YOUR EPISTEMOLOGY/ YOUR EMBODIMENT

Because the word “epistemology” sounds academic, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that epistemology, and specifically your epistemology about anything in particular, is merely intellectual or academic. Yet in reality it is not! Instead, your epistemology determines how you experience life in your body.

Why is that? Because when you think, you think ideas, and your ideas inevitably get located in your body. This ideo-dynamic or ideo-motor aspect of your mind-body system describes how you are a neuro-semantic and neuro-linguistic being. That means that “as you think, so you feel.” As you think, so you activate the motor cortex in your brain which then sends messages to your body. In the end, you embody those ideas and experience them kinesthetically.

Nor is this new. You already know that depending on what you’re thinking, and how you’re thinking, so you will feel and experience. That’s why you can think about all sorts of problems that could happen in the future (otherwise called ‘worrying’) and if you do it long enough and with enough intensity—you can make yourself sick with worry. You can create headaches, migrains, upset stomach, even ulcers. Isn‘t that amazing? You have the ability to embody your worrying thoughts so your body bears the blunt of those thoughts.

The principle that I’m getting at is this: As you think, and the way you know what you know, determine the emotional states and the physiological states you experience. Your epistemology —your embodiment. Your epistemology—your emotions.

Now let’s get personal. What are you embodying? What is deceptive about this process is that it takes time. The feedback from your body regarding the way you’re thinking does not happen immediately although you can speed it up. Add a lot of very intense emotions (fear, anger, sadness, etc.) to an idea and you can more quickly get yourself into a physiological state. Robbins does this in his fire walks. He adds massive desire, passion, and excitement to get people into physiological states where they walk on hot coals.

But normally, it takes weeks, months, even years for your way of thinking to result in psycho- somatic illnesses and diseases. This is what makes the process deceptive and what prevents us from gaining awareness of what we are doing to ourselves via our thoughts. Yet embodiment, as a process, is inevitable. It is what the body does. Your body, and mine, takes thoughts and translates them into a kinesthetic code. What results are our emotions, emotional states, attitudes (disposition of body), and the well-being or the ill-being in terms of our body functions.

Here is something that I think should cause all of us to pause and deeply consider what we are doing to ourselves via our thoughts. Ultimately, the way you think and know (your epistemology) becomes incorporated in your body.

To what extent do you think fearful, apprehensive, dreadful thoughts? To what extent do you think angry and aggressive thoughts during the day? To what extent do you think sad, depressive, and fatalistic thoughts? To what extent do you think in terms of competition, win and lose? To what extent do you think in terms of envy and jealous of others?

Another subtle factor of our thinking that leads to undesirable embodiment is the kind of thinking you do all day. Years ago I did a public demonstration of coaching with a person who had been brought in from the outside, who knew nothing of NLP or Meta-Coaching. I began by asking what he wanted to accomplish which was important to him and he told me what he did not want. I asked, “When you don’t have X, what will you have?” He again told me more of what he did not want. That repeated 4 or 5 times. Ah, a pattern! I asked, “What is your job or career?” It turned out he did quality control on airplanes.

“So all day long the kind of thinking you do is looking for what’s wrong, what you don’t want, what should not be there. Is that right?” “Yes, that’s right.”

“Well, now I know your problem and the solution. ... [long pause during which he began to look increasingly interested] It is your best day-time thinking that is now preventing you from enjoying your life. Your looking for what you don’t want has been so strong, so embodied, that you feel stuck and unable to change it. If you’d like to change that—that would be your solution.”

What does this mean for you and me? It means that the way you think all day (or a good part of the day) can become a thinking habit which prevents you from doing other kinds of thinking. The solution is becoming aware of your thinking habit and then thinking-about-your-thinking chose when it is useful and when it is not. All that requires is just some basic “mind” training.