Taking Responsibility & Finding Freedom: The Embodied Life with Russell Delman

What does it truly mean to take responsibility—and how does that lead to real freedom?

In this profound and heart-centered conversation, we’re joined by Russell Delman, founder of The Embodied Life, to explore how cultivating presence and taking ownership of our internal state can become the foundation for deep healing, self-acceptance, and spiritual evolution.

Drawing from over 45 years of experience in somatic awareness, Zen meditation, Gestalt therapy, and the Feldenkrais Method, Russell shares how embodiment can reconnect us to wholeness - not as a concept, but as a lived experience. He reflects on the emotional layers of sensation and story, the power of relational presence, and how we can learn to navigate life from a more grounded, aware, and compassionate space.

We discuss:

• Taking responsibility as a gateway to personal freedom
• How embodiment supports healing and spiritual development
• Moshé Feldenkrais’s incredible life story - from Judo to neuroscience
• The cultural roots of self-rejection and how to unlearn them
• How sensation and story shape emotional awareness
• The art of authentic communication in a disconnected world

Russell also opens up about his long-time partnership with his wife Linda, co-developer of The Embodied Life, and their shared journey as teachers, parents, and seekers.

Resources: theembodiedlife.org

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Transcript

Speaker 1 0:00

When we begin to truly get that. No one outside of ourselves creates our experience. Life changes. Everything affects me. Nothing causes how I feel the government, people destroying the environment, my wife when I don't like what she's saying. They don't cause my inner state. They influence it, but I am fundamentally responsible for the state I am creating. That is the beginning of freedom and the beginning of authentic communication.

Speaker 2 1:01

Welcome to the Field Dynamics Podcast. We're here to facilitate inspiring dialogues about the nature of consciousness across disciplines, communities and practitioners, all with a holistic perspective.

Speaker 3 1:09

From energy healing to somatic therapies, from neuroscience to meditation. We believe the most interesting things happen at the boundaries of disciplines.

Speaker 2 1:18

I'm Christabel.

Speaker 3 1:19

And I'm Keith.

Speaker 2 1:20

Thanks for joining us today and enjoy the episode.

Speaker 3 1:31

Hello and welcome to this episode of the Field Dynamics podcast. Today we're joined by Russell Delman. Russell is the co-developer, along with his wife Linda, of the Embodied Life a transformative approach to human potential. The Embodied Life a transformative approach to human potential. The Embodied Life simultaneously explores all levels of human experience physical, mental, emotional, spiritual and relational. At the heart of the approach is the art of being authentically present.

Speaker 3 1:59

Russell's exploration of body-mind perspectives and human potential began while studying psychology at university, sparking a lifelong commitment to awareness. He deepened his understanding through workshops at the Esalen Institute, traveling in the jungles of South America and trainings in Zen, meditation and yoga. He has extensively studied Gestalt therapy under Dr Robert Hall and in the Feldenkrais method with founder Moshe Feldenkrais. His relationship and study with Eugene Gendlin, the founder of the focusing technique, was also of great significance. Russell was one of the first teachers chosen to lead Feldenkrais professional training programs. He has taught in over 50 international programs, helping over 2,500 Feldenkrais teachers. Central to Russell's life are his nearly 50 years of marriage with Linda and their journey as parents to their daughter, liana. Russell, it is a pleasure to have you on the podcast today.

Speaker 1 2:50

Thank you. Thank you, nice to hear where I've been.

Speaker 3 2:55

Well, you are a founder of the Embodied Life approach. What does it mean to be embodied?

Speaker 1 3:03

Great. Our experiences as human beings are located in our physical body, and what I mean by that is I've except in my dream world, but even there my body is there. Every experience I've had in my life maybe a couple of out-of-body experiences that then came back to this physical body have been embodied. So embodiment is simply the fact of human experience, and an often overlooked fact, meaning that most people identify more with their thoughts, with their feelings, with their beliefs, and their body is kind of something that carries them along. And embodiment, from our point of view, is much more central to human identity, human experience. And when we start including not only the physical body but what we like to call the feeling body, how we're carrying our life in physical ways, we get a more, much more inclusive and authentic experience of being alive. So embodiment has that grounding of experience implicit in it.

Speaker 3 4:34

I just wonder then, by default, because you describe that we're often not as identified with our body as we may be with our mind, emotions, et cetera. Is there something keeping us from being in the body and if so, what is that?

Speaker 1 4:50

Yeah.

Speaker 1 4:51

So you know, one of the delights of being for some of us, of being with infants and being with young children, is how congruent they are physically, emotionally, as they're navigating the world right.

Speaker 1 5:06

There's this aliveness and gradually through, I would say, the evolution of our brain and the growing of our capacity to not being present, our capacity which are really great gifts of evolution, if we wanna see it that way the capacity to be planning for the future, going over memories of the past to see what worked or what didn't work, and the past and future begin to take a priority.

Conscious Embodiment & Our Healing Journey

Speaker 1 5:41

In experience, the brain is biased towards self-protection, so anything in the past that can give us a hint about being out of danger, as well as predicting what might happen later, begins to take priority, which was really successful in early mammals and early human life but has gotten at this point in the evolutionary process. As often happens in evolution, something that is a success at one level begins to become an impediment at another. So we've learned to prioritize what is not here unless what's here is dangerous. So it actually takes a conscious intention and, I would say, practice to thwart that tendency of our evolutionary brains and say no, it's really safe enough most of the time to be here and in fact it will make you safer if you're really present and of course, you have enough capacity for planning and remembering. We don't want to throw that out, but we want it in its proper relationship to presence.

Speaker 2 7:10

This is such a cool concept, russell, and the importance of this conscious practice of embodiment and we find it's often overlooked, as you said, particularly in holistic and spiritual practices, and I wonder if we could just extrapolate on this a step further and bring this into how does this conscious practice of embodiment aid our healing journey specifically?

Speaker 1 7:38

Yes, there's a lot in that, christabel, so I want to kind of chunk it down a little bit so we can see an embodiment relationship to spirituality, which was the beginning of what you're saying, and then the embodiment relationship to healing, which, of course, as you know, healing is a code name for being whole. Right, it's the same derivation and, if we want to then mix the images, our spiritual journey and our healing journey are both really about becoming whole, becoming whole in ourselves. But, as I like to emphasize, we can't be whole in ourselves only because we are always in relationship to the world, not only to each other, but to the planet, to the air, to the earth, to every situation we're in, and to be whole has to include our relatedness. So the first thing I want to say about the spiritual and the wholeness is that we can't be whole in ourselves and this throws Western psychology on its head because we've all been taught about the great gift of individuality and we've become worshippers of the individual, and as great a gift as that is for coming out of tribal consciousness, it again becomes an impediment at a certain level of unfolding, of evolution, where our glorification of our separateness, which has led to wonderful things and I don't want to throw that out.

Speaker 1 9:40

What makes us special is our individuality also. What makes us special is our individuality also. But we so overem in our interbeing, our interconnectivity with life. And that's not just some sort of new age concept, it's literal experience, first, sitting right here. We are supported by the earth. That's not a concept, that's not a theory. That is, we could not be having this conversation without gravity binding us to the earth and we would be floating in space, right. So we are already part of the earth. We could not be breathing without the environment, we could not be talking if you didn't invite me and we had this technology to talk through. So everything, if we step back a little bit, everything is interrelationship.

Speaker 1 11:19

And as that grows into our connection to the cosmos, to all of life, then we see that spirituality, wholeness, truly healed, deeply healed not only curing a certain disease, but deeply healed is to return to our wholeness with life.

Speaker 1 11:37

And we are all dealing with how do I value my individuality, bringing my gifts into the world and not overwhelm our essential connectedness to the rest of life? And we're all dancing with that and most traditions leave that out, most unfortunately. In my opinion this sounds kind of judgmental but a lot of somatic traditions encourage, unintentionally, grows a great narcissism. We see that in some of the great I mean I've been in the Zen world for more than 50 years and there are people with really great realizations on the cushion that when they bring that into relationship it can become abusive, it can become not healthy, it's not whole. So I think we're at another level of what's needed in the we could say spiritual world or development world or human world, whatever we want to call it, or development world or human world, whatever we wanna call it of recognizing. How do we balance encouraging the unique gifts of each individual without losing the fact that that is in service to the all, or the rest of it?

Speaker 3 13:25

Speaking of interconnectivity, your work with Embodied Life connects a lot of different modalities or approaches and techniques, wondering if we could just kind of walk through some of those and go over them, because they're all interesting in their own right. For instance, you started with Zen, or you've mentioned Zen already. Could you talk a little about your experience with Zen, in a sense, and how that's contributed to your approach?

A Journey Into Mindfulness and Healing

Speaker 1 13:51

So, first, I'm just so grateful and I feel so lucky that at a young age, through no credit of my own, I was gifted with opportunities. Of course there was some receptivity in here, but it wasn't some sort of oh, I want to study that, you know. It was luck. Luck and some kind of maybe karma or something. I don't know how it works really. But so I was 18. I had my first broken heart of my life. I was a freshman in college and one outcome of feeling a pain that I had never felt in my life was a kind of openness, and that openness led me to realize that I was lost in my head most of the time. It was my first conscious uncovering of the voices that keep going, the interpretive voices that keep one in kind of an internal dialogue, a kind of a functional trance, meaning I didn't bump into a lot of things, I was still functional, I was doing well in classes and interacting as a normal being, but so often missing the moment, and that had never occurred to me. And somehow I was graced with an article on Zen meditation by Shunryu Suzuki, who became my lineage, that I entered and just somehow in his language and something it went right through and I saw, okay. And that day I got on a cushion, no teacher, I just started taking basic instruction and I started sitting every day, lost in thought almost all the time. But something in me knew this was right, that this was somehow going to cure my fundamental disease or something. And so that started. And as I was, I was already interested in psychology. I was that's where the article came from a psychology class from a very hip psychology professor. A psychology class from a very hip psychology professor. And because my mother had had so many challenging mental difficulties, she was also a very intuitive person. But in those days the kinds of treatments were really inhumane and I got to see this. So I thought I wanted to be a psychiatrist. And here I am, meditating, studying psychology. And then again the same hip professor got me interested in the Eslan Institute.

Speaker 1 17:02

So I went out to California this was the early days of Aslan doing gestalt therapy and encounter work and also meditation, yoga, stuff like that, so the full range. And immediately it was clear to me that working with the sitting practice was wonderful. I was a physical guy, I've been an athlete. That oh, yoga, oh, this is connected to what I'm doing on the cushion. And then the gestalt therapy is very much about being in the present moment but now attending to how your feelings are living in you. So immediately. I was 19 years old at Esalen and right there I saw not consciously, but looking back, I saw the roots of the whole, embodied life, teachings, and then it unfolded from there where I was still sitting. I got trained as a yoga teacher when I was like 21.

Speaker 1 18:11

I was living in San Francisco and meditating, teaching some yoga, and Feldenkrais was offering his first training program a couple of years later and I thought, oh, there's something about this that draws me. That draws me. I had heard from a friend at Esalen that he was the kind of the cutting edge of of somatic teachings and so I want to do this. Oh, it costs $5,000 to do this program and get a PhD with him as your advisor from the Humanistic Psychology Institute. So I go oh, wow, how could I do this? And somehow, the way life unfolds, my mother, who had been my inspiration for studying inner work, died and she left me $5,000. So she started me off on the interest in the inner world and then paid for my education with Feldenkrais.

Speaker 1 19:25

And so then I started teaching Feldenkrais, teaching meditation a little bit, and the psychological side. I would be guiding people using my gestalt. I trained in gestalt therapy at the Gestalt Institute of Canada when I was 20 years old also. So I had all this when I was quite young, years old also. So I had all this when I was quite young and it all was immediately for me all about being present and that you can't leave out thinking, you can't leave out feeling, you can't leave out body sensation and you can't leave out what. This took a little longer connection to the world to have a holistic experience. So it was there from the beginning and gradually I was gifted with profound teachers who could help me deepen enough that I had something I could bring to other people. So that's I mean, I kind of answered it in one gulp. You kind of wanted it in more steps, but that's kind of the gulp.

Speaker 2 20:31

That's fantastic, Russell. It's wonderful to hear more of your journey, especially that early start point and the beautiful synchronicity you described there with regards to your mother. I'd like to touch base a little bit more detail on the Feldenkrais method, if that's okay. You've done extensive work with this methodology. Could you share with our listeners initially, who might not be familiar, exactly what the Feldenkrais method is?

The Unconventional Life of Feldenkrais

Speaker 1 20:56

I think we have enough time. I'll give a little history. And so Feldenkrais Feldenkrais method is named after Moshe Feldenkrais. So it's a person and he had one of these extraordinary backgrounds where he was born, in Ukraine. He was Jewish, but not very religious, but both his grandfathers were very famous rabbis, so he knew about Jewish traditions and Kabbalah and all of that and somehow it's very creative I mean his journals. I got to be very close with him. He'd had a stroke in 1982, 81. And I went to Israel and stayed with him and actually gave him Feldenkrais sessions to help him recover. So we got quite close during that time.

Speaker 1 21:51

But back to the beginning. So he was in Ukraine and at 13 years old he left his home, left his parents, because he saw the pogroms where Jews were being killed by the Russian soldiers and said we've got to get out of here. He had some sort of survival instinct that his rest of his family didn't and so he emigrated to Palestine wasn't Israel yet and helped build Tel Aviv. He was a very strong guy, also very smart, and got trained in martial arts, so his bodily skill. He wrote two books on unarmed combat, how to take knives away from people. That he developed through learning from a jujitsu master who was an English colonel, and so he wrote these books. And then he actually, when he went to study in Paris, he was a scientist. He studied physics and engineering was his big thing. And the Japanese were just starting to bring judo to the continent and they couldn't find success. The people weren't relating to it. The Japanese ambassador found Feldenkrais's books on unarmed combat, brought them to Professor Kano, who began modern-day judo, and he got interested and he said, feldenkrais, this move doesn't work for taking a knife away. And so Feldenkrais demonstrated on his Professor Cano's kind of biggest black belt guy, and he said, whoa, this guy knows something. So they trained him in judo and he opened the Paris Judo School while he was studying engineering. And he was now with his wife who was a pediatrician, so he was also interested in child movement. And he ends up on a ship going to England with these secrets that he now is put in with these scientists to develop. How can we fight against Hitler?

Speaker 1 24:27

And he lived with a group of scientists and this is when he started to think about what became the Feldenkrais method. Because he had injured knees, he couldn't walk. Well, they told him he needed surgery and he taught himself to walk with much of the cartilage destroyed in his legs, and so he started teaching the scientists what he was learning. And this is when he developed his first book called Body and Mature Behavior. So he developed a very fascinating way of looking at the human being, he said before neuroplasticity was even a concept. He said our brain is designed for learning. We I taught myself to walk when the basic patterns of my walking had to be relearned and done in a new way. Other people could learn to change their habits and function better.

Speaker 1 25:33

Now he also remember at this time this is the 30s, 40s in Europe psychoanalysis was getting famous and he started to see wait a second. This is not only about healing the physical body. To see, wait a second. This is not only about healing the physical body, but one of his best friends was a scientist who was having marital difficulties and was impotent. And he realized that this guy's walking pattern his pelvis tucked under. He didn't breathe easily. How's he ever going to feel really confident in himself if his tail's tucked under? So he worked on his body with his hands and led him through movements.

Speaker 1 26:17

Those are the two ways Feldenkrais is taught in private sessions, hands-on, but mostly it's known in group sessions called awareness through movement. So he started to use both of those on this guy and, as all great stories go, his marriage became very successful, as he did as well, and Feldenkrais realized that he had a unique vision of what healing could be on psychological levels, on physical levels, that you can't separate them, that people carry their lives in how they breathe, how they stand, how they walk. And if you want to affect pre-verbal learning, don't rely on language only. Language is very important, but go into the patterns that started to be developed pre-cognitively. So he adds this edge, which is I'm so grateful for in the embodied life work that we totally value language, the ability to articulate experience, the importance of language, accurate language for changing human beings and to loosen some of the binds of very old patterns of breathing, of contraction, of self-defense. To loosen some of those patterns so that the language can enter more deeply was essential. So he started to see this and he developed what became the Feldenkrais method, which you know.

Speaker 1 28:05

There are probably more than a thousand movement lessons, usually 45 minutes or so, maybe an hour, mostly slow movements that you're led through by a teacher, and they're called awareness through movement, because the whole idea is to help you be more aware of yourself, not to have a correct posture, but to be aware of how you're carrying yourself. And again, a Feldenkrais practitioner if you're going to them, as many people do, for real difficulties, brain injuries, uh, uh. You know we've trained a lot of physical therapists because they apply our work to their physical therapy. They They'll usually start with you with some hands on work and then lead you into the classwork. That's often a progression.

Speaker 3 28:58

Many people just do the classes as well fascinated by Feldenkrais' method and, like you're saying, there, the story was wonderful. I had no idea about a lot of the nuance there, about how he was in the center of a lot of things changing in the world and at the avant-garde of a lot of things as well in terms of his studies and interests. I've just been really fascinated myself in experiencing Felden Christ sessions. Um, and how I would describe it to people is you know, these very slow movements in general, you know, usually advised to be very slow, as rudimentary as one can imagine. You know, like make it simpler, make it easier, like picking up your arm and putting it down and then picking up your arm and looking at it and putting it down and rotating your pelvis Very slow, very simple.

Speaker 3 29:51

And then this kind of magic happens where, as you become more easeful in these extremely simple and slow movements, it's like what happens is your brain, your nervous system, is able to take on these new patterns very quickly because of how simple they are.

Speaker 3 30:10

So it's this minimalism approach that enables or effectuates neural repatterning extremely quickly and effectively and it connects me, like you were saying about things being so ahead of its time, you know, before neuroplasticity, etc. It even, as you were saying. That reminds me of how trauma healing models now work, with titration, that to engage with something that is overwhelming or very dense within the system, the only way to truly repattern it through the nervous system is to basically bite off a little percentage at a time that you can't do it all at once, otherwise you can't change. And the Feldenkrais approach almost has that as an implicit component is that you have to approach these fundamental patterns in the most easeful, easiest way possible, and only at that level of interaction can change be taken on. I don't know where I was going with any question with that, but more in part to reflect back, you know, as a person who hasn't done any training in Feldenkrais, the experience of it and what seems remarkable to me about it.

Speaker 1 31:21

Yeah, yeah. And I want to put in there the basic, the atmosphere, what I like to call implicit learning, when you're encouraged to go slow, to not push, to listen well, throughout your whole self. These are revolutionary concepts culturally. You know, culturally you want to go faster. No pain, no gain, work harder to get a good result. You know, if you're a good person you're like that and those are not always bad things. You know, sometimes it is good to push, sometimes it is good to go fast, of course, of course, but to give people a experience in their body that is self-reflective. There's no comparison to other people, there's no goal in the lessons themselves. You're not trying to stretch more.

Speaker 1 32:31

I mean, if most of us, even if you're in a wonderful yoga class where people where the teacher's saying you know, don't try so hard, be gentle with yourself, there's almost this implicit a little bit more, I'm doing a little bit better, how are they doing? And so, to completely undermine that frame of consciousness, that comparative, we're working with much more than the body we're working with how people are living, what are the ground rules for their self-image? Is it possible for me to really value just being aware of myself? And if awareness becomes a value, then just being present can become a fulfilling experience that I don't have to be better to enjoy my presence. To enjoy my presence, I don't have to be somehow as good as that person over there to feel good enough to be in this moment. So there's this almost subversive meta-learning, or intrinsic learning that's inviting people to say, oh, maybe as I am is okay, maybe accepting myself doesn't mean resignation. It means from here I can be present and I can be interested in learning what the next is. But it's not because there's a certain deficit in my basic self. And boy, that's a huge gift for people to you know, I don't think you get it one time but that you gradually get the sense that we have been taught not to be satisfied in who we are.

Speaker 1 34:35

Now that's not all bad. It is helpful to have ideals and to be moving forward towards to recognize our deficiencies. Recognize our deficiencies, to recognize where we hold back our love, where we hold back our, where we're self-protective and don't. All those things are wonderful, important, but in our therapeutic culture as well as our capitalist culture, they go together to create a system that says a little bit more, you'll be a little bit better, then you'll be good enough. No, no, just a little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit more. And it's almost like we're living in systems that are teaching dissatisfaction and those are cultural, and they live in the spiritual world as much as much as in the business world. And so to get under that structure, without then saying it's not kind of like some hippie dao that says everything's cool just the way it is, you know, I'm just all's one and I'm just kind of hanging out here, that is rarely a helpful attitude. Also.

Speaker 2 35:56

That's very interesting. Here you share that, russell, and I'm sort of fusing together some of the concepts or the principles you're sharing here this importance of cultivating an ideal environment, creating space in the body and the system for the words to permeate in between, the importance of having our practice in the room, on the mat as it were, and how that actually reflects, or doesn't reflect, in our lived existence. And that brings me full circle to communication, which is a really core piece here we haven't yet touched on, and your work very much emphasizes compassionate communication, and nonviolent communication has been mentioned as a source of inspiration. It's a very potent working method for people, I think to reference if they're not familiar with nonviolent communication. Is it possible that you could share some more on the importance of communication in your work and some practical guidelines for our listeners in terms of integrating that with the other work that you've shared thus far?

Effective Communication and Taking Responsibility

Speaker 1 36:59

Yeah. So how to find words that really speak from what's in here is rare. We usually talk in what I like to call public language, which is necessary for fast communications, but to communicate in a way that has some intimacy or some deeper connectivity, we need to be able to sense what's living in us and find language that feels true, feels real, and so it takes. The first thing that good communication takes, in my opinion, is the ability to pause, the ability to okay as soon as someone says something to me, I'm ready to say something, but if I give it a few seconds, can I go a little bit deeper into not just my reaction to what's being said, but what feels truer, deeper, more authentic in my experience. Because most of us all most of us have a quick reaction to almost everything and, again, some situations. That's just right. But if we want to really connect, the first step is finding the courage to pause, take a breath and sense what's true in one's experience. So that's the first thing I want to say is about pausing. The second thing I want to say is and I will get more practical as we go along, but I have to get these kind of things out there when we begin to truly get that no one outside of ourselves creates our experience, life changes. What I mean is everything affects me. Nothing causes how I feel the government, the people destroying the environment, my wife when I don't like what she's saying. They don't cause my inner state, they influence it. But I am fundamentally responsible for the beginning of authentic communication. Why? Because so much of our communication has some kind of blame in it, some kind of accusation in it, especially when we're in conflict with others and it's so fast to turn the mirror around that they're looking at themselves. We want them to be responsible. So pausing and saying, wait a second, the experience I'm having right now, I'm responsible for it. Experience I'm having right now, I'm responsible for it. I'm not discounting the influence of others, I'm just taking responsibility. Okay, so that eliminates my. I can't authentically blame anybody for anything. I may try, and I may try to get away with it a little bit in my own mind, but really down deep I know that part of my freedom as a human being is taking responsibility for my experience. So that means a lot more owning, in my language, of what I'm experiencing, a lot more.

Speaker 1 41:22

The next thing it points toward is the importance of what we call in Zen, not knowing the importance of uncertainty, the importance of uncertainty. So again, most of us, we crave certainty, we crave being sure of ourselves, being sure of our opinion. You know, we get into a dialogue, especially in a conflictual dialogue, it's like two televisions looking at each other on different channels and nobody's listening to the other. They're just two televisions looking at each other on different channels and nobody's listening to the other. They're just two televisions until somebody is willing to step out of their television and say okay, I'm putting down my protection and I really want to hear what's true for you. Wow, that's a huge moment, whether it's in political discourse or personal conflict or just getting to know somebody, to stop putting on our show and say okay, I really, really, am curious about how it's living in you.

Speaker 1 42:36

That is a healing moment. That is how peace will happen on this planet. If it does, somebody's going to say I need to hear you first. I will put down my armor, I'll put down my weapon, I'll be protected enough in my presence and if you get hostile with me, I'll make sure I can take care of myself. But my intention is to be the first one who's willing to listen. That's the beginning of effective communication.

Speaker 1 43:13

And then how do I speak of my needs, that my willingness to listen is not my martyrdom, of my own perspective. It's saying and this gets really hard saying I'm willing to tolerate the discomfort of everything that's being thrown at me when I don't agree with it and it's based on faulty thinking. And that's not the way it was. It was really like this to be able to go, you've got to be embodied, you've got to be able to breathe, you've got to be grounded, otherwise've got to be able to breathe, you've got to be grounded, otherwise you just want to go. Ah, and sometimes you just have to do that. Ok, but part of our embodied practice is to give us more tolerance, to give us more space in our chest, in our belly, to tolerate what feels like dishonesty or feels like and you're telling me that's the way it was when I know, or I believe it was different. So, okay, so listen, and how do I speak from in here? Right, how do I not just say no, you're wrong okay.

Speaker 1 44:41

Lead with uncertainty, lead with. You know, that's not the way it looks to me. I hear the way it is for you and I might even need to say back what I'm hearing from you is most important is this? What I'm hearing from you is most important, is this, this and this? Did I get that right? Because people really need to be affirmed that they're being heard. And then I'd really like the chance to tell you what's true for me. Are you willing to listen? Wow, that's not easy and you may be cut off right there. You may have to tolerate someone not listening. You know, I've had these great.

Speaker 1 45:24

I travel a lot because I'm teaching overseas a lot and I've had these really incredible plane rides with at least twice people of radically different political views. What I'll say now it's very judgmental, but that's fun sometimes spewing their ideology upon me and just saying back what I'm hearing. And at least one of them had no interest in hearing what I was saying. So that's just the way it is. You know it's practice. It's practice of letting go. The world's not fair. It's not meant to be fair. It's just the way it is right. It's actually very important to let go of the concept that it should be fair, because it's not. So. When I let go of that, it was really freeing because I realized that I had this strong picture that if I'm good to you, you'll be good to me, or you should be good to me, or something like that, and I go. That doesn't work sometimes. So something about listening, which means getting embodied enough, pausing, speaking not from the top reactivity, but from pausing and going inside, feeling what's really true here that really wants to be said, owning my experience, being unwilling to blame the other for what's living in me, for what's living in me those, just those, go a long way to bringing authentic communication and more peace into the world.

Speaker 3 47:28

I appreciate all of those points and your approach with the embodied life, bringing together these different aspects of practice which, without a grounded presence, how do you do communication, Like you're saying? It basically becomes unavailable to throw somebody into just compassionate communication without having self-compassion and presence and grounding. Good luck.

Speaker 1 47:51

Right, right. And there, keith, you can see the interconnectivity of Right and there, keith, you can see the interconnectivity of if you have encouraged, as we do in our embodied life work, to connect those experiences to how you listen to somebody and can you feel your bottom on the seat and still be really present with the other, can you feel your right foot on the ground and really be hearing the other. So we can practice being really embodied and connected and how the Feldenkrais work helps you sense your body, give you more of a home base so that you can have more capacity. More cells are alive for your presencing. So there's presencing in your body, presencing in your connecting to the other, presencing in being able to notice your thought patterns.

Speaker 1 49:12

So, as I said at the beginning, it all began 18 years old with the realization that I'm not here much of the time. I'm lost in my broken heart, in my stories and blah, blah, blah, blah, and that the healing is about coming back to wholeness, coming back to I'm here. It all begins there, but it's not enough to be in myself. It's to be in myself in connection with what's ever in my environment. For and that is meditation, that is good communication, that is becoming more.

Speaker 2 50:04

And more and more a whole human being. I think there was a real aha in what you were sharing there, russell, around this idea of creating more space, more space in the throat, more space in the chest, the belly, to be with these feelings of discomfort as they arise in our communication with others. And I feel we'd be missing something if I didn't ask about inner feeling states and emotions and just to perhaps extend slightly on how our emotional charges tie into these beautiful practices when we're in this maelstrom of stronger, perhaps more negative, identified feeling states or we're encountering others in those states yes.

Speaker 1 50:49

So first is to realize, you know, linguistically it sounds like there are emotions somewhere. Well, every emotion is taking place in your body. Okay, so, immediately, anytime you're having an emotional experience, two things are going on at the same time that are usually not so conscious. One is the story you're telling yourself about the situation and how it's living in your body. We usually focus on I'm just so angry, I'm just so angry, and then they did this. But they did this, they did this.

Speaker 1 51:39

The story about it is almost assumed to be true or something, but the emotion is being sustained in two ways. The emotion, what we call the anxiety, the anger, is being sustained by the story you're telling yourself and how it's being carried in your body. And how it's being carried in your body. So we need to recognize, when we are flying off into this state, that there are two main doorways to go deeper, to drop in, to find out how do I really heal from this level of anger? Okay, well, if I start bringing my attention to the story, I'm telling myself, with what we said before, a little bit of the situation. And that's a big thing if you can get that, if you have that already, then when you're in that emotional state and you're seeing the story. You get to hold it slightly lighter Now, if you can feel how you're revved up inside and how your breathing is going and how you're, or how you're whatever is the embodiment, and maybe even exaggerate it a little bit so you can really feel it. We begin to get to the substrate of what we call the emotion, in other words, how it's physiologically sustained, and then the cognitive element, how it's sustained through thought, and if we can then take a moment. This is where the pausing becomes so important and the self-responsibility. Okay, I am so damn pissed off at that. Okay, what's really going on here? Okay, I'm revved up. Yep, and well, they did this. Okay, I'm telling myself that they just didn't respect me. They said they were going to do this and they didn't do it. Okay, that might be true. It might also be true that their mother died and they couldn't get back to me. I don't really know the truth of the whole situation, but I know that that story is propelling my inner state. Is it a helpful story right now? Well, I still want to make sure that I'm not being taken advantage of. Okay, that makes sense.

Speaker 1 54:21

So then we start some self-talk, as you in embodied life work. What we work with a lot is how awareness can be like a meta-presence for whatever is living in here. So we have this language that sounds a little schizophrenic. Until you learn it is hello in there. I'm with you. What is it? What's going on? What do you need me to know?

Speaker 1 54:55

To ourselves, right To the inner, to our, our heart, to our belly? Oh, wow, there's a lot of churning in there. You're really churning. Oh, you're having that thought that they really don't care about you and that, oh, that must be so hard. Tell, tell me more. And you begin to listen to your inner world. When your inner world feels really heard even though you want to be heard by the other person, if your awareness is present enough to hear at a deeper level what's going on in your body and in your story, your system begins to settle. Now it may take some action. You might need some communications to make some communications to the other person. It's not that it's healed now, it's that your reactivity has gone to a level that you can see what's a helpful step forward in this situation. So emotions are great gifts for telling you what you care about. They're terrible justifications for your decisions and your actions, but they're excellent bright lights to get your attention, to tell you what's not right in your world right now.

Speaker 3 56:26

As tempting as it is. We could talk forever about this practice or your work, because it's so deep and so integrated, and I really do appreciate how the different facets of what you're doing really do account for a truly holistic engagement with the human being, an embodied life, as you call it. As we are coming to a close, just curious if you would please share how people might find your work. Do you have anything upcoming that you want to mention?

Speaker 1 56:55

Well, first I'll say I'm grateful to both of you. It's been delightful and I appreciate your good listening and good questions and it's been fun and engaging. So I just want to say that so we don't leave that out. Yeah, so my website is theembodiedlifeorg, genatcomorg, or you can also go to russelldelmancom. It's the same site but I like to make it a little less. My name dominated, so theembodiedlifeorg, so theembodiedlifeorg, and we teach in Europe four times a year Germany, austria, switzerland, france and I'll be there next week. There's a retreat at a Zen center in Germany, very close to Switzerland. You can go to the website, it's there. Then I'm back in Europe in July. There's a seminar in North Carolina in May and California in June, so there's different things that are available. If you're interested in what we're talking about on the website, there are some videos that are free. There's a lot of writings and you can get on the newsletter, and I usually send out a writing once or twice a month and you can get connected to this way of working.

Speaker 2 58:33

Thank you, russell. We'll make sure to reference both domains in the show notes and it's truly been a real pleasure. To echo Keith's sentiments, it's very empowering to hear a practitioner, a teacher, speak in such a 360 manner around so many different areas and principles, and I hope maybe we can arrange for a part two at some point in the future. That would be delightful. Many thanks.

Speaker 3 59:06

Thanks for listening to the episode. What really supports the podcast is providing a rating and review of the show on your preferred listening platform. This helps us get the message out to a wider audience. If the topics we discussed today appeal to you, do take a moment to subscribe. Lastly, we invite you to check out our website, fielddynamicshealingcom, to learn about our training programs, private session work and to see how we're setting the standard in contemporary energy healing. Many thanks and see you next time.