We Need More Embodied Education! A Conversation with Arawana Hayashi, Prof Guy Claxton, Dr Akhil K. Singh, Emily Poel and Caroline Williams

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

Learning is itself an embodied phenomenon. We can't get around that. So when I understand more and more what happens at school or the hours that are spent sitting or the pressure of the classroom and the hierarchies and the competition and all these things that these kids' bodies are dealing with, that I think, wow, it's really important that they learn how that works.

Hi everyone, thanks so much for joining me for another special episode of the podcast this week. My name is Tim Logan and the podcast is produced by Good Impact Labs. This week we're exploring embodiment science in education with some of the world's leading embodiment practitioners and cognitive scientists. I'll let these amazing people introduce themselves in a moment, but just to say, I believe this is one of the most important shifts happening in education globally, which is simultaneously so simple and yet so hard to move given the depths of the tendencies towards disembodiment embodiment, especially in the Western tradition, that we explore in this conversation. Also, just to note, despite my best intentions to get everybody together in one conversation with such amazing and busy people, this wasn't possible. So what follows is a product of 3 separate recording sessions. And if you'd like to follow up on anything you hear, you can find links to all of the incredible work of my guests in the show notes.

So my name is Arawana Hayashi. I work with the Presency Institute, which is a network of people who are committed to making change in a variety of sectors. Education is one of them, but also regenerative agriculture, business, healthcare. And the premise is that external change is really so deeply connected to personal, to how we feel and how we see the world, how we listen to the world. And so it's called awareness-based systems change. So I work with a couple of colleagues bringing kind of a series of practices called social presencing theater, and some of that is in schools. Looking forward to the conversation.

Hi, I'm Guy Claxton. I'm officially Emeritus Professor of the Learning Sciences at the University of Winchester and an honorary Senior Research Fellow at the University of Bristol.

So I'm Caroline Williams. I'm a science journalist. I'm based in the UK. I came to science journalism via a long circuitous route. Started off my university education training to be a PE teacher. Largely because I couldn't cope with the idea of having to sit around all day. And so that's how I ended up choosing that career. It didn't actually end up being for me. I swapped over to biology and then went on to become a science journalist. So I've worked at New Scientist magazine and gone on to be freelance, and I've written 3 books, 2 of which are relevant to this conversation, really. So I started specializing in neuroscience, which at the time I started was just looking at the mind as if it was sort of from the neck up and only looking at the brain. And then gradually over my sort of 25 years of being a science journalist, the body started creeping in, in sort of neuroscience studies. And so I— that sort of led me to research my book Move because, you know, all the things that seem to work in terms of changing something about how your brain works or how you feel involved moving your body. And I thought, well, what's all that about then? Okay. So I went in and sort of looked at that and that made it very clear to me that movement and the mind was a lot more than just all happy hormones and, you know, sort of endorphins and that kind of thing. And that there's something about the way we experience our bodies and move our bodies that affects the way we think and the way we feel. And then that led me to the subject of my latest book, which is just out a couple of weeks ago, which is about interoception, which is the sense of what's happening on the inside of our bodies. And that's how we build our understanding of everything. So from our feelings to our motivations to our decisions. And I think this is, you know, it's a really emerging area of science that not that many people know about. And I think because the education world is sort of like trucking along behind, we're in a situation where we've got very sedentary classrooms, although movement breaks do seem to be coming through. So working with, with Emily and Guy and also Arabella Chute, who's at Notting Hill Prep School in London, we sort of started this little project of trying to get— okay, let's see if we can get more movement into schools and see if it's feasible and doesn't disrupt the whole learning process, and B, you know, does it actually help? And that, that was really successful. And so along with another colleague, I'm taking it forward now into a second phase where we've got a lot of videos of secondary school kids doing various movements that primary school children can copy. And yes, we're going to see how that affects their learning.

Thanks, Tim Logan, for inviting. Uh, I'm Dr. Akhil Kumar Singh, currently working as an assistant professor in the School of Social Sciences at MS Ramayya University of Applied Sciences, Bengaluru, India. So my doctoral research was focused on the major questions of understanding human nature and its relationship with the educational practices, and especially through the lens of embodied cognition. So now much of my work revolves around embodied education and inclusive learning environments. And the basic question in front of me is to how an educational systems can be, you know, redesigned to reflect a more integrated view of human being, one that doesn't separate mind from body or individual from society. And recently, the book which came out titled Education for the Embodied Human emerged from my previous 5, 6 years of study during my doctoral work as well as after that. So it questions the deep-rooted dualism in modern education. So why this disembodied practices are still prevailing and especially the way we often separate the mind from the body and knowledge from the lived experience. So the book and the work basically builds a case for shifting towards what I call an embodied approach to education, one that integrates both outer pedagogical design as well as inner transformation, because the both approach we need to take.

My name is Emily Poole, and I'm in Berlin, Germany. I'm an embodiment practitioner and trainer, kind of gone rogue into different other areas, but I have a background in contemporary dance Performance and History. And I've been working with people in different ways for the past 20 years. So a lot of one-on-one work with clients as well as classes, workshops, groups, team development stuff. The last years have been more and more in companies, projects. I think I've, I've now get to join a lot of interesting projects and bring an embodied approach to thinking processes, innovation processes, which also led to, to the book with Guy that we were just finishing now, finally. And that's been kind of my entrance into the world of education. So the last 2 years have been really a deep dive into understanding the world of education a bit more, combined with different workshops with school principals, which has been really interesting to kind of understand, like, the different worlds that, that people are moving in. And I think what My personal interest has always been and continues to be is understanding thinking as a form of movement and exploring the interplay between moving through conceptual space is very similar to moving through physical space. And when we start to include embodied awareness more and movement more and, and what we're perceiving and the decisions we're making and how we're approaching things, the perspectives we're taking, then we start to get different results. Or new things start to happen. And, and I feel like some of those very basic skills absolutely should be taught at school, and that something is missing if they're not. And so that's why I'm also very much looking forward to the conversation with all of you.

Beautiful. Yeah, there's a lot, a lot missing, I think, a lot missing. And that's why I was so excited to do this podcast with all of you. But yeah, amazing, amazing. And I would love to get— if we can get on to the more kind practical reflections of what it means to actually bring this into formal education spaces and different organisational spaces for leaders, as you said, Emily, and different, yeah, different ways we can bring in. But I'd love if we can maybe just to pull back a little bit and start with— you've all already started in a way reflecting on the why, but I just wanted to dwell on that a little bit in terms of, I guess, making the case, strengthening the case as to why this is so critically important in terms of taking the body seriously, the interoception, the exteroception that, you know, all these confusing words, proprioception, all these unhelpfully complex scientific words, but it feels so important as I've been learning about 4E cognitive science and, you know, different aspects of learning sciences, you could say that just, you know, are dominated by a cognitivist paradigm and so often just completely eradicate any sense of the body and it's just this kind of thing we have to deal with. But actually, as you said, Caroline, so much of it is coming deeply from within the interoception. And so anyway, I would love to invite you from your different paths and backgrounds to just reflect on this idea of why taking the body seriously is just so important in knowing, thinking, learning, understanding. Systems change, arowana, you know, wherever you want to take it. But I think just, yeah, making that case would be lovely.

So one of the— the word theater, the root of that word means a place where something is seen. And in our work, the fact that the body is seen and that when what we see is resonant in terms of feeling, the inner sense of that This relationship between the presence of the, of the individual, that they actually can feel themselves. They feel themselves, their feet are on the ground, their seat is in the chair, their back body is present. They can feel their own presence, that that's felt by other people, that the presence of every individual is known on a— maybe not completely consciously, but it's known that we feel each other. So this sense of the more there's an integration between the mind and the body, that that's synchronized, that person then— all of us then feel more present. And presence is something that is felt by other people. So it's a connector in terms of our work is mostly about social, right? It's social presencing. So it has to do with the social body and the social field or the invisible relational quality of the social bodies. So the importance of that is one thing is that the individual can feel that there's no such thing as an isolated individual. They're always within classrooms or families or communities or teams or whatever, there's always this sort of sense that we are co-creating learning, we're co-creating healing, we're co-creating a social reality. So the feeling of that is not an idea, that's an embodied knowing of that. I think that our work, particularly with teachers or in classrooms, is first of all, is there being together? It's called being together of the mind and body. Can we be in the body? And then can we be in our social bodies in that space, that little social system, even if it's just two people or three friends or whatever, do we feel that as a social body? And that the quality of our attention can create a more wakeful, caring, intelligent social space. And in order to do that, we need to be present in the body. And on the Earth's body. So that's the kind of frame. And then it also leads to the collective agency that people feel in a collective, that they have some agency to co-create what they want, to co-create whether there's a kind of longing in the system for healthiness or learning, whatever the value is, something like that.

Amazing. Yeah, it feels— this is why I've been so excited about doing this podcast. So thank you so much. Caroline, do you wanna?

Yeah, so, so I think if we're talking about the why, why it's so important, especially in terms of schools and children and, and teaching them skills for life, which is what we know, what we really want to be doing with education, there's the idea of self-regulation. So, you know, we have this real issue of mental health in young people, and, you know, there's real struggles with self-regulation and anxiety and stress. And if you know, the kind of brain-centric way of looking at these issues is like, okay, well, you need to think in a different way, or you need to put your worries in a box or whatever. If we open it up to, okay, well, let's regulate through movement or through breathing, or for breathing and movement together, then that gives them something that doesn't involve having to think yourself down, which can just end up being really difficult and leave people feeling that they're failing. And so you're giving children another tool in their arsenal when they feel a certain way. Try doing this with your body in will maybe make you think and feel a different way. Um, so mental health is a really important one, and self-regulation. But also, you know, we've got a better awareness of neurodiversity now, and some children and some people have more needs than others in this area. And, you know, the interoception terms— people with ADHD and autism are often overwhelmed by bodily sensations but are less accurate at being able to tune into them. So trying to improve that awareness and the way of making sense of what your body is telling you is a really important skill, but not only for neurodiverse kids, but for everyone. So I think there's this real, you know, we're missing a trick really. And also for their ongoing brain health as well. You know, we want to send these kids out knowing that the best way to keep yourself sharp and to understand the world is to make sure that you're moving and giving your brain everything that it needs. And that comes from a healthy body. And as Arawana was saying, the social aspect is really interesting as well, because there are certain ways of movement particularly synchronized movements, whether that's drumming or yoga or dance or martial arts, whatever it is, that, that helps us. It does something to our view of ourself versus others. And so partly, you know where your body— where— who you are because of where your body begins and ends. If you start moving in time with other people, you experience their movements at the same time as you're feeling your own, and that sort of tricks the brain a little bit into blurring the boundaries between self of an other. And loads of experience has shown, like, from toddlers all the way up to adults, that moving together in synchrony helps you feel closer and more connected to other people, and that makes us care more about them. So in various psychological tests where you get people moving in synchrony and then playing particular games where they can either work together or they can stab each other in the back, people work together better when they've been moving in synchrony. So there's all these really important things that kind can come from moving if it's done well and thoughtfully.

Amazing. Thank you. And could I just ask you just briefly to maybe give a little bit of a kind of basic definition of what we mean by interoception, just for people? I know that's, you know, obviously you haven't always been in that space, but that is your latest book, and I would love to speak a bit about that later on, maybe in the conversation, because it feels incredibly powerful. But just, just so people understand what that means.

Yeah, that's right. So, so interoception is, um, as you say, it's one of those words, it's like a long and complicated word, but it's much more exciting and important than, than it sounds. So interoception is like a catch-all term that covers the ability to sense, perceive, and interpret changes that happen within our own bodies. So the senses that you think about, you know, it's like the vision and touch and all these other ones, they are exteroceptive, they're receiving information from the outside world. Interoceptive signals come from with the inside of the body. So it can be changes in heart rate. It can be whether you're hungry or tired or whether you need to go to the bathroom or, you know, there's how you're breathing. So most neuroscientists now not only do the sensing bit and how sensitive you are to them, but also how you interpret that. Do you interpret a rise in heart rate as something to be feared and to be avoided, or are you able to put that in context with what's what's going on around you from your other senses. So it's kind of like thinking of it as a back and forth between the brain to try and understand what's happening on the inside, what it means, and how you should react.

That's great. Thank you. And there's, there's a really— I love— I don't know if you know Daniel Schmachtenberger, but he, he's got this great quote that the quality of our sensemaking is only as good as the quality of our sensing, which I just think, you know, from an educational perspective, if we think about education as sensemaking, Thinking about all the different ways that we are sensing internally and externally, as you say, just feels like, how can we expand that landscape for young people so that they can be sensing more and then maybe the sense-making might be better.

So yeah, absolutely. To make the sense, you need to know that it's there. And if people struggle to tune into these sensations, partly because they're sitting static all the time and there's no change in the body, then you're going to struggle to make sense.

So yeah, that's great. Thanks. Thank you, Caroline. Guy, just coming over to you, perhaps you could give a bit of a sense from the cognitive sciences perspective as to why this is important in education.

The starting point for our book, Bodies of Learning: How Embodiment Science is Transforming Education, was a puzzle about the relative ineffectiveness of educational reform. I think the working title for one of our chapters was, we've had 100 years of educational reform and schools are getting worse. And what the paradox, it's like alternatives flare up, a few of them like Summerhill last remarkably long periods of time, but there's no impact on the mainstream. And why is that? So we've been burrowing into some of the philosophical or psychological presuppositions of school and looking at the history of school, where it came from. And to make a long and complicated and interesting story very short, it grew out of the Western tradition, beginning with Plato and others in classical Greece, which developed the idea of a very strong dissociation between mind and body. And body was seen— I think early Christianity may have played a significant role in this— that the body was seen as somehow ephemeral. Corrupt, unreliable, fallible, personal, subjective. And the search was on for something that was more hardwearing than that experiential level. So you have Aristotle and Plato conjuring up worlds that are truer or more abiding or more perpetual, and therefore more, in some sense, more reliable. But also more abstract worlds of knowledge in which you can put your trust. And this is thought of as higher. The metaphor of good is up. I'm feeling up, I'm feeling high. That embodied metaphor of up is better meant that this form of thinking that revolved around the development of the intellect, and dispassionate reasoning became seen as somehow or other the apotheosis, the epitome of human intelligence, and that it was that faculty that enabled you to approximate to godliness. So you get this sense of the mind and the soul becoming more ethereal, becoming something that is more dissociated from the body. So when formal schooling, the origins of formal schooling, in the 16th and 17th centuries were monastic. They came out of that tradition, the tradition against which, to shift to the Romantics, poets like Blake, William Blake, were railing against. That war between the Romantics and the hard-nosed people resulted in Blake saying in a wonderful poem called The Garden of Love, I don't know if you know it, where he said, "And priests in black gowns were walking their bounds and binding with briars my joys and desires." But that kind of dissociation, the idea of the abstraction getting higher, therefore is buried in the soil of education, which is why we've ended up with a version of education called school is embedded within that are these assumptions that basically to be intelligent is to be intellectual and rational. And so you end up with all the peculiarities of school, the hierarchy of esteem of subjects with maths at the top and PE, dance and drama at the bottom. That hierarchy, like the less body, the better. The more ethereal, the more spiritual. And I think that the reason why reforms have been so ephemeral is because they haven't got down to that. They haven't rooted out that underlying assumption. And there may be others as well. It's like if you're a gardener, my wife is a keen gardener and she's always complaining about couch grass, which you have to, you know, you have, it's something that infects gardens. It's a weed and you have to get every last little shred out or it immediately starts regenerating. It's a real garden pest. And I think this belief, this mind-body schism is so deeply embedded. It's a bit like a sort of, it's become a bit of a hypnotic trance that almost literally blinds us to the intelligence of the manual, the intelligence of the visceral, the intelligence of the sensory. And it almost makes those concepts sound like oxymorons.

Yeah.

And so we end up with something like school, which is, you know, to an outsider, very strange, very odd. I have this idea in my— this character in my mind who's a kind of educational anthropologist from Mars who's been sent to Earth to garner whatever useful information we might have about how we prepare our young. And the first thing he encounters is the notion of school. And with increasing astonishment, he says, so in order to prepare your children for life, you take them out of life and you put them in a place for much of their waking life, which is almost as different from real life, ordinary vernacular life, as it could be.

Really?

How interesting. Do tell me more.

And Emily?

No, we already have a great landscape of things here, so I have to kind of see how to respond. But I think I would start with the fact that we are embodied anyway. That's what we are and how we move in the world. And we can either cultivate that and strengthen it and develop it, or we can cripple it and curb it and ignore it and suppress it. And I'm obviously for developing it and including it, but I think it's, or our embodied nature is part of how we need to understand learning, that learning is itself an embodied phenomenon. Like we can't get around that. So that's why sometimes when I, when I understand more and more what happens at school or the hours that are spent sitting or the kind of pressure of the classroom and the hierarchies and the competition and all these things that these kids' bodies are dealing with and having to regulate, like Carolyn is saying, that I think, wow, it's really important that they learn how that works. And I feel, I feel like part of my work is about being a kind of translator, like understanding physical responses and what they indicate they are inevitably useful information. We look at them like emotions and sensations as dangerous, or if ADHD kids are jumpy, or everyone gets jumpy, it's, it's like we look at all of those things as kind of dangerous at school. And I would hope that even the people learning to be teachers or teachers who continue to learn, that we can all start to understand all of those things as normal, natural parts of being learning bodies. And kind of have better skills and tools of how to work with that instead of against it, instead of being afraid of it. And again, kind of circling back to what Arwana is saying about presence, I think all of these little exercises for movement and breathing and self-regulation, they do lead us back to a more grounded presence where we can feel ourselves and we can feel other people again, and we can then respond appropriately instead of just in these kind of banging our heads against the wall habitual ways that we keep getting stuck in. Again, I know, Arwan, a bit of your work, there's nothing against stuckness and stuck states. Like, there's a lot of learning and rich things in there, I know. But, but I think, again, it's like starting to see it all as useful instead of problematic, because it's kind of the basis for learning. And isn't school supposed to be about learning? So, I mean, I can say more, but that's why I think it's important.

No, that's amazing. Could you possibly just say, you said something very interesting in the beginning about moving as thinking. I'm very intrigued by that, what you mean by that. And like, obviously we, in formal education settings, we, we put this idea of thinking and critical thinking and reflecting, all these up on a pedestal as, as a big part of what's happening. And, you know, thinking in order to lay down long-term memories and all this kind of cognitivist stuff. So this idea of thinking as movement is really intriguing and probably quite, yeah, challenging to some educators. Maybe you could say a little bit more about what that means.

I can do my best. One thing that we try to talk about in the book also is, is that a lot of the, the basis even for our language and our metaphors is grounded in our physical experience, right? All of this language, the abstract, is built on our concrete experience. So our language developed to describe the things that were happening and that we needed to exchange about and share. And, and we've forgotten the physical and concrete roots of all of our conceptual work way up here. And so I think we've gotten stuck with an idea that thinking happens sitting still, and it's something that I do at my desk, that that's what thinking is, and we've learned it at school. And, and I think we need to rethink what thinking actually is And I think part of how we learned to think is, is moving through spaces, moving through natural environments, solving problems with each other, doing that together, not alone. So all of that I think is the basis for thinking and learning and, and that we've kind of just really lost track of that.

That's amazing because I, I've recently, I don't know if you heard the episode, but recently I've had Catherine Odora-Hoppers, the South African educator and just amazing person on the podcast. And she, one of her books is called Rethinking Thinking. And it's kind of, that's coming at the, the same idea, but from a, an idea that thinking has also been defined very much by modernity, by a Western version of modernity. And so it sets up other ways of being in the world that might, you might think of as thinking as very much not because they don't fit the paradigm case of the Western or the European male philosopher sitting at his desk thinking, you know, you can think of any number of famous philosophers in that, you know, who fit that mold. So there's, yeah, I think I love that. Something very interesting about challenging the assumptions of what thinking is. Yeah. Yeah. Akhil, so one, one of the things I was also very interested is in how much this, how much is this a Western phenomenon? Because there's a bit of a, it's an all too common trap of just assuming that what's happening in the weird countries is happening everywhere. So maybe you could say a little bit about that.

So see, Tim, if I talk about historically, so I have explored this particular theme in my recent work. And yes, there has been a strong pattern of disembodiment, especially in the Western intellectual tradition. So this idea then shaped much of modern schooling because that was developing at that time. And this coincided with the Industrial Revolution and the expansion of the colonial tradition, where education was designed to produce efficient and obedient workers. That was the core aim of the education system, to just create people who could sit still, follow orders, and suppress emotions because there was no relevance of the emotion in the whole working culture. So that was very disembodied model of learning. But as well as at the same time, it is not a universal story. As you said that in many non-Western societies, for example, India, I come from India, so I know much, but I have explored other cultures, for example, Chinese culture and even some Japanese culture, even some of the African cultures. So they have the very, you know, equal notion, I would say, if not more than the mental, but equal notion to the bodily aspect. And body was never seen as separate from learning or selfhood in general. In fact, Indian philosophical systems like yoga or Ayurveda are deeply rooted in the understanding that the body, mind, and breath are interconnected. So it's a kind of, you know, the holistic understanding of human life where mind, body, as well as the world are the, you know, tripod of the life. So I would say that, like, let's take example of ancient Gurukul system, which we had in India before the colonial, you know, expansion started. Their learning wasn't confined to reading text or just doing very repetitive tasks every day, but it included movement, meditation, some of the chanting to memorize, physical work, even silence as a way of cultivating awareness. And it helped to create the implicit understanding of mind-body connection. So knowledge was not just about memorization or creating marks or anything. It also about becoming a certain kind of person and certain kind of, you know, behaving. And the body was a vital part of that process. I would take example of a very famous educational thinker of India, like Rabindranath Tagore. He came in the 20th century, early 20th century, and he spoke about education as a deeply aesthetic and bodily experience. Like he brings out the aesthetic into the, you know, the educational system. And he established a Santiniketan modern school or education center. Where he designed learning to happen under the trees, through music, through movement, art, you know, dialogue. So not enclosed in a closed classroom or rigid routine, but he saw the body as well as activity of the body. So action of the body as a part of, you know, child's learning process. And it is not a kind of very, you know, fragmented reality. So similarly, as I said, it is true with other cultures, for example, Australia or Africa or Latin America, where learning happens through stories, through rituals, and it's always in relation with the land and the community. So in this tradition, to know something is not just to understand it in your head, it is to live it, feel it, and practice it. So in a sum, I would say yes, due to colonization or globalization, I would say very strongly, the dominance of Western academic frameworks, even many of these cultures have started to internalize this disembodied models of education., and, uh, it created a lot of distortion.

No, that's great. Thank you, Akhil. Um, Arawana, perhaps I can come to you. Could you perhaps say a bit more about the practical aspects of how social presence in theatre is using and developing some of these kinds of embodied approaches that Akhil is talking about?

So sometimes we refer to like the descriptive, which is very important in our work. As I said, it's being seen by someone, and it's very important that there's no projection. So we really invite people to say, "I see." Like, one person offers a sculpture of some kind, embodied sculpture, and the reflector can only say, "I see," or "I feel." They can only talk about themselves. They cannot at all interpret, make meaning, or project what they think another person is experiencing. It's very important in our work in terms of the container building safety, and also it questions the idea that, oh yes, I know what somebody else is feeling. And that's just after years of people making shapes and us trying to think that there's an archetype for this shape, and it isn't. I mean, 50 people tell you 50 different things about that shape. So that's what we call the collecting data, right? It's either I see, I feel, or I did. I saw, I felt, I did. They can talk like that. But the other part of language— and so that's like using one's sense perceptions. This is what I see. And then in terms of introspection, this is what I feel. But it could be I felt my shoulders going up. I feel heavy. I feel jiggly. I feel like tired. Whatever. And when I saw this, I did this. In other words, if they're all moving together, there was something that called me toward or away from, or I just didn't notice, or whatever. So that dynamic of being able to describe the experience and the motivation, the motive for the movement, whether it's individual or the shoulder wants to say something and then that leads to the rest of the gesture, or the low back is speaking. The low back has something to say, and it starts to gesture, and that moves the rest of the body. But the other kind of language that we talk about, which we don't have a good word for, but it's kind of a right-brain word, which is what we have been called the ceremonial or the poetic. So once there's a sculpture, let's say a gestural shape, it has something to say.. And it's not the same as the person has something to say. It's like this shape has something to say. This shape has, you know, it has a word or phrase that arises from the shape of the body, right? That is not like me thinking about something. It's a different kind of knowing. So if, for instance, as Emily said, there's a stuck practice and we love stucks, the stuck doesn't want to stay there because basically stuck isn't sustainable. Everything in nature is either born, being born, or it's dying, one thing or the other, but it's not stuck. So the stuff wants to do something. And if you disconnect and you don't have a goal, you don't know what it— you just say, I don't know, have no idea what it wants to do, and just notice the body, then the body will move to something else because the body I mean, that's a premise that we have. I don't know if it's true, but the premise is that systems don't want to be dysfunctional, that the individual body-mind system, it longs for health, it longs for a little more openness, or it longs for more connection, that there's a fundamental basicness in beings that don't want to be pathological. I mean, I don't know if that's true, but that's the premise of our work. And therefore, within systems, that's true, that the school system doesn't want to be dysfunctional. It actually has a longing for health and for compassion and for intelligence. It longs for that. So how do you contact that in your own system and then in the team system is what our work is about. So that kind of language is more like a right brain. You know, it's an art form, social presencing theater, more than anything comes out of that sort of contemplative art tradition. So it's saying that this, that once it gets to this, it has a journey from this to that. You've tracked the journey. And then when you get to your next sculpture, let's say, again, it has a word or a phrase, which is not a description of it, but some kind of knowing that's in the system that you can't actually access by like thinking about it. It emerges because of the body. It's held in the joints or the bones or something, who knows, and it pops out, the word or the phrase. And that word or phrase, it's not exactly thinking. It's like almost a thought. It's almost a feeling. But it's something that it could be something from the external. It could be a sound. It could be a, you know, it's something. That wakes up some kind of knowing that isn't exactly like sitting down and thinking about it. You know, I don't know how to describe that any better. It is something, it's this thing that pops out that is naturally creative, naturally like not thought of before. It emerges from an open space of not knowing. So this emphasis on not knowing is a huge part of our work. And that, that the body knows something and you can trust that the body knows something.

And it's so interesting cuz at the end there you brought in trust and that was the word that was coming up for me because there's a real trust thing that we have been conditioned out of. I wanna say in a formal education sense that even as you're talking, you're describing this, you know, the body wants to do, or we're participating in this social dynamic that wants, that has some, almost some will of its own. But that in many contexts, that's a really difficult thing to bring in because we've been conditioned into the idea that we can't trust that that is real because somehow the real thing is the intentional, explicit, propositional, cognitive, you know, it brings up all of that to me. And yeah, inviting back in that trust.

Right?

It's as if from the early times, there has been this idea that the body is somehow, you know, it's going to die. We get ill, like, you know, the beginnings of Buddhism, when the Buddha went out from his protected, regal, cushy life and saw people who were ill, people who are old, people who are dying, people who are dead. And that, you know, we live with that awareness and that consciousness. And therefore, you know, the idea that the body is somehow untrustworthy, it won't hold our weight because it's about— it's eventually going to give way underneath us. So we need to therefore invent comforting fictions, as Dan Dennett might have put it, about something that is incorruptible, that is immortal. I think it's part of this desire to find control, that education has become domesticated and controlled. So whatever is wild or fiery or unmanageable or even contentious tends to get written out. There tends to be a kind of myopia, involuntary blindness to all the things about children and about human nature that don't fit in. That are more wild or more uncontrollable and therefore more of the body.

Yeah.

With teachers, it was very difficult because we couldn't get them to prototype things in the classroom because they said, how— why would we do something if we don't know whether it'll work? If we don't know what the response will be, why would we do it? It was like the mentality to try something, you know, we don't— failure and success is not really one of our value bases. But learning is. So you would learn something by prototyping things, right, in the classroom. And this was not a comfortable or an easy idea to get across in the classroom. I don't know what'll happen, we just gotta try and see. But this was like, really? I mean, it wasn't an invitation that people really liked. So it began— we had to scaffold that back in the way that it works for people, that we made assumptions that people would just try this out and see what we learn. That was not a popular idea with the classroom teachers.

I would reflect on that without judgment of the educators because they are in a context that is obsessed with outcomes, right, with planning for particular outcomes. So the idea of not knowing is like anathema to a formal education system, right, that has— is predicated on the idea of we know what the outcomes are going to be, and then we're going to backwards plan to get to those outcomes because these are the right outcomes for these young people.

And so with Caroline, like, how are you evaluating in the Move4Schools? What is the actual evaluation process when you can sense— like, how is it? Just interviewing or your own observation, or What is the frame for bringing movement into the schools? Like, how do you frame that then that this was successful or not successful?

Yeah, it's, it's a good question. We, we've sort of struggled with it. It's like, well, how the way we are framing it for the schools and they were very enthusiastic is around, well, two things. One is that, you know, there's a huge amount of data that kids are not moving enough. For their physical health, never mind anything else. So, so getting more movement into the school day is pretty easy to sell on that basis. But also more importantly, we've been talking about focus and mental health. So in what we've done already at Notting Hill Prep, and also what we're doing at primary school and local to me in a couple of weeks, we are collecting data on movement, on the amount of movement that they're getting throughout, you know, basically doing a baseline recording with accelerometers showing how much movement they get before and during. And also we've got some sort of mood charts for the kids. So we've got stickers for the before. So how do you feel right now? Okay. So on a scale of, depending on which intervention we've got, we've got 3. There's a Zone In workout, which is supposed to get them energized and focused. So how do you feel on a different emojis from not focused to focus? And then we're going to get them to do it again afterwards. So that's going to be our comparison for, you know, data-wise. And also for the wellbeing workout, which we have later on in the day, you know, how do you feel? Do you feel, you know, shaky, you know, all these different emojis. And then we have one later on for specific types of movements. How confident do you feel in trying these kinds of movements, whether it's dance-based or sports-based or weight transference or whatever these things are, how confident do you feel? But Yeah, I think we're also going to get some, some questionnaire data from the teachers and ideally from the children as well about whether they noticed any improvements in the children's ability to, to kind of work through whatever they have to do, because for better or worse, they are going to have to sit down and do some work at some point. So did that help them, or did it send them off into stratosphere of being too excited to even think or concentrate? So, you know, have you noticed any changes in their behavior, in how they feel, and what are they reporting as well? So it's tricky hard to capture in some ways because you almost need to follow them over a year and see how they changed over a year. But, you know, based on what we've got, what we're trying to get from it is some data that says, look, they're moving more and they're saying it helps them. And the teachers are saying it's not horrendous to try and fit this into the day because, you know, with the best will in the world, schools are pressed, you know, they're trying to squeeze so much stuff in already. And if you're trying to say, we initially started out with this version of it saying 10 minutes of movement 3 times a day. And the headmaster we spoke to was like, well, if you're going to ask them, you know, they're going to say, what am I cutting? Science? What am I cutting? You know, English? And so we've kept it as small as possible and as unobtrusive as possible. And we're hoping to get some data that suggests that this is a useful thing. It doesn't detract at least, and then hopefully build from there and try and move things on to a slightly more nuanced level, I guess.

Yes.

It's an interesting kind of pragmatism, isn't it? And you know, we hold that a lot in our work and I do on the podcast in terms of we'd like it to be different, but there are many really hardworking, well-meaning educators working in systems where they are pushed, right, to do, to deliver, in inverted commas, all these outcomes. And that's very real. And how do we work in those spaces with those dynamics and communities? To bring something more generative into those spaces. And that's not easy when everyone's thinking about accountability structures and all of those, you know, so there's a real pragmatism of that, which I really hear, Caroline, and I really appreciate.

Yeah, I think, I mean, it's possible that we come out of our next trial and the teachers say that was a nightmare with 30 children in the classroom. I couldn't calm them down afterwards. It set us all on, you know, it might be that it's just not feasible. But I'm hoping that, you know, based on what happened at Notting Hill Prep, they came out saying, no, it was, it was actually easy, the kids enjoyed it, it helped them to concentrate, they got the idea of how moving affected how they felt. So it seemed to be quite a positive thing. It's whether we can scale it up to kind of, you know, the average full-packed classroom. We'll see.

Yeah, and it's a challenge, isn't it? Because it's like it becomes another thing to bring in rather than part of the moving and learning and living and knowing that is just living, right? It, it's when we're, we're trying to bring it into a particular cognitivist paradigm and industrial structure, it becomes another thing that teachers have to do rather than what— I mean, in a way, my intention for this podcast is to bring the idea as an invitation to think about it's not just another thing that, you know, to add onto the menu of things teachers have to do. It's like, it's a fundamental rethinking, or it could be a fundamental reimagining or rethinking of actually what learning and knowing means and how do we, how do we take that seriously and how do we build institutional structures.

Yeah, well, what I wanted to respond to actually, because I think both of you have just described the two different extremes of a spectrum that if we just kind of gently move towards each other a little bit, like I believe the door is these small interventions that are safe enough and easy enough for teachers to start to try and to realize the effects, and that, that is one way in that then can give people more of a foundation for this other, more maybe different way of knowing that comes from this contemplative art direction, or that comes from a different place, that the interoceptive awareness in the movement foundations serve adding dimensions to learning and to experience things differently. And, and what I hope is that even the data can motivate people like, yeah, this actually is good. Or the feedback after Notting Hill Prep was really interesting. And I was just going through it again recently for the last chapter of the book to include some of it. And what I think, and this might again speak to slightly older kids who can take it as a kind of inquiry project with their teacher, which is what we did as kind of discovering together what do different forms of movement do with how my mind is working, with how I'm thinking, with how I am, how I'm feeling. And what was so interesting in those, in all the feedback, and I feel like this is even part of the, the essence of the thing, is how individual it was. The same thing won't be true for one person or another person, but to have some kind of context for that is actually great and correct and how it should be, that, that this is true for Adam but this is not true for Jamie, or this is— but Adam and family can each have a kind of awareness of what is good for them in a certain moment when they need to do homework or when they need to do a group project, and they have tools that they can then use to ground themselves or to energize themselves, and that they can use their body intelligence according to the context that is at hand. And, and that's, that's for me the goal, is that it's including this kind of embodied awareness as a skill set for self-regulation, but also for thinking, but also for emotional regulation, and also even aesthetic understanding of things like that. It's, it's so hard to put it all into words, but it's part of the same landscape.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that is absolutely right. And so in some ways, even though what we're doing on the next stage is a fairly blunt tool, we're just throwing 3 types of movement at these kids, I hope to like eventually go back and put that into a bit more context and say, okay, well, if this doesn't work for you, what about this? You know, and then give them the sort of, you know, the embodied experience that moving a certain way makes them personally feel a particular way. And then when they're off on their own later in life, and then they've got that knowledge.

So yeah.

Can I maybe, Caroline, ask you, because I was listening to you speaking elsewhere and I thought it was a really interesting point that you brought up about that more is not necessarily better in the sense of tuning into these more embodied senses, interoception. So understand, like, you know, taking notice of your breathing or your heartbeat or, you know, yeah. How your back's feeling or, you know, just this embodied sense.

Yeah.

It wasn't necessarily better to have just more and more of it all the time.

Yeah. So I think there's a, there's a temptation to think, oh, well, you know what, there's this wisdom in your body and you should always listen to that, you know, and, and the more you listen to it, the better. And it seems like two extremes are bad. So if you're not, you know, if you're basically numb from the neck down and you have no insight on what's happening in your body at all, then that can raise problems with, you know, knowing what you're feeling and what that means emotionally, or, you know, understanding your thoughts and your feelings and your motivations. So that's bad, not to have any insight. But if people are too focused on a particular sensation, whether it's the heartbeat or how they're breathing or or stomach sensations, that can be a problem too. So for example, people who are diagnosed with a cardiac arrhythmia that they didn't know about can get so obsessed with, you know, feeling that their heart is rising and interpreting that as something bad, then it can really sort of cause problems. People don't want to move, they don't want to leave the house. Eating disorders, if you're too sort of focused on the sensation of food in your stomach, then that can just really mess with everything and you don't know what to do, or you just— that feels aversive. So what seems to be the most important thing is being able to precisely see what your body— feel what your body is doing from the inside, but also to put that into context and make sense of it. And that's informed by biology, I guess. Some people are more sensitive, just as some people have better eyesight than others and better hearing than others. Some people are more sensitive to what's going on, but also through life experience. So, you know, if a child has experienced trauma or abuse or some kind of, you know, physical overwhelming anguish, then they're not going to want to go there. And so, and anything that happens there can just feel too much. So it's kind of, for some sort of mental health disorders, or what we think of as mental health disorders, it can be a kind of putting this stuff back into context and relearning this, this relationship between what your brain thinks is going on in your body, what's actually going on in your body, and what any changes mean. And that's why I think movement is so such a great tool because you can use movement to change the signals, you know, and if you are anxious and feel that changes in heart are aversive, well then doing some exercise that gets that heartbeat up in a safe environment can help you relearn those connections. So that's quite where a lot of the research is going. It's not in, okay, let's get everyone focusing on the inside of their body. It's using that understanding to then regulate it because then if you can sense it and go, okay, this isn't what I think it is, and then you you can regulate it some way. And then that sort of, you know, think of it as a constant sort of dynamic back and forth. If you change what any piece of that back and forth, right?

And it also speaks to the kind of Lisa Feldman Barrett and, you know, Andy Clark idea of the predictive mind-body, let's say, you know.

So that's sort of the idea of the predictive brain was sort of started off with like external senses. But yeah, so Lisa Feldman Barrett and Daniel Seth have put that in, into the embodied mind as well, saying, you know, this is exactly how it works. And so if brain is predicting that what was happening last time I felt this way? And if the answer is I was in mortal danger, then you're going to have a hard time regulating that.

Right.

So I think where the research seems to be going with interoception and health and mental health is trying to put all these things back together and not trying to just go, okay, well, you need to change your thoughts. Seeing it as a broader system.

Overcoming the separations, maybe.

Yeah. And also, and going back to what Arawana was saying, like also putting us in contact with other people because these interoceptive sensations, they are the basis of empathy. So when you, you know, you're feeling what somebody else is feeling, you literally feel it in your body to a, maybe to a lower extent, but you're sort of mirroring what's happening in their body. And so understanding your own body in the context of other bodies and what's going on around you is, is really important. Yeah.

The question I get that's coming up for me now in relation to all of this is that you are all amazing professionals, practitioners, specialists in this area, and I think it's, you know, it's fundamentally important that we all, you know, learn how to take our bodies much more seriously and help, help young people to do the same. But I guess, yeah, the question that's coming up for me is how to encourage educators who may feel underprepared to do that in the sense that, to your point, Caroline, about, you know, bringing up things which are challenging for the young people that they may be aware of or may not be aware of. And so actually it's a similar conversation around mindfulness in schools. Sometimes the possibilities that, that might bring up less generative outcomes for young people mean that educators don't feel prepared and supported to do that, so they avoid it entirely because of the possibilities that it may generate not only good outcomes but also some quite difficult ones that we then don't have the support structures to deal with. In terms of mental health and wellbeing for young people. So I don't know, I just wondered where are the things that educators anywhere in formal, non-formal spaces could, maybe some practical tips or, you know, ideas that they could actually use that avoid some of that feeling that it's just a specialist area, that we, we can't go there because we're, we're teachers.

I would say that as Emily said earlier, you know, we are embodied and these things are happening whether we are aware of them or not. So in some ways, just making teachers aware that this aspect of their mind is there and it's affecting them, I guess, is important in itself. So, you know, you're not— by doing any form of embodied education in schools, you're not making them feel things or whatever. So it's kind of— it's just revealing what's there already. And whether you might normally say that as a kid, acting out and throwing things across a classroom, it might come out in a different way, but the teachers are already dealing with it. So I guess giving them a better understanding of it can only help.

Well, I think this is definitely a tricky issue. And I, again, I have to think of the school principals because I think if there's school leadership that sees this as important and that is willing to invest in professional development for staff and teachers, because I think the more people who are sharing the knowledge in a given ecosystem, the better, and the more exchange that happens and the more this worked for me, did that work for— no, but that, that there's a kind of conversation and exchange around it will help. I also think what we did at NHP in retrospect was much smarter than I initially realized because you had the kids and the teachers researching together. It wasn't a top-down thing that the teachers are now saying we have to do this. It was like, okay, what happens when we do this? And this week we're going to focus on this kind and they were researching together and also reflecting on what worked and what didn't and why and not. And, and I feel like that also gives a kind of supportive and safe environment. I do believe that consent is an important issue, and, and I think it should always be voluntary. There can be a kind of even a norm, I think we wrote in the book, around, okay, you're allowed to sit this one out but not to disrupt. Or I think in different mindfulness programs for schools, or there are interoceptive curriculums for schools, those things I think can guide teachers through a process that then would make it easier for them to keep practicing themselves or to, to develop their own tools. So I guess everything from school leadership to doing it together to including students to having designed curriculas that guide you through it. I happened to do a webinar with Kelly Mahler, who she has the interoceptive curriculum, and I've just found it really interesting, and she does a lot with neurodivergent kids and autism and all of this. And what astounded me is that she gave an example, or the woman she was co-teaching with, that a third grader, by going through this interoceptive curriculum and kind of doing the steps of learning interoceptive awareness, like when I feel this way, that means I need to go jump around. When I feel this way, I need to go in the quiet corner. When I feel this way, I actually need to eat. Or when, like, so it's like learning the kind of the language of my body signals, when they have that language down, they were far more advanced than most of the adults that I work with. Like, one-on-one. And these were kids, and it's not rocket science, and it's not that hard. And it's, it's really a kind of skill set that I think everyone should get.

I know, amazing. And that's that kind of, I guess, affect labeling that I've also heard you, Caroline, talking about. Just like, am I aware, and do I know how to think and talk about the way I'm feeling right now? Do I have a word for it or a gesture for it or something that tells me it's this and not that?

Yeah, and I think that's the thing that, you know, neurodiverse kids can struggle with, you know, this idea of alexithymia, that you don't have a word for how you're feeling. But the good thing about sort of interoceptive awareness is that you, you can learn it, you know, once you know it's there and you can start making sense of it. That can really help.

So, I mean, yeah, that's great. Thank you. Um, Akhil, perhaps I could ask you, where are you seeing possibilities or opportunities for interventions in this, the current systems?

So recently I got a project, it's, it's got funded by my own university related to understanding the teacher training modules or teacher training curriculum of these alternative schools, because teachers are the center in any educational, you know, delivery. So you see, this whole system has been fractured. So for example, the parents who are living right now, like in 21st century, are trained by the industrial or colonial educational models, right? So their understanding is not different from the colonial structures, right? So they don't know what is the alternative, especially if we talk about these experimental alternative schools, for example, established by Rabindranath Tagore or Krishnamurti or Sri Aurobindo, right? These are very, very small population, very small level schools where they are experimenting a lot of things. And one of my, you know, major current work is related to explore these alternative models, how they are doing things, how they are preparing a human being in a very, you know, globalized world and what we can learn from them and how we can implement into the mainstream education without disrupting anything. So if we can understand how these teachers are being trained in these alternative centers, we can in fact form the mainstream teacher education programs to change the whole, you know, teacher training. And once this teacher gets changed, then the system can be, you know, impacted in a very large manner. So that's one approach I thought could be one way to contribute in this area.

Amazing. Arawana, did you— you mentioned at the beginning, just before we started recording, just about the 5-minute, you know, maybe interventions that somehow you've seen in schools. Or I don't know whether that was a hope or whether something you've done, but yeah, I just, if there's anything else practically that you think educators could do, I'd love to hear you.

Yeah, these are so helpful what you're sharing here. And of course you just have much more experience with this that they had to do with kind of the idea of the check-in and the check-out, you know, like you have a little check-in and then, you know, each of the kids can offer something and then we all mirror it back. Right in the class. And then this is a classroom which doesn't have 30 kids, it has 20-some maybe. So each, like a check-in gesture, and then we all mirror that back and then the next one makes a check-in gesture. Like simple things like that that you could do in a few minutes that just have to do with a way of saying that, you know, how am I feeling right now? And they do it in a gesture rather than a word, or they can say a word too. And sometimes we do weather reports, like if your weather What kind of weather are you? And what does that look like? You know, in a shape. Or they pick a card for weather, right? Like a location card and then that kind of thing. So it's just that there's a sense that the body shape can express something that the others can see and follow and celebrate by kind of following what someone else is offering. One of the things that for us is important is that there isn't any judgment. And as you say, there's always, it's always an invitation. And the invitation, that's true for adults as well. You know, that's an invitation to join and to try. And if the person doesn't want to make a gesture, maybe they could make a drawing or they can make a drawing on their iPad. You know, like it, we have a different, so that it's a different modality. It's a visual thing, but it's still a way of engaging in something that you're doing. And something that you're reflecting on. So there's always this sense that we have no idea what happens to other people, what's happening to other people's bodies. We don't know what their background is. We don't know how they were raised. We don't know their gender relationships and all of these things. We don't know this about people. Now, maybe classroom teachers have more of a sense of that with their kids, but this assumption that there's I mean, I make an assumption no matter where I am that there's always abuse in the room. That just statistically we know that. That in statistics some of these people have had, have been beaten or had other kinds of untoward, you know, trauma that's happened to them. As well as collective, like the collective, like racial collective trauma, right? Or that kind of thing. So it's, so we know that that's there. So I think that that's a sense, like when one of the biggest things that happens in schools when we work with them is that kids end up saying, "I'm not alone. My suffering," whatever it is, whether it's family or in LA, a lot of it is the threat of deportation. They don't speak English as their first language. This sense that my kind of personal suffering in my little team, I have a little team little social body of 4 or 5 kids, that I'm not alone with that, and that I can embody. And that we make these little sculptures, right, where other people kind of embody the forces that are keeping a person from moving forward towards what they want to do or create or connect with. And then we see how that all transforms into something else, and then we can sit and reflect on that. So in the social presencing theater, it's just a tool for reflection. The embodied gesture then allows for a certain kind of reflection. And what we found with the kids that they— and sometimes we have the teachers in another group— is that was the biggest takeaway, that they could actually share something in a safe environment. They could be heard, what they had to say, and that that in itself was transformational. It wasn't a big thing. It was just the fact that they were seen and heard. And felt that they belonged to a little group, that that was incredibly powerful for them in terms of feeling. I mean, the school principal said it had something to do with a healing process for kids, that they just were seen and heard, their little gestures, and somebody reflected back and had a little conversation about that. And there was no intervention on my part. We just set up the practice and they had these little groups and they had an experience and we have no control over what their experience is, but they themselves could make a kind of healthy learning setup for who they were and how they were in relationship to the group. And so the feedback from the principal said, it's like, if you could set up something like that in schools, we'd have far less— in her case, she had like 17 suicide ideations in that school year before we'd even gotten there. You know, you get them to help each other and to listen. And there's something about the method, the container that they take care of one another.

Thank you. No, I mean, I think that's incredibly powerful and I think it does answer the question in like in really powerful ways, the kind of the broader question that we're asking about what are the spaces that we have our young people in every day, right? I mean, what are the spaces? And I mean, purely selfishly, you mentioned at the beginning, I, I wanted to come back to it, but just the idea of the social field. And I think I've, I've had other conversations on the podcast, for example, with Mette Bøll, you, you may know perhaps, and this idea of systems work around generative social fields, they, they call it. But I, I think it speak— I feel like what you were speaking to there is something around this idea, which again is very, feels very alien to a lot of people. But this idea that we are participating in a social field and we are co-creating, as you said at the beginning, very much. I mean, I think we can't not co-create a social field, but are we aware of that? And are we aware of our agency and our role in that? Feels again like another, almost like another sensing literacy that we might wanna, or invite people into, let's say.

And it depends upon embodiment. It depends upon feeling, and the body's language is feeling, right? The other thing I noticed with the kids and teachers, this sense of it's right or it's wrong. So that's a hard thing to get at, and not just with teachers. I mean, I just finished working with doctors in Ohio. We do it right or it's wrong. It's a sense that that might not be the operative here. Like, there isn't any way of making a mistake, you know. And that's hard to understand. And there are rules, you know, and so how to make containers that don't seem like rules, containers for learning is what I think we're really interested in. And that then they learn from one another. There's no, you know, there's just a little— what is the least obstructive and clear container for learning? I think that's certainly one of our constant kind of questions to ourselves. Themselves. And, and the idea that you said, Emily, that either the kids do it together or the kids and the teachers do it together, that there's not— it's not coming from the teacher, but the teacher is willing to say, I'm also learning here. Or the teachers work alone, like we had them in their own groups, and then they go through a process with each other that's similar to what the kids are doing.

I would love— I would love— please, yeah, quickly respond if that's okay, because again, I think we can apply the same idea of doing these small things that then support, like these check-ins or a gesture or a mirroring, like I wanna, like you were saying at the beginning, check-ins, check-outs, little transitions of embodied stuff between subjects, like all of that, all of those little things help create that safe container. And I think the same can be little relational practices like speed discussions or kids talk to each other much more or We can do little interventions on all kinds of different levels that then shift the whole class container and make it safe and that people don't feel alone. And I think that's actually perhaps the most important thing as, as a basis for classroom learning is a safe environment for learning where you're not alone and you're not in your box and you can make mistakes. And again, Guy's excellent on this topic of classroom culture and and creating a culture of mistakes, or that you can honor mistakes and you can— all of those things are in there too. But I could not agree more that it's an embodied thing that then also has to do with empathy, Carolyn, like you described so well. And I'm not sure if you're familiar with the work of Ron Berger and this, we are crew and we're not passengers, we're crew. Like we're together in this. And we hold each other accountable and we work together. And that gives me goosebumps when I think about it. And like, we should all have that much more. And, and I, again, I think the embodiment just supports all of those social emotional learning things. And for me, embodiment is another code word for interoceptive awareness, is a code word for proprioceptive. Like, it's all part of the same soup that then lets us have healthy relationships and learn better.

Yeah, no, absolutely. And that, I mean, Ron's work with expeditionary learning is, that feels very relevant in the sense of earlier on in the conversation, I was thinking about getting young people outside of the classroom, in the outside. So that idea of expeditionary, right? How can you be learning while doing in a collective? So, you know, the container is still held socially by the educator, but the, you know, yeah, get, get the young people out in the world. Living and experiencing. And yeah, that feels important. But no, this is so amazing. Thank you so much. I'm so grateful for all of you for, and all of your work and your time. Thank you so much for doing this.

Thank you so much for the invitation, Tim. I'm really grateful.

Yeah, same from me. And I would love to talk with all of you about a million more things.

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