In This Body

Your Body Is Not An Adversary, It Is Home with Abigail Rose Clarke

• Ailey Jolie

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0:00 | 51:59

What if coming home to your body feels unfamiliar because you were taught to see it as something outside of you?

In this episode, Ailey sits down with somatic educator, author, and artist Abigail Rose Clarke to explore what embodiment actually is beneath the noise. Not a concept to master, but a practice of curiosity, presence, and relationship rooted in lived sensation.

We talk about what pulls us away from ourselves, from objectification to self surveillance, and the cultural belief that the body is something to fix. Abigail offers a powerful reframe: the body is not against you, the body is you.

From there, we expand into ecosomatics, exploring how connection deepens when we remember we are part of a larger living system. Through breath, sensation, and the senses, she offers grounded ways to return to the body.

We also challenge the consumer driven version of wellness and the idea that embodiment is about optimisation. Instead, this conversation invites a more relational and collective approach to being human.

If you are longing to feel more connected to yourself in a real and lasting way, this conversation offers a place to begin.

In this episode:

  • 0:00 Welcome To In This Body
  • 8:20 Returning Home After Disconnection
  • 15:45 Ecosomatics And Earth As Home
  • 24:01 Senses As A Way Back
  • 33:42 Why Embodiment Is Political
  • 37:06 From Self Optimisation To Liberation
  • 40:08 The GROWL Method Explained
  • 45:55 A Daily Grounding Practise

Learn more about Ailey Jolie:

To follow along with the In This Body podcast:

Welcome To In This Body

Ailey Jolie

Welcome to In This Body, a podcast where we dive deep into the power of embodiment. I'm your host, Aile Jolie, a psychotherapist deeply passionate about living life fully from the wisdom within your very own body. The podcast In This Body is a love letter to embodiment, a podcast dedicated to asking important questions like how does connecting to your body change your life? How does connecting to your body enhance your capacity to love more deeply and live more authentically? And how can collective embodiment alter the course of our shared world? Join me for more consciously curated conversations with leading experts. Each episode is intended to support you in reconnecting to your very own body. This podcast will be available for free wherever you get your podcast, making it easy for you to stay connected to In This Body, the podcast with me, Ailey Jolie. Welcome back to In This Body. I'm Ailey Jolie, and today I'm with Abigail Rose Clark, a somatic educator, author, and artist whose work weaves together the rigor of scientific method with the poetry of embodied experience. Abigail is the author of Returning Home to Our Bodies, Reimagining the Relationship Between Our Bodies and the World. She's also the creator of the Somato Tarot, The Body Oracle Deck, and the Growl Method, which she's been teaching internationally since 2014. Her work pushes back against a consumerist pleasure-centric somatics industry, insisting instead that meaningful embodiment practice nurtures our relationship with self, nature, and community too. Today we're exploring what it means to return home to our bodies not as a destination, but as an ongoing practice of presence, curiosity, and relationship with the natural world. I hope you enjoy this episode of How to Be in This Body with me, Aile Jolie. So my first question to open our time together today is I would love to know what being in your body means to you. Oh, that is such a good question.

Abigail Rose Clarke

I think more than anything, it means being in a state of curiosity. And actually, a a friend of mine, Indigenous seed keeper, Rowan White, has coined the term reverent curiosity as a way of just highlighting the state of awe that's included in that. So I think that more than anything, it's that openness, but the curiosity that's not driven from a purely intellectual state, which there's a piece of that there. There's a piece of understanding how the body works and you know the different sort of intricate details of the natural world that the body's a part of, but that it's that it's not intellectual, that it goes under that, right? That there's a a depth of presence under the thinking mind. And that is what it means to be in a body. At least that's my answer today.

Ailey Jolie

I love that little bracket there of today. This is what this means. Because I am familiar with your work, I'm gonna ask maybe a question that leans into a little bit more of your answer. And I would love to hear from you what that process was for you of like, okay, there's thinking in the intellect of embodiment, there's actually something underneath, and maybe how you began to understand that the body is a guide or started to be curious about that special, I would say, like kind of magical ethereal place underneath the thinking line.

Abigail Rose Clarke

I've always had an active imagination, which is just, you know, sort of the a side effect of being an only child living in the growing up in the woods. I was actually reminded recently of as a kid, I, you know, kids have imaginary friends, but my imaginary friends were actually my cells, which sounds almost silly because I grew up to be a somatic educator, but I had this whole little community of I thought of them as like little guys, like not like gendered guys, but just like little, they just were like these little buddies in my in my whole body, and they were kind of in charge of everything. Maybe it was just from watching, like, you know, the magic school bus or something that influenced it. But so that sort of um willingness to be in a place of imagination was there way before I got into the science of it. And then I, you know, I went through adolescence and young, like early young adulthood, and like so many people kind of lost a lot of the, well, especially growing up in in the early, like the late 90s, early 2000s, where there was this real push to control the body, especially women's bodies. And so my body became something very separate and foreign to me that felt adversarial. And it wasn't until I met my primary somatics teacher, Patty Townsend, who is uh herself a primary student of Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen. So that's my somatic lineage. Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen developed Body Mind Centering. Patty Townsend took Body Mind Centering mixed with her decades of yoga practice and created embody yoga, and I've been fortunate enough to study with both of them. Very profoundly embodied women who teach without any rush or hurry and show what they're learning as they're learning it. If anyone here has been fortunate enough to study with either of them, and if you haven't, they actually both teach quite a lot online. Bonnie has moved her practice of teaching online quite extensively after the COVID quarantine. So you can find a lot of online courses from her. Patty teaches uh a lot through the Stub Zack app. And both of those women, when you see them in their bodies and the way that they inhabit their body and the way that they teach through this transmission essentially of deep presence. I don't know if there's a word for it that really lands on it other than magic. As tired as that word tends to get because people tend to use it a lot. There's this magic that happens when you see somebody so richly and fully in themselves. And so, you know, in whatever way that I can carry that lineage forward through the lens that then I teach, that feels like the greatest gift. But finding those two teachers is really what helped me understand that there, and there's an incredible intellectual rigor there. I mean, like, so there's this value on study, but then deprioritizing the mind's understanding and constantly efforting towards a deep presence of feeling rather than just regurgitating facts. I met Patty in my early 20s, so and it was a uh one of those life-changing moments. I'm now in my heading towards mid-40s. So it's been the sort of anchor point of my life has been this work as part of a lineage that's been created by these two women.

Ailey Jolie

The title of your book is Returning Home to Our Bodies. And even the title, it suggests that we've been away. And so I would love to ask you maybe what was your process of returning to the body, or what are some signs that maybe we are disconnected or away from the body?

Abigail Rose Clarke

And I do think that's a really beautiful way of putting it. I do think that I I it was uh a returning home to my own body that that I was just touching on, you know, that that adolescence, early adulthood time of the body as adversary, which it's mirrored through, you know, it was mirror it was certainly offered in uh in abundance at at that time, but it's even now it's part of the discourse that says that the body keeps the score. And not to malign a specific book, but more just to highlight how it's that title of that book has created this sort of worldview that says that the body is an adversary and somehow both judge and jury, and to recognize that instead of body as adversary or body as object that needs to be controlled, that body is home, there is both a uh gentling and a um a ferocity that's needed, like a uh an adamance that's needed, right? Like I have to tend to what I claim as my own, but I also hold it with a softness because it's my home. For me, it was it's it's not even like I can say, oh, it's it's something that I'm I'm done and and and settled with. I'm I'm alive in this world just like everyone else, with the constant barrage of messages telling me to consider my body as an adversary, not even just in the mainstream somatics world, really just in what it means to be alive, especially in a woman's body, in a middle-aged woman's body, all these things, right? Where there's this constant and the objectification that's the result of seeing ourselves so much. Like even right now, I'm looking at, I'm looking at you, I'm looking at me because we're recording. Like we see ourselves on Zoom, we see ourselves in it on social media, we see ourselves constantly as this external object. And body is home is about the feeling of presence from within oneself rather than the feeling of being perceived from outside of oneself. So for me, it's a continual returning. Thankfully, the thing is that you you do it, and just like walking a path through the woods, eventually the path becomes well known and also well seen, right? I know where to go because my footsteps have been there before, but also I know where to go because my body has done those motions before. Finding a way home to myself when I get pulled away, there's a path. I'm grateful that I've walked enough times that I can find myself back to. It honestly comes down to if I'm going to trying to get to the most simplified version of it, it comes down to am I feeling my actual full self, right? Like the width and breadth and depth of me, or am I thinking about myself from this sort of externalized um idea? And that's not to say that we don't think about ourselves from an externalized idea, right? To have a career, do what needs to get done during a day, to just like, you know, be a person in the world. I gotta think about myself. I have to understand who this person that people think of as Abigail Rose Clark is. I had to think about who this person is. But is that anchored into self, like the self of real deep presence is how I can check myself, right? If I've just been scrolling for too long, or if my self-talk has turned really negative, or if I just realized that I haven't actually felt like the deep low bottom parts of myself rather than just this sort of externalized superficial layers.

Ailey Jolie

I feel like you've answered some of this question, but I'm going to ask it anyway, just for the listener who maybe has read things like the body keeps the score or when the body says no. And again, I definitely have parts of me that are grateful to both of those white heterosexual men who have made somatics more mainstream. And then I have other parts of me that are like, oh my goodness, here it's happening again, and this is missing a lot, and a lot of traditional wisdom and intersectional feminist work is being co-opted. I would love to hear from you what you feel like or what you perceive that variant of somatics that has gone mainstream might be missing and why sometimes it may not be the most accessible or understandable or relatable for people who feel disconnected from their body.

Ecosomatics And Earth As Home

Abigail Rose Clarke

It's one of those things where you have to tread carefully, right? Because we do want to be grateful for people who have brought this work to the mainstream. And I don't want to, um, it's so easy to say what's wrong and to criticize, right? A thing that I think that lends mistakes is that fundamental idea of body as separate and body as adversary. You know, if a phrase that got pulled from my own book is that the body is always on our side, which I feel like, you know, offers an important counterpoint. It's not that the body keeps the score, the body's actually on our side. Beyond that, and even more importantly than that, the body is us. So it's not something separate from us that then is dictating from this externalized place, friend or foe. And I it sounds so basic and almost like the reason that I wouldn't lead with that saying with that phrase and leave it there, like the body is us, is that it's kind of like, well, yeah, obviously, like I'm me. But what does it really mean to live in the body as home and as ecosystem, as self, not object but presence? And I think that it it requires a lot of slowing down, which isn't appealing to mainstream world, but also can be difficult in the stage of trauma where it things are hard to, you know, it's hard to want to feel. How do you feel that the body is home when home was a place of danger? How do you feel like the body is home when you have, you know, at least this lifetime, if not, if not epigenetically, generations of lifetimes telling you that it's not safe to be here, right? And I think that's where recognizing that it's not just body is home, but whole earth as home. And that includes just even this chair that's underneath me as an extension of the earth that I can trust and release into as home, so that wherever I am and whatever state I'm in, there is always some sort of homecoming available to me, even when there's um, even when there's real, real reasons that the body doesn't feel safe, right? I don't want to make it sound like, oh, if you're doing this right, you're gonna always feel okay. And if you don't feel okay, you're locked out of this frame of thinking and being in the body, because that that erases huge aspects of my own history and also sets this really high level to entry that I don't want. Instead, body as home and body as um as ally, never adversary, is saying we can rest here in whatever place you need to be as you return to yourself. You don't have to suddenly understand everything and get there immediately. You can rest into it.

Ailey Jolie

I would love to hear a little bit from you because I do feel like it's point of view that sometimes gets missed out around somatics, even though it's so deeply the foundation of how I understand somatics or how I even came to the realm of somatics is this place of the body being an ecosystem or us being a part of an ecosystem. So I would love to hear a little bit from you around I'm calling it ecosomatics, but you might have different language for it. What shaped you, what led you there, how you understand it even? Because I know that it's it's not something that's often spoke about in somatic discourse. Ecosomatics is a great way to describe it.

Abigail Rose Clarke

I think that I think actually it speaks to probably a large part of that feeling of being separate and not comfortable within my own body, but the natural world growing, you know, I was an only child growing up in the woods, like I said. So the natural world was a place of connection for me. You know, that's where I could go and play in the stream or look at old trees and moss. And so there's this long-standing place of connection that the natural world offers. And so it has always made sense to me that it's not so much that I have to feel my own body exclusively, because that's not always possible. It's that the the body is in a relationship with the natural world always. And so yeah, I think that it's a, I don't want to say it, it's a wider door to get through than this idea that if you want to heal, if you want to heal, because isn't that what we're all like somehow trying to do? Which on on another level, I sort of feel like that's its own mistake, this idea that we're trying to heal, especially because healing is seen as some sort of finite arrival destination. And instead, it's a um, if we're considering that being embodied is a being in a place of curiosity, and if and even more than that, a place of awe-filled curiosity, like awesome curiosity, then it's not so much about healing, it's about being present to what is as it's happening. That door is wider when I remember that it doesn't have to just be about like, okay, what am I feeling? Because again, that can kind of shrink our attention down into ourselves, and it turns into this kind of navel gazing where it's just like me and my problems, and oh, I just shouldn't be like this. Like I should just be different, right? If I was only like this, then these then everything would be easier. And if my nervous system was just regulated, which is another rant I'm willing to go on. Instead, you know, some of my most embodied states have been lying belly down in the grass watching the micro world get big as my attention changes form to meet it, right? And then suddenly it's like, oh, I'm here breathing on this living planet, just like everything else is breathing on this living planet. And that to me has been some of the most exquisite embodied moments of my life. And I can then through deep intellectual study about the physiology of the body, through the practices that Bonnie and Patty have given me over years and years, I can feel that happening in the mitochondria, in the understanding of the way that the brain formed and the embryological development. There's this sort of ability to move back and forth across time and feel what is there to be felt, but it's mirrored out there, right? It's mirrored in the natural world and the billowing of clouds and the unfurling of leaves. So the door to our own embodied presence widens when I'm no longer thinking of it as just my body, my presence, my healing, my work.

Ailey Jolie

I would love to hear from you around some steps in that process that maybe you have that you feel like are really important. I know for myself, there were a few things that opened that up. One was spending a significant amount of time on silent retreat and then going into COVID. And another one was just being sick and being like, oh, okay. In the environmental world around me, a bug there just doing its buggy thing bit me. And oh my goodness, this is how connected we are here the next, you know, X number of years of my life dealing with this thing. But I know that this link between looking inwards and seeing that connectivity and feeling that we are like a body in a larger body and that is our home can be quite hard and quite challenging. So I would love to hear from you just a little bit, maybe for the listener who's curious about this and wants to extend outward or knows that there's something out there, but doesn't really know how to get there just yet. Yeah, that is the thing, right?

Abigail Rose Clarke

It's like we are so obviously interconnected. If any, if the if COVID gave us anything, and it did give us quite a lot, for good and for bad, it gave us a real clear understanding that we're very interconnected. You know, the world breathes together. And I think that is a step, right? So to recognize that when you when we're breathing in, there is a dance of relationship between myself and the space that I'm in, you know, my most localized space right now. So, you know, I lit some incense before we got started. I can smell that on the air. I'm very clearly engaging for better or worse. There's plenty of, you know, natural people who say that you shouldn't burn incense because it's not a, you know, it's a substance that you're not taking in. But it's an example of engaging with the outside world and taking it into myself. I have houseplants all around me. They are also in that dance with me. I breathe in what they are offering through their own photosynthesis that extends out into the world I see outside my my window. I it doesn't take a lot since I know, you know, I, you know, all you had to do is go to like high school biology and you know that, or even younger, you know, that leaves make sunlight or leaves take sunlight and make it into oxygen, right? So I know that that's true. So can I let that sift down from just the intellectual into an embodied awareness that I am in a relationship with the plants around me? And then if I want to really expand my understanding out, well, I know that oxygen molecules can last for I think it's mil, I think it was five million years, is what I when I was last looking it up. On the level of kind of big numbers, oxygen molecules can last for a long time. So I could be breathing in like prehistoric oxygen. I don't know. That lets me expand out of just this one singular day in this one singular room, in this one singular area, and feel how I'm breathing in a relationship with ancient plants, ancient animals, ancient time. And I exhale then and offer my breath out into a new relationship with future plants, future animals, future time. So now if my mind needs something to think about, because minds think, well, at least it can think about that, that I'm in a relationship with both ancient past and unknowable future just through breathing. I don't have to then try and lean on the honestly to me feels a little bit bored and tired of just being like, okay, I'm breathing in, I'm breathing out. I mean, obviously it's like it's a beautiful practice if you have enough expert, if you have practiced it enough. But if you're just getting started, that's like I think of like, you know, trying to teach my my nine year old goddaughter about it, and she's just like, yeah, boring. Like, what? You know, in, out, okay, whatever. But if it's like, look, there's this dance of experience that we're engaging in with this inhale and this exhale and As the mind settles back into the body, you can feel more and more of it. You can feel how not only the lungs are filling with breath, but there's this pulsing that happens through all of the trillions of cells in your body, how your skin is always breathing, how there's this gliding, sliding expansion on the inhale, and then this condensing, sort of returning, like you know, this homing, returning process on the exhale. Then my mind gets to be engaged with that, but it's because it's been invited into a bigger story than just I'm breathing in, I'm breathing out, I'm breathing in, I'm breathing out. That's that's one step I can offer.

Ailey Jolie

And even in that step, there's again a little bit of, I'll use this word, but I don't feel like it's the best, the best one. There's a little bit of an oxymoron in that. Like the more in I experience, the more out I have to go. And that piece, I personally, I find the synergy of that and the mirroring of that so beautiful. And one of the reasons why somatics to me feels so rich, because there is this, this weaving. And you mention sense there in your incense in the room. So I would love to hear from you and just a little speak a little bit about how our senses can actually bring us home.

Abigail Rose Clarke

I mean, there is that sort of well-known sense ladder, right? Where it's like if you're finding yourself really outside of yourself, you can look around and name five things that you see, and what is it, five things you see, and four things you can touch, and three things you can hear, and two things you can smell and one thing you can taste. Does that sound right? Maybe I got some of them confused, but it's like a classic one. So that's one way that you can engage your senses to bring you back to where you are and not outside of yourself and in, you know, in the in the doom scrolling world or in the, you know, just like those places where our minds can go. But also in in turning towards the senses, like really turning towards it. So let's look at eyes, for example. Obviously, not everyone has the sense of sight, but um, even if you don't have the sense of sight, even if you're not sighted, recognizing that the eyes have a muscular component to them, therefore can relax. If you want to do this with me, if you warm up your hands, if like me, you're one of your senses is that it's cold because it's the middle of winter or it's getting to be winter, you're in New England. You warm up your hands and then cut them over your eyes to give some heat to the actual muscles of your eyes to guide those muscles back, to guide the actual organ of the eye back into the cave of the eye socket. Still letting them stay back if you want to open and look at the space around you from a place of receiving and receding. So the eyes are back in the skull, receiving what is there light, tone, shape, color. You can switch it if you want. You know, it's I think it's very helpful when learning these things to specifically lose it and try and look past your ease of vision, right? Like try and like squint, see far away, and then keep that sort of hardness in the eyes as you look around your room or look with a critical gaze. I'm in my office, which could really use uh end of the year deep clean. So it's very easy for me to see that pile, that dust bunny, these things, the windows could really use a deep scrubbing, like all these things. It's very easy to get critical. No, no, no, everything that's wrong, right? To go back to that soft place, you know, this is where cupping the hands can be a nice sort of reminder of how to get there, but to let the eyes settle and instead of taking in a list, just simply receiving what's there to be seen. So the light shining through the leaves of my houseplant, the glimmer of light off of the surface of my desk, all of these are observations I can make with a soft gaze. And that's just one example of how the senses have these layers of opening that we can go into if we slow down and really explore. Another one could be touch, right? So I could just touch my hand, right? Or I could just touch my sweater, and it's like, okay, yeah, there's sweater, there's skin, there's sweater, there's skin. And sometimes that's what I need to do. If I've really kind of lost myself, it can be helpful to just even squeeze and be like, right, here's the container of my own body. Here I am. But if I slow down and let the touch of my hand meet the touch of my own arm and feel the pressure and the heat, and then feel down through layers of that to then feel how I'm touching not just skin, I'm touching fat, I'm touching nerve, I'm touching muscle, I'm touching bone. That depth of presence gives me a richer understanding of touch that I can meet when I touch my hands to the desk or my hands to the chair. If I slow down to explore how a sense is really a relationship, then the relationship opens, right?

Ailey Jolie

There's more to be felt. I love how you described a sense as a relationship. I think that's a really beautiful framing. One thing that I have noticed, and it's even really present in the practices that you just offered, is there is they're not centered around pleasure per se, or consuming or product, or any of those things. And I would love to just hear a little bit from you, because it's one thing that I've noticed in your work, is that you kind of push back against pleasure-based somatic industry or consumerist-based somatic industry. And just to hear from you why you do that, why you think it's important, um, how we can even notice that when it's popping up, because sometimes it can be quite subtle or sneaky.

Abigail Rose Clarke

There's nothing, I have nothing against pleasure. I think, and I do think that at the core of it, embodiment in the way that I'm describing is deeply pleasurable. There's a a depth of pleasure in feeling what is actually there and feeling through the layers of what is actually there. I also think that we that I, well, I don't just think, I know that I want to hold the delicacy of offering somatics into a world that has become, you know, increasingly focused on what we call somatics from a consumerist place and that we live in an ableist culture. So there's this idea that if you're not feeling good, not just an ableist culture, but a moralistic ableist culture. So not only uh do we prioritize uh access to specific bodies, but also there's this sort of undercurrent of, well, if you're a good person, you won't get sick or you won't stay sick. Or if you are sick, you have this very specific role as the good sick person to perform, right? So a lot of the conversation around the pleasure seems to orient itself towards those those views on what it means to be in a good body, which means that the body feels good all the time and it doesn't, right? The body doesn't feel good all the time. I feel very fortunate to have been able to have worked with people who have long-term chronic, it's not going away, pain, and see how the work I offer does in fact offer them avenues towards what I would call pleasure, but it's not in the ways that we're kind of cued towards thinking of it. I also I also stay away from the word pleasure because as a woman teaching this stuff, I'm just aware that it's very easy for it to get sexualized, like really soon. And for better or worse, if I start talking about pleasure, use the word three times, it's like Beetlejuice, except that it's actually just somebody assuming that you're making some sort of erotic comment. It's like, okay, this is what you're talking about. And it's not, right? Sexual pleasure is amazing, it's wonderful, and it's not the only way that the body has to feel pleasure, and not all pleasure is sexual. Can't I think that it does come down a bit with semantics because it's like, well, but what is it? And I think it's actually presence and the depth of presence in the space, not just in the actual structure of the body, but like you were saying, you go out, you go in, like you go out far enough, you find out that we're just it's all space. You go in far enough, you find out that it's all space. And in that space, there's this thrumming life force that is incredibly exquisite to be in the presence of, to feel that is pleasurable at a layer that transcends, you know, the pleasure of rubbing on your favorite lotion, getting a massage, getting in a hot bath, all of which are great. But also, I think we have to just push back against the ways that things get commodified. And when I started teaching somatics, nobody knew what it was. It wasn't a buzzword, right? I started teaching somatics back when yoga was the buzzword. And then I watched how somatics sort of replaced that, right? Um, but now the we can call the like if we just lump somatics, yoga, to sort of like the sort of embodiment and wellness industry, I think it's at the it's in the trillions of dollars, it's valued in the trillions of dollars worldwide, which isn't like astronomical number, right? It's like it's hard to even fully comprehend how much a trillion like trillions of dollars really are. And so if what we're talking about is in an industry that is in the trillions of dollars, obviously capitalism and consumerism has influenced it. It's created commodities where maybe commodities don't need to be. Pleasure is everyone wants to feel good, but then everyone's being told that if they buy this thing, that's when they'll feel good. So I just want to offer alternatives, especially for my own self. I don't want to feel like I have to catch myself and be like, oh, maybe I'll feel better if I have this thing, right? And it's true that some things do make you feel good. Like a better mattress does make your body ache less, right? So I don't want to imply that we don't have real material needs. And underneath any of that stuff is the presence of a living body, and that's where I want my attention to go more so than the stuff that accentuates how much I'm able to feel that, if that makes sense.

Ailey Jolie

It does. I really loved how you framed that and broke down the commercialization of somatics. It's something that is just going to continue to happen and happen. It's why I created this podcast because, like, actually, all of those things that they may give some feeling in the body, but they're not the only thing, and you don't need to buy something to have that. And there's also lots of other feelings that you could not really ever get through purchasing something that are super important feelings to have an experience in a body, which brings me to another piece of your work. I know that I think something that we share is viewing embodiment as pretty inherently political. And I would love to just spend a little bit of time speaking to you about your understanding of that, how that changes how you show up in your work and your understanding of embodiment in general.

Abigail Rose Clarke

Embodiment transcends politics because it transcends the intellectual and the repercussions of an of politics are not just intellectual. They have real physical and physiological effect. Things like here in the United States, even adjusting for socioeconomic status, the risk factors for heart disease amongst the black population is higher because of the stress of living in a racialized society, living in a racialized society and also racialized healthcare, right? And that's just one example, right? I don't want to get too in the weeds, but it's like it's one example of out of many that there are real um effects of living within racialized structures, even though race itself is an imaginary concept. It's something that has been thought of and then created, right? But the effects are real, but not just race. That's not the only aspect of uh politicized embodiment. There's also, like I mentioned, socioeconomic status, having time to devote to something like this does imply having some time, right? Which means that you have your bills paid or, you know, or at least paid enough. As long as social safety nets are being stripped. And I'm speaking from the United States where they're getting like shredded, but it's not exclusive to the United States, right? It's like even though our healthcare system is in true shambles, it's not, it's not like you know, people in other countries that have universal health care. It's like you still get better healthcare if you have more money, right? So as long as money, which is politicized, influences how you can inhabit your own body, then embodiment is political. To not acknowledge that just gives it more power. It sort of makes this assumption, and it means honestly, the rooms that I see where it's not being talked about tend to be exclusively white upper middle class because everyone just kind of agrees to not talk about it. As a white upper middle class person, I still want to carefully acknowledge the places where my privilege comes in and also actively work towards not allowing those privileges to put up a barrier against making communities that transcend these class systems, right?

From Self Optimisation To Liberation

Ailey Jolie

I love how you broke it down because I know just even the phrasing can be a little like, ooh, for some people. They're like, oh, I like came for embodiment or being in my body or somatics, and now it's political and like what does that mean? So I love how you kind of broke it down into these ways that made it accessible and engageable or engaging for people. And I would love to just spend a little bit of time just on the same thread a little bit, around how somatic practice or being in the body can also be a pathway for collective liberation instead of just individual optimization. And I think this is where the political piece is actually for me really exciting and interesting because it does open up possibilities.

The GROWL Method Explained

Abigail Rose Clarke

Yeah. Cause what are we doing if we're only just trying to focus on our own individual optimization, right? That's a scary direction for somatics to go in. And it's a direction that somatics can easily go in and has a history of going in. Those who doubt me, you know, look up the ways that Nazism actually created some of the fundamentals that that somatics is currently working within, especially in mainstream, where it's all about optimizing the body and regulating your nervous system and cleansing and purifying and strengthening and toning, etc. etc. etc. Right. Instead of that, if I am in my body in a way that is prioritizing my own individual self, well then I'm moving in that direction, like I was just describing. But if I'm in my body in a way that accentuates how relationships are elemental, there's no way that I can exist without relationships. I'm a multicellular organism living in deep, intimate relationship with the place that holds me, with the world as a whole, and with the people that includes the people that I'm a part of. And so am I willing and able to do the sometimes strenuous effort of being in community, right? And also the discerning effort of being in community, figuring out, okay, how close is the right distance? How can I show up for my friends when they need me? How can I figure out what those like if those needs are are uh appropriate or are not? How can I step outside the zone of my own individualized comfort, you know, sitting on my couch and scrolling on my phone to then do the, you know, sort of tricky work of being a person in relationships. And also, I am a better person in all of my relationships, whatever closeness they have moved towards or distance they have had to move towards, right? Because relationships change and they cycle. And I'm not trying to say that we have to be in deep, intimate relationship with everyone that we know. Sometimes we need to say, okay, I love you at a distance. Uh, but no matter what the distance is between myself and another, I am a better person in that relationship if I am present in my own self as I'm making that choice to the level that I can be. I'm not perfect and I'm always going to be making mistakes. But finding that inner sense of presence lets me meet my relationships with more presence, right? It lets me move through conflict with more presence, it lets me move through disappointment with more presence, it lets me meet the ones I love with more joy. All of that happens because I'm more in myself. So it's not that I go into myself to just work on myself, it's that I go into myself so that I can be more of a part of the whole I am.

Ailey Jolie

Because I'm familiar with some of your work, or I would love for you to introduce to the listener the growl framework that you've created, because I know that it touches on some of the things that you've just named around navigating conflict or living in a body with conflict. Could you explore some of that for the listener who's new? Yeah.

A Daily Grounding Practise

Abigail Rose Clarke

So growl is an acronym. I think maybe because I was a kid of like the, you know, the Dare or the Stop, Drop and Roll like era, where it's like we know we got taught in acronyms. They're useful, they help you remember stuff. So Growl is an acronym for ground G, relate, R, observe, O, widen W. So at first it was just going to be grow, and I thought that was enough. Working on returning home to our bodies, that's where that growl framework actually arose from. When I first started working on the manuscript, I thought maybe it would be a collection of essays on the body. Eventually I started to realize oh, there's something here that actually wants to be. I it was like looking into a pool and seeing down to the bottom. I could see that there was something there. And as I explored it more fully, I realized that all of that is really it's about love and not just the romantic love, but love is the like cosmic force that weaves everything together. And I like how then when you add L and it becomes growl, there's a little bit of ferocity there that this isn't passive, that we actually do have to dig our claws in and have some, like be adamant about this. So, but the the order actually, it's not just to be cute. It wasn't just to, you know, sort of make it into make make it fit the word. The order matters. First comes ground and being in an actual relationship with the ground, which means with gravity itself. So gravity is not just a force that pulls us down, gravity anchors us down to the to the earth. The earth says, You're mine, you belong to me, you're not leaving, right? And then in equal measure, as the earth pulls us down, gravity then also pushes back up through us because otherwise we'd be flat like pancakes. There's this force that comes from the earth as we're pulled down and pushed up in equal measure. If I can do nothing else, if I'm caught in my grief, my anger, my loneliness, or just distracted, if I can do nothing else to be in that relationship of gravity and ground as verb and noun, that's the gateway. So that comes first. Once I'm there, in that place of deep release into gravity like that, then I have already started to understand at a at a level that is under the intellect, right? Because that's what embodiment is. It goes under the level of the mind. I'm understanding that I'm in a relationship. I'm in a relationship with the earth that is pushing up through me. And now I can explore some of those other relationships I was talking about, like with the breath, or just feeling how I am surrounded by a myriad of relationships, both plant, animal, human, more than human, etc. Then from there to go to observation, which is the mind, right? And I remember when I was working on Growl, somebody was like, oh, it should be observe and then relate. And I was like, Yeah, that's how a lot of people tend to try and do it, right? This idea that we can see it and then we relate to it. But I actually want to push back against that and say that we're actually we're never able to escape our relationships. We're always in relationships, even if it's just the relationships between my multicellular, you know, bacteria and like prokaryotic, eukaryotic cells are in relationships. So I'm always in relationships. So can I remember that and prioritize that as I then go into the observational place of noticing patterns and noticing my own my own uh you know responsibilities to those patterns. Widen comes next because all of that is good, but if I'm not widening it out essentially into this like more politicized and understanding how everything interacts uh with itself and with each other, then and also understanding the whole the community that I am a part of. If I'm if I'm not widening out, then I'm just I'm at risk of just navel gazing myself into this narrow existence of just always looking at me and my problems, right? Ground, relate, observe, widen. To me, that is the formula for what it means to be in love with everything. And and I say that not to paint like some sort of Disney persona on it because I'm not a Disney princess. I don't have, you know, like I don't walk out and just be like greet everyone with just like, oh yes, we're all best friends, right? I I keep my distance from a lot of people, and I'm I'm an introverted person and I, you know, I I'm a writer. I'd sit in my own space writing more often than not. Love doesn't mean close up next to all the time. Love means that there is this recognition of a force that moves through all of us all the time. And my heart loves my intestines, or at least in that framework that I'm describing, there's a there's a cosmic force that moves through both my heart and my intestines, but they are not next to each other. They are not getting cozy. They're also not adversaries. So can And I use that as a reminder that I can have distance with who I need to have distance with and things I have to have distance from. But there doesn't have to be an adversarial nature to that. And when I do what whatever intimacy level I am choosing or I'm being chosen with, to remember that framework of the grow that comes before the growl and then the ferocity required to do it, to actually live it, that it's not just some pretty little thing that we decide and then let go of that this is a daily practice.

Ailey Jolie

My last question for you are if you have any suggestions to the listeners for daily practices for them to connect to their body, if this is all relatively new to them, or this specifically even this frame of somatics is new, if you have something that you would like to leave them with.

Abigail Rose Clarke

Anything that felt appealing is a great place to go. Anything that I shared that felt appealing, you can take that and let that be its own seed of possibility for you as you create a practice for yourself. But if there's one daily practice that I might offer, it is that practice of recognizing where are you in your own body and what is underneath you. Remembering that that is an extension of the actual earth. Even if you're on like the 40th floor of a building, it's still this extension of the earth's forces going up through the architecture of the building so that where you are sitting right now or standing or or uh lying down, there is the earth's force there holding you. And you can drop into that. You can trust that force of the earth to hold you, which means you can let go. And in letting go, you will be met in an equal and opposite measure. The more you release your weight into the earth, the more the earth's force will rise up to then meet you. And you can use that as an opening point, as a portal into exploring all of the many different layers and subtleties of anything you want to explore. But that is the yielding to that fundamental relationship of body and earth is where I feel it opens from. So even if it's just, you know, wherever you're sitting right now, can you feel what you're sitting on and let it hold you? And if you find yourself, you know, outside of yourself throughout the day to check back into what's underneath you and can you feel it actually receive your own body's weight?

Ailey Jolie

Thank you for that. And also thank you for all your time. I know we'll have all of your information in the show notes so people can find you on social media, but also so that they can find your books. Is there anything you have upcompany that you want the listener to know about?

Abigail Rose Clarke

Gosh, upcoming. Well, so returning home to our bodies came out in 2024, but I'm very excited that we created I created a deck called the Body Oracle deck, which will come out with the same publisher in summer of 2026, so August of 2026. So, and that'll be available worldwide everywhere books are sold. It's illustrated by the same amazing artist that did the cover art for Returning Home to Our Bodies, Amy Salomon. I'm really excited about it because it's uh takes the ideas that I'm sharing in the book and then it makes it into some sort of like infinite story potential. Just pull a card and combine the cards and see what happens. Oh, I love it. I'm very excited.

Ailey Jolie

Again, thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much. And that image is something Abigail shared during our time together today. It's the image of Abigail belly down in the grass, watching the micro world get big, breathing on this living planet, just like everything else is breathing too. That's embodiment to her. Not a technique, not a thing to master, just presence meeting presence. And I know that this image stood out to me because during my experience of silent meditation retreat, I know after a really long time meditating and being in silence on the last day I had a really similar experience where I laid belly down and looked at the blades of grass, found the blades of grass that had already been removed from the earth's soil. And I laid there and I just braided them together. Allowed my consciousness to expand, my creativity to move, allowed my consciousness to expand, my creativity to express, and my body to be fully held by the body of the earth too. Having similar experiences to Abigail is probably why when she said the body is always on our side, I felt something move in my chest. I really love that she said that the body doesn't keep score, that's not holding things against us, but that it's really on our side because it is. And I notice how differently that lands, the story we've inherited, that the body is the problem, the project, the thing that needs to be fixed. And I notice how differently that lands in me. Which is why I'll ask you to maybe notice how it lands differently in you. What if the body isn't something we need to fix? What if it's not a problem? What if it's not keeping score at all? What if it's the one and only place we'll ever actually truly get to call home? Before I leave you today, I want to pull one more thing out of our time with Abigail. And it's a practice that she offered us. And I want to offer it to you right now and right here for you to notice and feel what's underneath you. Maybe it's the chair, the floor, the earth pushing up or holding you. And just taking a moment here together to maybe use the breath to soften the body so that you can let the floor or the chair or whatever else is underneath you really hold you. Just allowing yourself to know that you didn't earn that. There's nothing you did to be worthy of being held by the earth. Just taking this moment to really let yourself receive it. And also just noticing how the more you release into the support that's always there holding you underneath your feet or underneath your body right now, the more the ground, the chair, whatever is supporting you, rises to meet you. So invite you to really take a moment and let yourself be held. If you're looking for more experiences of being held, I'll invite you to explore my in-body course that's upcoming and also my Substack, where I write about embodiment, coming home, being held, supported. You can join Substack as either a paid or free subscriber. Again, thank you for listening and for being in the tender, ongoing process of coming home to your body and allowing this podcast, our guest, and me, Ailey Jolie, to be a part of that process for you. If you found value in this episode, it would mean so much to me for you to share the podcast with friends, a loved one, or on your social platform. If you have the time, please rate and review the podcast so that this podcast reaches a larger audience and can inspire more and more humans to connect to their bodies too. Thank you for being here and nurturing the relationship you have with your very own body.