Working in a Body

Last week I wrote about that moment at work when all the trappings of professional life fall away and you remember that you and your colleagues are “just people in a room.” I compared these moments to the first ones shipwreck survivors might experience when they wash up on a desert island and see who else is there.

How might we cultivate the beginner’s-mind freshness of this experience and its intimacy with the physical realities of the world as it is today — not as it was when our current ways of working first came into practice?

One place to start is by remembering that our greatest access to the concentric rings of physical reality around us, is through our own physicality.

Isn’t it odd that we have developed norms of working for millions of “knowledge” workers that primarily call on just our brains, our eyes and our keyboarding fingers, while the rest of our miraculous bodies are parked like cars for most of the day?
I would assert that those who are able to bring their whole-body capacities to their work and lives are more effective at whatever they are doing.

Here’s a fun experiment I did recently with some colleagues. You can do this with others or stealthily alone. The next time you are out walking somewhere, take three minutes to try this:

• Choose a part of your body to “follow” when you walk. You might start with feet. Imagine that your feet are the ringleaders of the rest of your body. What does it feel like to be following your feet? 

• Now try another part. How about your hips? Your knees? 
  What is it like to follow the lead of your spine? Your heart? 

• Take about ten good paces with each part at the helm. What do you notice about the difference in the way you experience your body and your world? What shifts in your internal world with each new part in the front. If your experience is anything like ours, the differences are radical.

• Finally, try leading your walk with your mind. What does this do to your sense of clarity and direction, your sense of connection with your surrounding environment?

Now, a little reflection … what part of you is out in front most of the time at work? What might become accessible if you allowed other aspects of your presence to come forward? In a meeting today, could you imagine for a minute that you were accessing the uprightness of your spine? The connectedness of your heart? The knowledge of the earth available in your feet? Your “gut” sense of the heart of the matter? Might you learn to “play forward” all of these in a work day like the multi-toned instrument that you are?

No matter what our work is, our bodies are always dancing with life. How much we recognize and inhabit this dance with our attention and intention is up to us. I would suggest that doing so can not only increase the range of our mastery in our jobs, but also makes us more able to sense the realities around us — and to be more accurate and effective at working in a way that works for the world