product of wholeness. There's order, which the head tends to gravitate to — hierarchical and based on an abstract system that's imposed. Harmony is a process that results from every part of an organic whole yielding to every other part, and it comes into harmony. And when we are not in wholeness, we cannot feel harmony in ourselves or in the world. So then it is impossible to harmonize with the world. And when I am feeling my way forward, I am guided by the world's harmony. I am dropped into my wholeness, attuning to wholeness, and the way is clear — and if it's not clear, I wait. I stay with it, I'm present to the issue, whatever it might be. Leadership, if it becomes tyrannical, will require force and will create division. It will create division within the corporation, within the body, within the whole, whatever it might be. To feel your way forward is to take into account all the mindful awarenesses that lie within the corporation, within the team, within the whatever, and bring them together into the most potent resolution that leads with sensitivity and leads without attachment to the way to arrive at an outcome. So leadership will adjust, will adjust, will adjust when it is organic, when it is attuned to the whole — as opposed to "this is what we're gonna do and how we're gonna do it" without any responsibility to the unfolding present.

Dmitrij Achelrod (1:11:43) While you were talking, I was wondering how does trauma also relate to embodiment? Because when we think or study trauma, we often hear of people dissociating from the felt sense, right? From the body, from the emotions, from the feelings even, because they're too painful. It seems that for traumatized people, it is almost impossible to even feel the body, right? And to tap into this source. What is your approach to start this reconnection?

Philip Shepherd (1:12:30) Yeah, so trauma is chiefly characterized by a dissociation from the body. By that standard, we are all traumatized. We live in the head — you're traumatized. I mean, it's just, how do you get away from that as an understanding? And in trauma, you lose the resource of the body's intelligence. It becomes incoherent. In my experience, the journey back to coherence requires two things. One is it requires expression. That what has been buried, what has been prohibited from being expressed — you're not going to integrate that if that prohibition remains in place. And in the journey to wholeness, there's only one means that will take you to wholeness, which is integration. You can't fix things, you can't overcome them, you can't get to wholeness by pushing things aside. So what is that expression? It might be writing, it might be talking, it might be standing in the woods screaming at the top of your lungs, it might be hitting a pillow with a tennis racket — but to feel yourself, in a safe way however that may show up, allowing this wound to be expressed. And there are fabulous modalities that help people with that. But there's the second step for me that is crucial — this expression has happened, and then how to bring that back, all that energy, how to gather it and bring it back to your center. And that process of integration, to me, is crucial. If it doesn't happen, your ability to center yourself, I think, will be impaired in some way.

Dmitrij Achelrod (1:14:38) I have one last question for you, Philip. So if you had a wish for humanity, what would it be?

Philip Shepherd (1:14:54) To recognize that aloneness is an illusion. To feel the gift of this miraculous planet on which we live. Understand that what moves life forward is a mystery that cannot be known, but it can be felt. And to join your life to that mystery in a way that brings you more and more alive to the world around you.

Dmitrij Achelrod (1:15:32) Thank you, Philip. So if people want to find out more about your work, about what you do, where should they look?

Philip Shepherd (1:15:43) I have a website which is embodiedpresent.com — not embodiedpresents. I have difficulty with the term "embodied presence" because it's tautological. If you're embodied, you're present. If you're present, you're embodied. But embodiedpresent.com — it's saying what you are embodying is the present. It's not that you're in here and the present is out there and you're trying to connect to it; the present lives through you. And to open to that attunement is the path that leads to true embodiment. So, embodiedpresent.com — and we have so much in the way of free resources. There's a community that's free to join that supports embodiment and brings issues to the fore. There's also a membership, like a gym membership, where there are 300 exercises that I've recorded and you get an email once a week alerting you to an exercise. And it's only through practice, it's only through experience that our neurology changes. So it's there, and the challenge we face is we live immersed in a culture of forgetfulness. And so we slip into forgetfulness. And that's what the membership provides — this ongoing drip feed of remembrance. I've also written three books — the two you mentioned, there's also Deep Fitness, which is about embodied fitness. And we have other courses as well on the website that people might find interesting.

Dmitrij Achelrod (1:17:43) And yeah, for those living in Europe — you are also coming to Europe this year. I will be attending your Embodied Present Process in Berlin in May. And I think you will also be in the UK, right?

Philip Shepherd (1:17:56) Yeah, in Oxford, also in Basel, I think also in Vienna. I'm waiting to hear back if there's a space in Vienna. If it's not in Vienna, it might be Copenhagen. And it starts sort of mid-May and runs into June. I'm thrilled to bits about coming back to Europe. Yeah.

Dmitrij Achelrod (1:18:16) Yeah, and I'm very excited to actually be meeting you in person here in Germany.

Philip Shepherd (1:18:23) I so look forward to it, Dmitrij.

Dmitrij Achelrod (1:18:25) Philip, thank you so much for your time. It was a true pleasure having you here and listening to the embodied wisdom that you are. So much, much appreciation.

Philip Shepherd (1:18:39) Thank you, Dmitrij, it's been a joy. Thank you.