Prof Sarah Stewart-Brown – The Embodied Present: Tapping into the Wisdom of the Body
Is Your Body Trying to Tell You Something That Western Culture Told You to Forget?
Life’s rewarding emotional and spiritual experiences are registered through the body and depend on interoceptive skills that few of us still have. The ancient spiritual traditions of the East recognised the importance of these skills and included mindful bodywork like yoga and tai chi as components of practice. The veneration of cognitive intelligence over experiential knowledge in Western societies and the spread of religions like Christianity and Islam which discourage embodiment have resulted in a dulling of our capacity to sense the world through our bodies.
As Western culture extends across the globe, humans who still have these capacities are few and far between, residing in indigenous communities in remote or inhospitable parts of the planet: – The San in the Kalahari, the Sang’oi in Malaysia, the Anlo-Ewe in West Africa and occasional aboriginal communities in the Americas.
Loss of the ability to fully experience life leaves us feeling unfulfilled. It diminishes intuitive intelligence and reduces the capacity to take good care of ourselves with the result that we get sick. Embodiment practices which draw on knowledge from ancient spiritual and shamanic traditions enable us to relearn the skill of interception. But to become skilled we need to be convinced that something we can no longer do would be valuable if we could, and to practice, with consistency and patience, practices that make no sense to the cognitive mind.
Most of us have spent a lifetime living from the neck up – thinking, analysing, achieving – while our bodies quietly hold the wisdom we’ve been searching for elsewhere. This talk is an invitation to come home to yourself!
This webinar will be followed by a live Q&A with Prof Sarah Stewart-Brown.
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About the speaker:
Sarah Stewart-Brown is Emeritus Professor of Public Health at the University of Warwick. She is a public health doctor whose career has spanned academic and service practice and now includes consultancy, coaching and wellbeing teaching and training. Her research underpinned her leadership in neglected aspects of public health including public mental health. Early in her career Sarah worked in the UK NHS in paediatrics and in public health giving her practical experience of health care as well as expertise in research and teaching. She has published over 250 peer review journal publications, books, book chapters and reports. She holds a PhD from Bristol University and is a fellow of the Faculty of Public Health and the Royal College of Physicians of London. She has advised English, Scottish and Welsh Governments on public mental health. In 2015 Sarah was awarded the prestigious Wilfred Harding Prize by the Faculty of Public Health in recognition of her contribution to and leadership in public health. Sarah has been curious, about the human potential for wellbeing from early adulthood and has engaged with this agenda from a personal and interpersonal perspective as well as an academic one. She has been a student of the Ridhwan School of Human Development for 15 years, trained to teach a bodywork called Zero Balancing, recently completed Philip Shepherd’s Embodied Present Process training and is now offering his Radical Wholeness workshops in the UK. She now offers coaching, experiential teaching in small groups, consultancy and lectures to support others who want to explore wellbeing in the context of their work, home, health and relationships.
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