Last month (Feb 2019) I led a 10 day workshop on embodied research and used body mapping as a tool to process the information collected through the process of the research. So what is embodied research? Of course, like anything else, there are several different understandings of it. But here is how I understood it for the purpose of this workshop. I asked the participants to pay attention to all the information that was being generated and held in the body. This might be as simple as becoming aware of how your weight is distributed on your feet, or it might be quite subtle where you become aware of how an emotional state is manifesting in the body. In any case, the body does hold a lot of information and I notice that most of us are unused to and unsure of how to first identify and then respond to this information. But what does happen, is that the more one pays attention, the more detail and subtlety one becomes aware of!
The first half of every day we would work with a series of physical tasks, improvisation or led, and pay attention to the information being generated in the body. The second half of the day would be spent processing this information by adding to the body map. A picture of each day’s work was taken and stitched together at the end of the workshop.
Below are three examples of the body maps created through the workshop.