How often do we talking about our own disembodiment caused by academia? Not enough, but I’m going to share a thread of some stellar points @hillarylmcbride made today about being embodied in academia @U21FINE #U21FINE

But before I do I’m going to practice it by not being on technology in this moment #u21fine

Paraphrase from @hillarylmcbride : We don’t just “have” bodies but we “are” bodies.

Easy for academics to prioritise our heads as central and our bodies merely as “meat” vehicles for our brains, but our bodies send 9x more signals to our heads than our heads do to our body...

...therefore in that sense our bodies are more ourselves than how we commonly perceive our identities as primarily in our cognition as is often the case with the mind-body dualism.

Another key @hillarylmcbride wisdom: academia often celebrates our disembodiment of mind, of being able to override our bodies’ signals, which is significant for at least 3 reasons...

1. Should allow us to better have compassion for ourselves and why our disembodiment in academia has been a survival strategy ...

2. It emphasises that being embodied in academia is actually a powerful act of resistance against the institutional structures of higher education, which in many sensen often teaches us to colonise/conquer our own bodies’ needs and signals.

3. Our bodies miss us!

Pay attention to your posture, your breathing, your satiety signals. And becoming more embodied might be overwhelming for a time as you’ve gotten so used to ignoring it, so don’t be surprised if there’s a lot there that needs to be processed.

Although we give cognitive labels to emotions, we need to focus on giving our bodies space to feel the emotions, and anger is a key emotion for us to understand and to lean into for setting our personal boundaries in academia for our embodiment/wellbeing

If you’re going into a time period in academia that you know you are going to override your bodies signals more than is sustainable in the long run, at the very least tell your body in advance so that your body knows and then you can intentionally reunite and get connected again.

One of @hillarylmcbride ‘s wake up calls in academia and disembodiment was meeting cohort after cohort of PhD students who the vast majority developed significant auto-immune diseases that they didn’t have before their PhD.

These are just some takeaways, I could have taken notes when she presented but I was too embodied to be distracted by that . Please check out @hillarylmcbride and all her work, she has an amazing new book on embodiment coming out this year. #U21FINE @U21FINE

@PhDVoice @AcademicChatter #phdvoice you might be interested in this thread