An illustration of the profiles of two people.Embodied knowing is transdisciplinary. Although we might identify its roots in phenomenology, it has been identified in fields as diverse as anthropology, business studies, computing, cognitive neuroscience, pedagogy, psychology, religious studies and sociology. That list is by no means complete, and new applications are regularly emerging.
Despite their diversity, different disciplines agree on key principles: embodied knowing is nonverbal, pre-reflective and experiential. Polanyi concluded that “we know more than we can tell”, and therein lies a research challenge: if our participants can't tell us about any embodied knowing they might have, how do we research it?
My research problem
This dilemma faced me when I moved into the fieldwork phase of my PhD research into embodied knowing in eco-paganism. I'd developed a movement-based approach, inviting participants to explore their embodied knowing at a short workshop. I quickly realised it wouldn't work, as much of my fieldwork took place on road protest sites, which were fluid, unpredictable and unstable. Organising anything as structured as a workshop was impossible! I found myself amid challenging fieldwork without a methodology to access the embodied tacit knowing I was there to explore.
The solution
During my literature review, I'd come across the work of a philosopher and psychotherapist, Eugene Gendlin. He was the first person to identify the felt sense – “a body-sense of meaning”. A felt sense is embodied and meaningful and Gendlin had developed a therapeutic technique to help people access this non-verbal and pre-reflective form of knowing that he called Focusing.
Could I bring Focusing into semi-structured interviews to access embodied knowing? It isn't hard to learn the basics of Focusing, and I quickly realised from personal experience that this approach had great potential. My PhD supervisor was more cautious. Adopting a new and untried approach late in my research was risky: how certain was I that this would work? I had a gut feeling that this was the way to go, and my supervisor approved funding to attend short Focusing training. Before long, I had developed a methodology I call the Focusing interview.
During a Focusing interview, the researcher invites respondents to pay attention to any bodily feelings or sensations that come up in responses to questions. Respondents can communicate any felt senses that arise using metaphors, sounds or movements. The interviewer remains attentive to any felt senses arising in the interviewer's own body, as this enhances empathy and can provide vital clues to the respondent's embodied experience.
Applying the Focusing interview
The Focusing interview did enable my respondents to access and articulate their embodied knowing. As a result, a fascinating landscape of experience emerged, allowing me to map embodied knowing in eco-paganism. One of the key aspects of this approach is the researcher's awareness of their own embodied knowing. On one notable occasion, I noticed a felt sense at what I thought was the end of an interview. A bodily prompting told me that I had missed something, and it took me a moment to formulate the question that was on the tip of my tongue. The question that emerged from my felt sense brought a powerful new insight that would never have been expressed otherwise.
I subsequently used the Focusing interview to research the experience of Pagans who were involved with celebrations of the outcast dead buried at Cross Bones, an unconsecrated graveyard in south London. Cross Bones had a powerful sense of place, and the Pagans who honoured the dead there were able to articulate a rich, embodied knowing of their relationship with it.
Looking forwards
My experience with Focusing eventually led me to train as a psychotherapist, and that has been my primary occupation for the last decade. I have continued to research embodied knowing, and my therapeutic training has led to an involvement with the emerging field of psychedelic studies. This has brought me back to the Focusing interview.
Ineffability is a common characteristic of psychedelic experiences, which limits the degree to which they can be understood. Some researchers suggest that this characteristic is fundamental to the transformative power of altered states of consciousness. The Focusing interview can provide access to the tacit embodied knowledge that emerges from psychedelic experiences. This means that it could become a valuable methodology in the evolving world of psychedelic studies. It's clear that even though the Focusing interview has been published as a religious studies methodology, its applications are far wider; it has immediate applications wherever embodied knowing is researched.
My chapter on developing and applying the Focusing interview has recently been published in Messy Methods in Researching Religion.