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Image: "On Embodiment" Art House Dallas
Body-Mindedness as a Practice towards Personal Coherence
Introduction: Why Body-Mindedness Matters
We live in times of great complexity, fragmentation, and uncertainty. Many people sense the dissonance between what they know intellectually and how they actually live. We aspire to balance, presence, and clarity, yet our daily lives often pull us into cycles of stress, reactivity, and disconnection.
The Body-Mindedness Online-LIVE Learning Journey, developed and hosted by IFIS as part of the Cohere+ Project (EU Erasmus+), explores a deceptively simple yet radical proposition: the body itself is not merely an accessory to thought, but a living compass for coherence, resilience, and wise action. By integrating embodied practices with reflective learning, the program invites participants to realign their sense of self, deepen their agency, and discover fresh pathways of choice.
The Essence of Body-Mindedness
At its heart, body-mindedness challenges the pervasive cultural assumption that body and mind are separate. Neuroscience, somatic psychology, and contemplative traditions all point toward a more integrated reality: our being is a continuous interplay of body, emotion, thought, and environment. Subtle bodily processes often register shifts before our conscious mind notices them.
One participant described it this way:
“Sensing into myself is not a mind-driven process but an immediate check-in with the now, connecting to the evolutionary potential of the now.”
Body-mindedness is thus less about learning something new than about remembering and inhabiting the resources that are always already present within us.
The Three Core Practices
Grounding: Reconnecting with the Inner Compass
Grounding begins with a body scan: noticing posture, weight distribution, breath, and tension without judgment. Though simple, this act of returning to the body creates a reset point—a way of locating oneself in the present.
Participants highlighted that grounding requires regularity:
“Feeling very well grounded doesn’t happen automagically—it’s a result of consistent practice.”
Another realized that the practice starts even before the exercise itself:
“Creating the precondition for practicing is the actual practice. I take ownership of being with myself and organizing my space the way I want—then within that I can do the practice.”
This insight underscores that grounding is as much about designing supportive conditions—quiet time, an uncluttered space, ease of access to recordings—as it is about the practice itself.
Decision-Making: Discovering the “Third Way”
Many life choices present as either/or dilemmas. The body-mindedness approach invites participants to imagine and feel each option fully in their body, then explore the space in between. This “third way” often reveals surprising possibilities the analytical mind alone cannot generate.
Although some found this harder to integrate immediately, the exercise points toward a shift from binary, head-driven choices to embodied discernment. It broadens the field of viable options, increasing freedom and resourcefulness.
Self-Witnessing: Cultivating Perspective and Agency
The final pillar, self-witnessing, helps participants step back and observe themselves from a broader vantage point. It is the move from subject to object: from being caught in an experience to also seeing it.
One participant shared how, in a period of stress, they noticed their body “not complying” with their mental agenda. Instead of pushing through, they paused, reflected, and adjusted—allowing the body’s message to inform their choices.
Self-witnessing thus builds true agency. It enables us to work with our ego rather than be worked by it.
Preconditions: Designing Support for Practice
A striking theme in participants’ feedback is that body-mindedness is not only about the exercises but also about the preconditions that make practice possible.
Practical examples include:
- Not working late on a screen before bedtime.
- Keeping meditation links or recordings easy to access.
- Organizing personal space to invite calm and presence.
As one participant put it:
“Simple elegance in self-support means making practices accessible in under 10 seconds.”
This emphasis on simplicity and accessibility prevents practice from becoming another “should” on the to-do list. It turns embodiment into a lived habit, woven seamlessly into daily life.
This orientation to designing conditions for coherence is also why the Body-Mindedness module was developed within the Cohere+ project: to bridge the gap between online-only and onsite-only formats by creating an online-LIVE format. This format combines accessibility with real-time presence, emphasizing interaction, embodiment, and shared learning.
Valuable perspectives are being added and interwoven by Cohere+ Partner EMERGE and Associate Partner "Design of the Designer"
- Emerge (Cohere+) - citing the key profile of Emily Poel who emphasizes embodiment as a door to presence and possibilities. She shows how sensing into the body is not just for personal well-being but also for decision-making, relational capacity, and social change. Embodiment helps us notice new options and deepen our capacity to be with others in complexity.
- Michael Keller / Design of the Designer brings attention to how we design the conditions in which we practice and live. His work highlights that coherence is not accidental—it depends on how we design our environments, habits, and systems to support embodied presence.
Together, these perspectives affirm that body-mindedness is not just about individual exercises, but about shaping the contexts—inner and outer—that allow coherence to flourish.
Transformations Reported by Participants
Shifts in Daily Life
Participants described moving from autopilot reactions toward proactive responses. Grounding helped them reset their “inner compass,” making daily life feel less driven by external pressures and more aligned with inner rhythm.
A New Relationship with Self
Through consistent practice, participants reported feeling more authentic, resilient, and self-accepting. The body revealed hidden patterns—tightness, anxieties, habits—that once named could be worked with rather than endured.
Growth in Agency
By cultivating self-witnessing, participants gained a stronger sense of authorship in their lives. They were able to see their patterns, pause, and choose differently.
The Broader Ripple Effect
The effects extended beyond individuals to relationships and collective spaces:
- Building resilience: Regular practice recalibrated participants’ neurology, fostering adaptive capacity to meet life’s challenges.
- Navigating energy: Participants learned to balance coarse, task-driven energy with subtle, receptive energy.
- Fostering community: Sharing experiences created a field where “something emerges in the middle that nobody saw coming.”
- Redefining success: Participants shifted from striving for spectacle toward valuing presence, connection, and the “unspectacular” quality of simple being.
Conclusion: An Invitation to Embodied Living
Body-mindedness is more than a seminar or a set of techniques. It is a way of being—a commitment to inhabiting one’s body as a resource for coherence, resilience, and wise action.
It reminds us that coherence is not something we achieve once and for all but something we practice daily, through small acts of attention, grounding, and self-witnessing. And it grows stronger when we design the right preconditions for it.
The invitation is simple:
- Pause. Notice. Ground.
- Make space for what is.
- Allow your body to teach you coherence.
From here, a more resilient, authentic, and connected way of being becomes possible—not only for ourselves, but also for the communities we touch.
References & Inspirations
Friston, K. (2020). Embodied cognition: A general perspective [YouTube video]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HW0JnjgCO3o
Gallagher, S. (2017). Enactivist Interventions: Rethinking the Mind. Oxford University Press.
Ginsburg, S., & Jablonka, E. (2019). Picturing the Mind: Consciousness and Evolution. MIT Press.
HeartMath Institute. (2020). What is Personal Coherence? [Video]. https://www.heartmath.org/resources/videos/personal-coherence/
Keller, M. Ecology of Design in Human Systems (2025)
https://ecologyofdesigninhumansystems.com/knowledge-gateway/design-for-…
Langer, E. (2023). The Mindful Body: Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health. Ballantine Books.
Maull, F. (2020). Neuro-Somatic Mindfulness: Enhancing the Five Neural Networks of Healing and Awakening. Prison Mindfulness Institute.
Poel, E. (2025, August 28). Embodiment as a ‘door to presence and possibilities’. Emerge / Cohere+. https://www.whatisemerging.com/opinions/embodiment-as-a-door-to-presence-and-possibilities
Schmachtenberger, D. (2019). Navigating Reality: It’s All About Perspective [Video]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7ghXdujfLE
Thompson, E. (2014). Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy. Columbia University Press.
UZAZU Embodied Intelligence. (2022). Transformation through the Whole Bodymind. https://www.uzazu.org