Bodies in Motion

Insight with Pablo Escorcia

We spoke with Pablo Escorcia, Co-Founder of Purpose and Motion, a social enterprise that supports game-changers, working together to make the game of life more meaningful, more sustainable and regenerative. They believe that one of the biggest challenges most of us face right now is being able to embody the change we want to see in the world. One of the tools they have developed is what they call  ‘embodiment for social transformation,’ practices that help their clients connect to and consciously use their mind, emotions and body intelligence. 

Organisations don’t tend to have that level of awareness with regards to their needs. But in the context of covid and lockdown, well being has become more present. Organisations now know that it’s not only about performance, but it’s about how we feel while we are working, and how to create the necessary incentives and spaces for people to feel good and well while working.

We are born through movement. 

From our youngest days, we are nurtured to move, to grab, to crawl. We are taught how to walk, how to run, how to climb. But at some point, our movements become restricted, and we are prevented from running around and exploring our surroundings. This is mostly out of fear. We later spend our days inside classrooms, delineated courtyards and other prescribed parameters - all the way to our office cubicles. While we may take part in various athletic activities, the focus is often on competition, performance or teamwork, and not simply on moving our bodies. With technological advances and everything now at our fingertips, we barely need to leave our homes, desks or sofas. But we are starting to see how static bodies affect our minds, emotions and overall health. And it’s time to do something about it.

PART ONE: What does it mean to live in a disembodied culture?

I believe that we can perceive reality with every cell in our body. But there’s a hierarchy in the way we perceive the world, and on top of that hierarchy is the mind. Our whole society is created to train our ability to come up with great ideas and thoughts. But we don’t necessarily receive the same amount of education with regards to emotions, to manage and use and express emotions, which is the key to engaging in any kind of relationship.

Most of the education that most of us receive in regards to the body is oriented towards performance; either being a good producer, somebody who knows their set of tasks, or training to compete in a specific discipline - an athletic discipline, for example. But besides these two aspects, we don’t understand our bodies as something that is alive. Not just a vessel that carries our mind around, but actually that allows us to perceive reality as we perceive it. And this is the same way that we structure organisations. 

With embodiment work, we understand that our bodies and emotions are essential parts of the way that we are aware of ourselves in the world. We start seeing how the organism is more like a network of different types of information that complement one another. And this is the same way that new organisations are trying to structure themselves, more like networks or ecosystems.

People have lost their ability to rest. 

The way that our nervous system is structured means it needs to have a balance between what is going on outside, being active, being fully present, trying to achieve our goals, and at the same time, moments of regeneration, knowing how to rest. This is something that not a lot of people know how to do. And that’s where we see this amount of burnout.

We don’t understand why we are making certain decisions. 

Our bodies understand through sensing. We are sensing all the time. In the space we are in, in relationships, and those sensations guide the way we behave. But the language of sensations is one that most of us are not fluent in. We never received instructions on how to sense, so most of those sensations still speak to us, but on an unconscious level. Why is this space not good for me? Why do I feel this way? All of those questions that cannot only be answered rationally. And our bodies start screaming so we can pay attention.

We see a lot of the ‘superhero syndrome’ in the nonprofit worker.

We consider ourselves to be the good guys, so then we burn ourselves out in order to fulfil objectives. We sacrifice ourselves, and this of course is not good for the individual, nor for the organisation.

This is in part because we haven’t really reviewed our main motivation. We want to change the world, yes, but at what cost? How can we come back to ourselves, incorporate new habits into our everyday lives in order to take care of ourselves and play a role in trying to contribute to the change in the world? It’s not grandiose; it’s a much healthier and realistic way to think, and it allows us to take care of ourselves while working.

There is a habit of acting out of resoluteness. 

Resoluteness is highly praised in our culture. The person who is most goal oriented is the person that we admire. But we look suspiciously at the person who actually finds the balance to take care of themselves.

If we want change then we feel that the only thing or the most effective thing that we can do is to move forwards with everything that we have until we achieve our goal - which we might never achieve. This is a way of using resoluteness as the main energy that is driving motion, that is driving movement. But it is not the only energy that we can use.

Openness is an embodied skill which we can also practise. And openness is not moving forwards, it’s moving backwards; it creates inertia and this allows us to do things that resoluteness doesn’t. Specifically it allows us, for example, to listen. 

If leaders in the non-profit sector can encourage their staff or teams to move from resoluteness, to a space for openness, this creates a different balance among people and in the way we work.

Developing awareness is only the first step.

When talking about change we need to understand it as a process in which awareness is one of the initial and necessary steps - but it’s not enough to say that we have changed. I might be aware that smoking is bad for me and I still do it. I might be aware that eating sugar in excess is bad for me but I still consume it. So we need to talk about how people are behaving. And that’s why it’s so hard sometimes for teams to change because we are beings of habit, we create the feeling of safety by creating habits in our personal and professional lives. And what change requires from us is that we leave our habits behind and start creating new ones. And this is not something that is easy for everybody to do.

PART TWO: Balance is not static - so how do we achieve this in our everyday lives? 

In order to deal with the complexity of our work and our reality, we need embodiment skills, such as flexibility, creativity and groundedness. 

We are training our bodies all the time. 

If our work requires us to stay sitting from 9 to 5, Monday to Friday, this means that we are investing this time in training our bodies to do that. If we live in a disembodied culture where what happens to our body is not as important as what happens to our minds, we are training our bodies for that.

Movement affects our creativity. 

We cannot be expected to come up with creative ideas if we’re moving in the same way all the time. If a person is working sitting down all day, almost everyday, their ability to think outside the box, to be flexible, to innovate is going to be very hindered and reduced. 

It also relates to our ability to move out of our comfort zone. 

Our comfort zones are those habits that we have created that we repeat again and again, the ones that we feel comfortable with, and the ones that we don’t need to pay much attention to.

So start by moving differently, start by doing things differently, start by paying attention to what you are doing. You will then realise that you can actually be creative. A lot of people believe that they’re not creative, and of course there are many, many courses to learn creative tools and innovation tools, and those are perfectly fine, but if the existential creativity level is not addressed those tools are not going to be effective. So we have to do this inner work in order to do the outer work.

And remember to breathe. Breathing is one concrete example of how our bodies and habits are not necessarily the most healthy and helpful for the life that we want to live. We feel our bodies naturally and automatically breathe, and we don’t need to pay attention to the way that we breathe, which is absolutely wrong. A lot of the religious and spiritual traditions know this and have created a lot of different exercises and practices with the breath to create a different awareness of ourselves in the world.

Move from sustainable to regenerative. When it comes to climate change, we feel that we are past the point of only trying to create a sustainable world; that the way we live, the way we consume, relate to one another and relate to nature, requires healing. And this is what we call regenerative. What we are trying to create is a world in which we can move together towards a different kind of future, in a different kind of exchange, but not a capitalistic extractive way of relating.

PART THREE: Movement towards wholeness is part of the work that we all need to do. 

Frederic Laloux speaks about one of the core elements of the new work movement which is wholeness. Whole means with everything that we are, emotions, body, thoughts, everything. Yet, this is something that we have learned not to do. We try to be as professional as possible, and that means usually we don’t speak about emotions. And because we don’t speak about emotions professionally, and maybe not even personally, whenever we do take a pause, take a conscious breath, a tsunami of emotion comes and overwhelms us. And because we don’t want to start crying, or be perceived as unprofessional, we’d rather not breathe, we’d rather not feel, we’d rather not be embodied. 

Emotion is an energy that creates movement. 

A beautiful way of understanding emotion is by the way that people express those emotions. For example, when I’m super happy, what I want to do is to make myself big, to expand my chest, maybe to jump, maybe to shout, my eyes are fully open, I’m fully present. Those same behaviours would feel completely artificial when I’m sad. What I want to do is to make myself smaller, make myself as quiet as possible and not to move too much.

It’s about creating new rituals. 

What we try to do is to invite our clients to reflect on that meta-level of the culture of the organisation, and try to create and implement new practices, new habits, or what we like to call new rituals that are based on well-being. And this can be anything - it can be yoga practice, but also not working every day, or not working overtime, not working on the weekends, it depends on the context.

So that movement towards wholeness is part of the work that we all need to do, starting with the leaders of our organisations. Because the leaders need to be the ones who allow the teams and their staff to create the space for them to be whole.

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Pablo is a Berlin-based entrepreneur, Biodanza teacher, Yogui, coach and consultant. His life has been a journey of searching for his own path by integrating the practical world of business and the integral world of yoga and dance. His goal in life is to lead processes of enhancing human consciousness from gratitude and love to help create a better world. He is an experienced organisational consultant, coach and trainer. He has worked with hundreds of organisations, reaching thousands of people, from private companies, public institutions, international NGOs and educational institutions.