Published:
July 2024

Issue:
Vol.19, No.1

Word count:
6,068

About the author

  • Currently in the final year of postgraduate studies in Creative Arts Therapy with a specialisation in arts-based research, RTM is a multi-modal visual and performance artist, photographer, poet, writer, and creative arts therapist. They are passionate about cultivating awareness around ‘studio arts inquiry practice’ as a therapeutic modality. As an arts-based researcher, RTM delves into the ontology of neurodivergent lived experience and how this impacts/is impacted by trauma, relationality, and epistemological considerations. RTM aspires to see neurodivergent modes of expression and understanding more widely integrated and represented within research literature and academia. They are curious to see what emerges from and beyond the post-qualitative and the depth and inclusivity this could bring to academic and therapeutic landscapes.

Recipient of the ANZACATA-JoCAT Author Support Bursary

This work is published in JoCAT and licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA-4.0 license.

  • RTM, (2024). Embodied awareness: An inquiry into finding a felt-sense through a neurodivergent lens. JoCAT, 19(1). https://www.jocat-online.org/a-24-rtm

Embodied awareness: An inquiry into finding a felt-sense through a neurodivergent lens

RTM

Abstract 

This article shares my process of coming to know about embodied awareness. A multi-modal autoethnographic account, this arts-based inquiry follows my experience of learning about and finding a felt-sense. It showcases how multi-modal creative arts-based inquiry processes and procedures facilitate perceptual shifts, how sensory experiencing activities can destabilise neurodivergent and highly sensitive individuals, and, importantly, the value of non-verbal forms of expression and inquiry, the richness and opening of knowledge that becomes sharable when multi-modal forms of communication and research are allowed and taken as valid and accepted.

Keywords

Embodied awareness, felt-sense, multi-modal, neurodivergent, arts-based inquiry, autoethnographic

Introduction

Implicit knowings are obscured by definition, if you have a clear implicit knowing it is not an implicit knowing … when you express an implicit knowing you give it a coherence that it did not originally possess. Somehow you have to give it a form that is organised and concise, and comprehensible to others. (Baricco, 2002, as cited in Stern, 2004)

Baricco used the word ideas in the above passage. Stern (2004) suggested altering it, replacing the word ideas with implicit knowings (p.117).

In consideration of Baricco’s words, it is with intention that I deviate from following a normative academic word engagement structure for this article, as doing so would be to further lose in translation my implicit understandings and coming-to-knows of embodied awareness and what it is to attend to the felt-senses. I invite you to allow this diversion, bracketing out how an academic article should be grammatically and stylistically presented for a time and experience academic content neurodivergently expressed.

Table 1.

It will be helpful to know… A key of sorts       

There will be:  

  • Headings

  • Subheadings

  • Tables

  • Moments of normative academic offerings

  • Locating an inquiry within space and place

  • ‘Un-integrated quotations’

  • Dot points

  • Expressive worded formings and felt words

  • Raw reflective notes in blue-bordered boxes

  • 🤓 Emergent natterings

  • Multimodal expressions of inquiry

  • Bracketed in opinions

🤓 I used to believe I was bad at written forms of communication.
I am not. I just needed accommodation to do it my own way.

As a student at The MIECAT Institute (MIECAT), my coming-to-knows of embodied awareness emerged from a multi-modal collection of experiences, presented here as a layered account. The experiences included are separate and distinct, yet together form the whole. I want to convey a sense of this here.

There might be instances when you feel you have a sense of what I am trying to convey, yet the more you try to reify this sense, the quicker it evaporates into the ether. I hope to offer you a deep sense of my evolving understanding of embodied awareness, even if it might leave you wondering about the intangibility of your ‘no doubt’.  Could it be that this ‘no doubt’, if you experience it, comes from a pre-verbal felt-sense of my understandings?

It may also be that you find the flow of my writing disjointed. It is ok if you do; it is also ok if you experience moments of feeling ‘lost’ or ‘confused’, as I hope this reading may offer an experiential sense of my heuristic experience. I might even be cheeky enough to suggest that ‘disjointed’, ‘lost’ and ‘confused’ are ways I sometimes feel, as a neurodivergent person, when engaging with walls of dense, congested, claustrophobic, dry normative academic literature.


🤓 Chaotic, busy, non-linear, messy, unnecessarily verbose, disordered, too much. I will not be confined to comfortable, easy to digest paragraphical formings of learnt ideas!
This is what coming-to-know is like for me, my hope is to share a felt-sense of this with you here.

The MIECAT Institute: The contextual container

This body of work began as an assessment requirement grounded within Embodied Awareness, Unit 2 of the first year, and includes considerations spanning the first two years of my post-graduate studies at MIECAT. 

In preparing this research for publication, I was invited to introduce and discuss MIECAT and its approaches. I wondered how best to go about this. What emerged was a desire to ask MIECAT what it might like people to know. Following this desire, an imaginal dialogical engagement with MIECAT ensued.

In the ‘transcript’ below of this conversation,

MIECAT’s voice is depicted in blue,

and mine is shown in pink.

MIECAT, thank you for this opportunity to sit down and have a chat.

Thank you, RTM, for allowing me a voice.

Of course!

Does it feel ok if I jump right on in and ask you some questions? 

Yes, that feels ok with me.

What would be your elevator pitch?

“The MIECAT Institute is a not-for-profit higher education provider that offers accredited post-graduate courses in, and conducts research through, experiential and creative arts” (MIECAT, n.d., guiding framework).

As an educational institute, what feels of importance to you?

“Our approach seeks congruence between what is taught and how it is taught. The dynamic process of inquiry invites you to be curious, challenged and immersed in a community of co-learners” (MIECAT, n.d., mission statement).

Can you speak a little on your approach to inquiry?

“It is an emergent form of inquiry which is flexible and responsive, informed by the values of relationality, multi-modality, emergence and experiencing” (MIECAT, 2021, para.1).

Nicely articulated MIECAT. As always, it has been a pleasure to speak with you. 

What I am coming to know

“Much of this implicit knowing is not even transposable into words” (Stern, 2004, p.117).

My experience of learning about felt-senses – by which I mean the sensation of bodily knowing, experiencing, and intuition, as separate from, and often present before, cognitive verbally explicit awareness – required cognitive engagement with a lot of words. While words are helpful when it comes to sharing ideas with others, words alone were inadequate in helping me understand ‘felt-senses’.

🤓   We are so lucky, those of us here at MIECAT. We get to know and communicate in ways other than normative word use. I find this wonderful, as words do not always come easily. Sometimes, I may not be sure which words fit, or I find myself unable to locate them in the moment. Being able to express multi-modally — through bodily gestures, sounds, images, etc — feels expansive, inclusive, and freeing. I would love to see the world embrace this.

All these words I offer here do not ‘feel’ like the totality of what I am coming to know (see Figure 1); what I am coming to know feels much more significant than this.

Figure 1. RTM, Words alone are not enough, 2022, video.

Caldwell (2018) discusses ‘word privilege’ and the idea that “we force ourselves to construct a verbal explanation for our sensations as the only way they can be legitimised” (p.42). I am neurodivergent with complex trauma disorder and highly sensitive with heightened sensory perception. At times, this can present challenges within the language processing centres of my brain (Brites, 2021). Being able to inquire and, more importantly, to express using non-verbal modalities feels… big, empowering, freeing, heavy, tear-inducing, a relief, fuzzy, zingy. The process of engaging with so many words and trying to make explicit, sharable meanings using words for concepts much larger than words can, at times, be frustrating. Figure 2 represents this frustration.

Figure 2. RTM, So many words: The verbal edition, 2022, graphite on paper, 300 × 210mm.

Figure 3. RTM, So many words: The non-verbal edition, 2022, graphite on paper, 300 × 210mm.

Words have been used in this expression; however, it is not the words and their ascribed meanings alone, but also the marks that remain from my body’s movement in making the expression that make the implicit explicit.

I became curious to know, surrounded by all these verbal/nonverbal considerations, if the same felt-sense would be present if the visual expression was made without worded mark-makings (Figure 3).

While I won’t delve deeper into this inquiry at this time, I sense that the feeling expressed in Figure 2 is present because it was made from an emergent, pre-reflective place. Recreating it removed the essence that the immediacy of emergence carried, which was unrelated to whether the marks were words or not. There is something interesting in this.

🤓This ⬆︎ is one of those ‘raw reflective notes, in a blue-bordered box’.

Packaging this idea of embodied awareness into words was not easy; however, after ingestion and digestion of the many explored words, I have been able somewhat to concisely consolidate them into the following definition of the term and its use:

EMBODIED AWARENESS:

  1. Noticing the felt-sense of experiencing within the somatic system.

  2. Pre-cognitive, intuitive knowing.

  3. Awareness of the ways we experience from within our body.

This concise consolidation acts as a brief overview. The experience of felt-sensing may vary widely and be highly individualised.

Embodied Awareness may assist in regulating the shared space of experiencing, known as the intersubjective field, between companion and inquirer or between self and relational others.

🤓 As a highly sensitive neurodivergent individual, my journey of experiencing, sensing, and being aware of/from all my bodily senses can prove overwhelming and destabilising. This is evident in ‘the offending jumper inquiry’, a personal experience shared in the section titled ‘Embodied awareness and neurodiversity: Sensory considerations’.

Whilst the worded definitions give an almost tangible understanding of the concept, the process of coming-to-know embodied awareness necessitated a series of intermodal multi-modal inquiries not dependent upon linguistic privileging. What do I mean by ‘intermodal multi-modal inquiry’? I am referring to the practice of “creating with many materials in multiple modes” (Moy, 2023), which is woven within the inquiry process (Woodford, 2023, p.16). Figure 4 offers a fuller sense of what I am coming to know:

Figure 4. RTM, What I have come to know, 2022, crayon on paper, 200 × 190mm.

 

Whilst words alone are not enough, they can help make meaning from experience and bring what is implicitly known into sharable forms of expression (Todres, 2007), be that through verbal communication or artistic presentations. Table 2 shows the verbal explicit meaning discovered within Figure 4, found during the process of phenomenological description – describing as opposed to offering theoretical explanation (Spinelli, 2005, p.21) – of the visual expression.

Table 2.

Words that emerged alongside the visual expression

A bigger, overarching, not-quite-known knowledge that is felt,

containing compartments of many interpretations, perspectives, and forming understandings.

Some overlap, some are contained within others.

Some relate to others in differing ways.

It feels full, intricate, nuanced.

There are no start or end points, reflective of the constant fluidity of understandings.

I am coming to know:

  • It is about:

    • sitting down and listening to your bodily felt-sense;

    • what I feel, even if that means I do not cognitively understand;

    • what I am experiencing in my body;

    • going slowly, with gentleness; and

    • “It is to experience the fullness of a dance of attention” (Manning & Massumi, 2014, p.4).

  • I can only know things from the perspective of my own lived experience, through the lens of this and all it encompasses (physiological, social, cultural).

  • Through this inquiry, I discovered a significant aspect of myself – I have been very disconnected from my somatic body.

The meaning I am coming to make through inquiry into embodied awareness is complex. There is something around being in full attendance to the awareness of what is within and without so that one might bring the best quality of presence possible to intersubjective fields. Through embodied awareness, we can broaden our ways of knowing and widen the field of data available, allowing for richer modes of engagement with and considered expressive responses to relational others (Gendlin, 1982; Lett, 2011; Manning & Massumi, 2014; Stern, 2004; Todres, 2007; Violi, 2009; Weber, 2019).

Engagement with literature

Academic endeavours inevitably lead to engagement with relevant literature. For this inquiry, MIECAT's invitation was to engage in a multi-modal dialogue with selected literature and to use the literature as an opportunity to develop and capture embodied responses. The focus here is on noticing and capturing these embodied responses rather than reviewing the literary content.

🤓 Why have I made the above sentence bold?
I want to draw your attention to MIECAT's unique approach to the invitation. It also became apparent that the lack of words or information about each piece of literature may leave some readers feeling an irreconcilable discombobulation.

In the following subsections, I offer my embodied responses to each text. Included under each subheading is a summary of the literature for the reader’s interest; however, it should not be assumed that my embodied response is attached to the words contained within each body of writing. The invitation was for multi-modal engagement, not normative academic reading.

Author: Nixon (2020)

I noticed I did not want to give information about this article at this location.

Did not!

I did try; it was all typed in.

I was including it to cater to the desire of others for me to be a “good academic” and keep everyone happy.

For me, though,

you see,

it felt unnecessary.

The article’s topics and content did not influence my embodied response and the resulting visual expression.

It made me feel uncomfortable to include it.

Anxiety sat in my chest

irritating my internal flesh like an expanding, itchy, foam-stuffing froth.

It sat heavy on my brow

and tight in my neck.

It made my insides run frantically around, racing and crashing about.

 

Why such a response?

I viscerally felt it would alter the interpretation and perception

of the visual expression.

Change it in ways far from its intention.

I am fond of this expression and the memories anchored in it.

It was a significant moment for me, following my intuitive sense rather than what I thought was required of me.

It was a moment of advocating for oneself and attending to self-care needs.

I did not want to erase any of this, even knowing I have little control over how a creative expression is received and heard.

What felt important was respecting the significance it held for me.

🤓 “but wait, there’s more…”

 The anxiety had now been replaced with a pit of swirling lead in my stomach

which travelled slowly down from my jaw to my sternum

weaving in and out about my ribs

until reaching its gastric destination.   

I had started to panic.

The thoughts had crept in.

I was not being an excellent academic.

I was failing to bring quality and rigour to my work.

AND

Then I remembered to question.

Who am I trying to please?

I also remembered to consider

Who am I within this space?

What does my voice want to say?

How does it want to be said?

It was by this I was finally led.

🤓 It is ok; a way to resolve this and tend to both needs was found…

Figure 5 shows a moment of listening to and following my felt-sense whilst engaging with Nixon’s (2020) “The body as mediator”:

Figure 5. RTM, Experience of the body as mediator reading, 2022, digital image.

I enjoyed this reading when first sitting down to it. Unable to complete it at that moment, I returned later, my mind wanting to dive in. My body said no — I know this because I listened. After reading the same sentence for the fifth time and still having no retention of the words or meaning, my urge to draw, to trace the loop that the re-re-re-re-reading was creating, sat strong in my heart and hand. So, I let them play…

Nixon also left me pondering this regarding movement and gesture:

  • Why do I hold such resistance to the modalities of movement, gesture, and voice?

  • Why do I feel so uncomfortable, vulnerable, self-conscious?

  • This is strange when I consider that:

  1. I am a very gesturally expressive person. I speak with my whole body (hands, face, posture), often communicating with sounds and gestures rather than words.

  2. I dance, without inhibition, letting my bodily movements be guided by how the music feels.

  3. How do I experience this within the body, and what meaning can I make from that?

🤓 I have come to use gesture and voice frequently as expressive modalities. Although I may still not be completely comfortable with them, I find them useful in making the implicit explicit.

In his 2020 article ‘The body as mediator’, Nixon suggests that our digital environments can lead to a troubling sense of disembodiment, where we disconnect from our bodies as living, breathing entities. To counter this, he proposes a return to the phenomenological philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and a re-embrace of embodied experience. 

🤓 See! ⬆︎ ⬆︎ here is the resolution I mentioned earlier.

Author: Vanclay et al., (2008)

Vanclay et al. (2008) explore the multifaceted nature of place, which encompasses not only physical locations but also the social, cultural, and experiential dimensions associated with them. They delve into the ways in which people develop attachments to places, how places shape identities, and the role of place in shaping human experiences and relationships.

“Place is fundamental to humanity, for ‘to be human is to live in a world that is filled with significant places: to be human is to have and to know your place’” (p.7).

My immediate response to this was, “NO, f#@k you, my place is not in the kitchen!!” – from the perspective of being a woman/mum of European-Anglo descent, remembering such sentences as “a woman should know her place”. After that visceral reaction, however, I like this quote; it plays well to considerations of significant place.

“Sense of place is also about the senses. …I am immediately aware of the feel and smell of the place. My body reacts…” (p.9).

🤓 As a highly sensitive person, smells and feels of places do indeed bear impact.

Authors: Manning, E., & Massumi, B. (2014)

Manning and Massumi (2014) propose that thinking and artfulness are inseparably intertwined. They argue that thinking is not merely a passive process; instead, it emerges through the act of creation, whether through creative arts-making practice or simply perceiving the world. They reframe thinking as an embodied, relational process that arises from creative experimentation and even incorporate considerations of autistic perception.

After sitting down and engaging with this piece of literature, this is what I came to know:

I feel, when reading Manning and Massumi, due to its neurodivergent considerations and perspectives:

  • a lightness

  • a hopefulness

  • a slight easing of heaviness in my chest

  • a smile

  • a spaciousness in my neural networks (because I do not have to translate/understand everything from a neurotypical perspective, which is an experiential perspective that differs from my own. I was not aware of the exhaustion and burden I feel from having to do that until this moment)

  • I can relate to this

  • some sense of connectedness

Embodied awareness and neurodiversity: Sensory considerations

Day 1, Unit 2.
In class activity invitation: Attending to the senses – Hearing, Seeing, Touching, Smelling, Tasting. Outdoors, 3 minutes for each sense.

The offending jumper inquiry and reflections took place after class. High sensitivity,

🤓 Wait – what do I mean by high sensitivity?

Experiencing heightened sensitivity, my life is a constant influx of sensory information, more than most people seem to receive. Susan Cain (2012) offers that highly sensitive people “process information about their environments – both physical and emotional – unusually deeply. They tend to notice subtleties that others miss – another person’s shift in mood, say, or a lightbulb burning a touch too brightly.'“ (Cain, 2012, p.142). Receiving ALL the information existing within my surrounding environment can leave me feeling overwhelmed – things I usually find bearable become unbearable.

🤓 I was once so irritable the feeling of my eyelashes against my eyelids drove me to despair. Anyway, I digress, let us continue.

This significantly impacts lived experience and interrelation with biotic and abiotic others (Manning & Massumi, 2014).

Figures 6, 7 and 8 show this process of inquiry utilising multi-modal expressions, each drawing upon the expression before it.

Feeling aversion toward the offending jumper, I impulsively discarded it in the bin with disgust. Noticing my embodied reaction, I decided to inquire further. I started by capturing an image of the discarded jumper (Figure 6).

Figure 6. RTM, The offending jumper: Immediate emergence, 2022, photograph.

 

I then explored the gesture of this ‘discarding’ (Figure 7).

Figure 7. RTM, The offending jumper: gestural inquiry, 2022, animated drawing.

 

Next, I transposed this gesture through mark-making (Figure 8).

Figure 8. RTM, The offending jumper: Visual reduction, 2022, ink, crayon, and pastel on paper, 115 × 130mm.

 

The following words came after making the visual reduction in Figure 8:

Disgusted

Rejection

Childlike

Softening at the end

After attending to the senses and putting on a freshly laundered jumper, something felt incorrect. It seemed to have marginally shrunk in the wash.
I could feel the seams pressing into my skin.
Unpleasant, restrictive, constrictive.
Then I noticed that the fabric was patterned – this was an old jumper, yet I had never noticed the pattern.
I strongly dislike patterned clothes.
Disgusted in my skin, and offended in my eyeballs, I removed the jumper and discarded it in the trash.
I only own two jumpers.
This one had been my favourite.

Five senses used to be too much for me, and now that I am learning to be present in my body, I have gained a gazillion more senses. (Gazillion may be an exaggeration.)

Initially, this has proven to be destabilising. It has been a lot to navigate. However, thanks to shifts in movement and an earnest daily practice of attending to bodily felt-senses and noticing the body within each moment of experience, I have an inkling that these new senses will actually aid in managing sensory overwhelm.

The ‘how’ of my coming-to-know

“One must go to that place where there are not words but only feelings” (Gendlin, 1982, p.86).

“Your own sense comes from within you and always feels like an opening, an unconstricting” (Gendlin, 1982, p.98).

”Don’t go inside the problem. Stand back from it and sense how it makes you feel in your body when you think of it as a whole just for a moment” (Gendlin, 1982, p.53).

🤓 Why are there three disembodied quotes this time?
Well, all spoke to me and felt significant in service of my coming to find a felt-sense.

Pip Felts and Gendlin

Figure 9. RTM, Pip Felts, 2022, felted fur.

Day 4, Unit 2
Taking place after class, this inquiry followed a dialogue with Eugene Gendlin’s Focusing (1982).

Gendlin (1982) describes how to find what a felt-sense feels like for those who find it difficult. He invites you to think of a person/moment/place that brings you joy. He asks you to imagine vividly and fully, then feel/see what you feel within your body as you imagine this joy. This is a felt-sense (p.91). Following Gendlin’s invitation, I think of Pip, my joy.

Pip is my best friend and loyal companion. A white German Shepherd, she sports a luxurious coat reminiscent of golden sunshine, which is soft and comforting to the touch. After a pat and cuddle, little bundles of Pip’s soft golden fur are sometimes amassed and, in an attempt to be tidy, I may tuck them into my pocket rather than leaving them loose to float about and form into tumbleweeds across the floor. One day, a happy accident occurred. After removing my laundry from the clothes dryer, I noticed a lump in the pocket of my pants. Inside was an amassed golden fur bundle that I had forgotten to remove. Journeying through the wash and dryer cycle had transformed the pocketed fur bundle into a felted pebble. I loved it instantly and proceeded to intentionally fill my pockets with fur bundles before each wash.

No matter from what perspective I look at the Pip Felts (Figure 9), I feel the same about them. Coming from within, the feeling is a warming joy radiating from my heart, with upward curling mouth corners. Cognitively aware they are made from shed fur, no longer part of the living dog I love, my body feels the affection I hold for Pip upon seeing them. This provided new knowings around social / cultural / personal background / conditioning influences upon the perception of experience. The inclusion of pets as valued family members acted as conditioning (Cameron, 2016, p.224), affording me the ability to attach meaning to and make meaning from Pip’s fur.

Noticing my felt-sense is difficult; it is a new skill I am learning. “Finding ‘felt’ senses: A spoken word expression” (Figure 10) is a creative synthesis of my experience of this.

Figure 10. RTM, Finding ‘felt’ senses: A spoken word expression, 2023, spoken word and animation.

From forming and watching “Finding ‘felt' senses: A spoken word expression” (Figure 10), I learned two things. The first is distortion, and the second is resonance.

Distortion:

The image and sounds become distorted. It becomes hard to hear and watch. This is reflective of my relationship to embodied awareness – hard to hear/sense/connect with bodily knowing. There is a discomfort in the watching that is not entirely resolved by the end. This speaks to where I find myself in relation to embodied awareness and listening to my intuition. Still resolving and becoming yet known and begun.

Resonance:

Making and making and making until it ‘feels right’. I will know when I know because I will feel it in my body.

Consonant or dissonant, resonance is my embodied indicator. This was reflected in my continual search for congruence in the “Finding ‘felt’ senses: A spoken word expression” piece (Figure 6). There is little that is intellectual about resonance; it is pre-cognitive and pre-linguistic. It is a resounding definite ‘yes’ or ‘no’ that emerges before knowing why it is a ‘yes’ or ‘no’.

🤓 Whilst resonance is often the closest I can come to an awareness of a felt-sense for now, my embodied awareness will continue to develop and strengthen with time, practice, and guidance from Gendlin and Pip.

Pip goes further than this in her role as a canine educator on all things embodied awareness. In the last scene of the spoken word expression in Figure 10, the drawing of Pip and the jar comes from a photograph taken during an inquiry into the refining of my companioning self, shown in Figure 11 below.

Figure 11. RTM, Clear embodied vessel, holding gently, 2023, digital photograph.

In this photograph, the jar/vessel represents my body. It is vital that it is clear so the light within remains visible.

The lights represent my authentic self, essence, and innate wisdom.

Pip, well she represents embodiment and a soft held-ness.

Embodiment is essential for me to remember.

Her soft, fluffy, luxurious coat reminds me of my need for gentleness and soothing – for moments of cosy nestling in and deep restorative rest.

🤓 It is about listening to the body because my body is wise.

Figure 12. RTM, Imaginal conversations with canine wisdom, 2023, installation.

 

During imaginal conversations with a particularly charismatic Pip Felt (Figure 12), I am offered the following reminder from my canine educator:

 Don't think so much human

Keep the vessel clear

Privilege the body's wisdom

You've got this

Now play with me, come on let’s go...

What I would like to do with what I am coming-to-know

Figure 13. RTM, Gestation of companion me: Pre, 2022, digital image
Figure 14. RTM, Gestation of companion me: 1, 2022, digital image
Figure 15. RTM, Gestation of companion me: 2, 2022, digital image.

Figure 16. RTM, Gestation of companion me: 3, 2023, mixed media digital image, 1700 × 160mm.

MIECAT is the womb within which companion/therapist and therapeutic arts-based inquirer me are developing. The conception of Figure 13 comes in response to this quote: “My head is getting bigger, but my heart is shrinking” (Pearmain, 2001, p.1).

This developed into Figure 14, with mind and heart connected, as I hope, as an arts-based inquirer engaged in an artistic exploration of phenomena (Lett, 2011), to “walk slowly, gently and intentionally” (de Cosson et al., 2007, p.140), honing the phenomenological dance between “bracketing pre-understandings and exploiting them as a source of insight” (Finlay, 2011, p.74). Figure 15 grew to include the felt-senses, intuitive knowing, and innate wisdom. Figure 16 is where I am coming to be now. 

Figures 13, 14, and 15 show a torso-esque representation. ‘I’ am not in these images. For Figure 16, I used a life-sized outline of my body and included golden buzzing joyful energy threads that represent my essence, bringing myself into the picture. It feels right to do so.

🤓 Before we continue, may I have your attention for one moment? I would like to offer the following for your consideration:

You may notice that I sometimes use ‘we’ instead of ‘I’.

Why?

I do this as a way to foster a withness.

You see, we are in here in dialogue together.

You, the reader, with me, the author.

We are here together in this moment.

 

I do this when companioning in therapeutic spaces when I curiously offer

“what if we try this” or “could we take a closer look at that”.

The feedback has been that it provides a sense of solidarity.

I’m right there beside them, alongside, with.

Words, though sometimes inadequate, can make a difference.

This is something I have come to know.

We can recognise the benefits of bringing ‘bodyfulness’ (Caldwell, 2018, p.40) instead of just ‘mindfulness’ to the therapeutic space. Siegel (2007), in particular, uses word formings that feel descriptively useful, such as “implicit, if not explicit, awareness of multiple perspectives; and orientation to the present” (p.7). We are better able to notice the non-verbal, pre-reflective signals communicated to and received from relational others; the capacity for self-regulation, self-awareness and co-regulation is improved; the ability to be aware of our awareness facilitates acting from awareness rather than from automatic reaction (p.12). By slowing down, being gentle and attending to the felt-senses and your situational position within your surroundings, you are giving experience space to breathe and be the all of what it is (Manning & Massumi, 2014).

By listening to and privileging my embodied awareness, I can bring a greater quality of therapeutic presence, which is described by Geller and Greenberg (2012) as a flow state, a trust in and following of “inner resonances” (p.108). The concept of wu-wei comes to mind here, the art of not forcing, of “always acting in accord with the pattern of things as they exist” (Watts & Watts, 2023, p.135). I think of wu-wei as having attained a level of proficiency where it becomes natural and occurs without conscious effort.

🤓 Without conscious effort?!
I am having thoughts of pre-verbal,
of pre-cognitive,
of innately known.

Reflecting upon myself as companion, I am continually surprised and delighted by the strange invitations of engagement I offer. Unplanned, they are simply emergent curious and creative responses to what is alive and present. They intuitively feel correct in the moment.

🤓 They intuitively feel correct in the moment!
INTUITIVELY FEEL!!

As a therapeutic arts-based inquirer and practitioner, I hope to bring a wu-wei-esque quality of therapeutic presence and embodied awareness, informed through the dance of attention to the implicit and explicit, emergent and reflective, phenomenological and subjective, verbal and non-verbal knowings that come from the interconnection of mind, heart and bodily felt-senses.

We can check in with our implicit knowing by monitoring our own felt-senses. These small, often unnoticed elements of our in-the-moment somatic experience bear significance to inter-relational spaces and the intersubjective field. They can help us be more aware of our contribution to the companion-inquirer relation and intersubjective field. Hopefully, noticing our embodied awareness allows us to bring a greater quality of presence, as we can attend to not only the inquirer and inquiry but also ourselves and the ongoing co-creation of the intersubjective relationship. From a companioning/inquirer/co-inquiring perspective — by being aware of our body’s responses and expressions — we can create a more intentional/beneficial/gentle/kind/safe intersubjective, inter-relational space.

The prickly pear: An embodied inquiry

“… the ability to make meaning (or make sense) derives from bodily interaction with the world” (Weber, 2019, p.313).

The prickly pear inquiry took place during reflection upon what I had come to know over my time immersed in unit 2. It came in response to noticing feelings of resistance experienced in my personal life.

When faced with the unfamiliar and unknown, I sometimes feel like a prickly pear, meaning I am resistant, prickly, and stand-offish. Others may experience this as unfriendliness or even rudeness. It can leave me feeling stuck and rigid in my thoughts.

What if the prickles were seen as receptors reaching out to explore and perceive the surrounding environment instead of a spiky protective barrier?

What if the prickly pear was, in fact, a curious pear?  

Figures 17 and 18 visually represent the inter and intra experience of being a prickly pear. Figures 19 and 20 show the difference felt after shifting to a curious pear.

Figure 17. RTM, The prickly pear, 2022, digital image.

Figure 18. RTM, Inside the prickly pear, 2022, digital image.

Figure 19. RTM, The curious pear, 2022, digital image.

Figure 20. RTM, Inside the curious pear, 2022, digital image.

Words that came from inquiring into the pears:

CURIOUS PEAR

Informative

Curious

Protective

Helpful

Sensory

Cautionary

Advisory

Playful

Prepared

Movement

Tentative

Engagement

PRICKLY PEAR

Stuckness

Resistance

Protective

Rigidity

Inflexibility

Prickly

Difficult

Unfriendly

Danger

Tight

Isolating

The words here prove helpful in bringing what is implicitly felt into the explicit (Stern, 2004). We now see that both prickly and curious pears serve a protective function. The shift in perception of the felt-sense lies in the movement from ‘danger’ to ‘informative’, from ‘isolating’ to ‘engagement’, and from ‘resistance’ to ‘curiosity’.

The act of inquiring through embodied and multi-modal means led to this shift from prickly to curious. The prickly pear was a constricting barrier between self and others, an obstacle to inter-relational participation. The curious pear collects data curiously, providing information to sense how to proceed and engage in safe and manageable ways.

🤓 See, it works! I made meaning through embodied inquiry into a felt-sense and have somewhat managed to make something implicitly known, explicitly knowable and sharable. Further, I was able to shift a long embodied felt-sense of restrictive ‘stuckness’ to a felt-sense of ‘curious engagement’.

A peer recently offered that there exists a relationship between the prickly pear + amount and level of sensory information within a given environment + where I am within my circle of capacity (Malchiodi, 2021). I appreciate this offering, feeling a consonant resonance. Whilst I don’t go on to consider it further here, I sense there is scope for further meaning-making held within both the prickly and curious pears.

Conclusion

This article aims to offer my experience of learning about embodied awareness from a neurodivergent perspective. Developing embodied awareness allows for greater self-awareness and opens one up to more ways of knowing, enabling greater intentionality around what is brought and offered within intersubjective and inter-relational spaces.

Of significance were the limitations of normative verbal expression, the imperative of including the somatic into therapeutic practices, and the power of pre-linguistic knowing and nonverbal, multi-modal forms of expression in making meaning of experience.

A multi-modal, embodied inquiry into a felt-sense proves effective in shifting perception. Further, by attending to embodied responses and multi-modally engaging with non-human others – such as data and literature – insights and understandings otherwise inaccessible can be gained.

Resonances – a strong ‘yes’ or ‘no’ – can serve as an initial awareness of embodied indicators for those finding it challenging to notice felt-sensing, acting as a starting point from which to grow and strengthen embodied awareness.

Educators and therapeutic practitioners must be aware of potential overwhelm and destabilisation in neurodivergent and highly sensitive individuals when engaging in activities focusing on the senses.

Finally, what became important was the ability to share my coming-to-knows with a broader academic and professional audience in a non-normative manner, employing written modalities that feel more accessible to me (knowing that ‘me’ reflects a broader ‘we’). While I acknowledge the usefulness of words in making the implicit explicit, I hope we can move beyond existing ‘word and grammar formatting privilege’ and see a continuing acceptance and inclusivity of other forms of sharing knowledge and research findings within academia.

🤓 Yes, I am aware that my conclusion does not adhere to prescribed grammatical rules. Embrace it anyway.

Endnote

Why RTM? That is not a name, is it? 

I have been coming-to-know that words matter. Incorrect or ill-considered word choice can prove reductive, invalidating, and evoke unintended embodied responses. They can obscure phenomena being observed, as often, once something is named, it may become limited to the lens of the worded label or infused with bias depending on the audience’s understanding or experience of the word. The result is that the phenomena are no longer free to be seen or interpreted in other ways.

In preparing this article for publication, two opportunities for considering the impact of name-labels arose, which felt apt as an aspect of this article considers word privilege. The first was for The MIECAT Institute, and the second was my professional name, RTM. 

The MIECAT Institute (MIECAT)
In the returned first draft, the editor had asked me to include MIECAT in full the first time it appeared. This left me confused, as I believed I had. To my knowledge, MIECAT’s full name was The MIECAT Institute. After imagining possible acronyms for MIECAT and scouring their website and other documentation, I was perplexed and befuddled, so I contacted my MIECAT coordinator.  

“The full name on our business certificate is The MIECAT Institute.
We were formally known as The Melbourne Institute for Experiential and Creative Arts Therapy.** M.I.E.C.A.T was the acronym.

We changed our name to The MIECAT Institute around 2011/12 (and yet people still really want to spell out the MIECAT! 😊 ). I remember the change was because we realised that our form of inquiry was being used for more than therapy (in education, research, arts-making, community).

But let’s see how we might include this. We tend not to name it at all, so people aren’t tempted to use it, but we might need to in this instance and use it as a way to educate/ inform” (A. Woodford, Studio Practice and Professional Doctorate Coordinator at The MIECAT Institute, personal communication, March 19, 2024). 

My first reaction was: Do not let them label you for their own comfort MIECAT, do not be reduced into words!
Then, my second reaction: How do you feel about it MIECAT? If you would like to utilise this opportunity to educate/inform, I happily embrace that.

After some discussion, the decision arrived upon was that MIECAT wishes to remain un-acronymed.

**🤓 Yep, you guessed it! I am not going to scratch any acronym curiosity itch you may hold. I choose to respect MIECAT for how they wish to be known in the present day.

RTM
The other day, a colleague inquired how I would like them to cite me, which led to some pondering. Aware that the name I use now becomes my professional name moving forward, it felt important to consider it. As an artist, I use RTM. I do this because it is non-gendered, allowing my works to be first met without the lens of my gender and any bias that may bring. I want my artworks to be initially known for who they are, independent of my reproductive biology. As an arts-based researcher engaging in autoethnographic-esque me-search, my presence and its relationship to the artwork become known soon enough.

If people can quote Rumi as Rumi, Banksy as Banksy, and Cher as Cher, is there space for RTM to be RTM? 

Acknowledgement

I wish to offer my sincere gratitude to JoCAT and their extraordinary team, as well as to my mentor Eliza Gibbons and the invaluable support and guidance she provided. I feel very thankful for the ANZACATA JoCAT Author Support Bursary scheme – such a fantastic experience and opportunity.

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