Embodied Enquiry

Drawing on a particular emphasis within the phenomenological tradition as exemplified by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Eugene Gendlin, this book, now available in paperback, considers the role of the lived body as a way of knowing and being. The author, a psychologist, psychotherapist and qualitative researcher pursues this theme within the three practical contexts that illustrate some of the nuances of embodied enquiry: 1 In research methodology: how embodied understanding is not just 'cognitive', but involves embodied, aesthetic experience and application 2 In spirituality: how embodied understanding opens up a view of human existence that lies between great freedom and great vulnerability, a view of spirituality that integrates the personal and the transpersonal 3 In psychotherapy: how embodied understanding may occur through the process of psychotherapy where one is able to increasingly experience oneself as 'more than' the ways one has been objectified and defined (freedom), and therefore, more fluidly in accord with the human realm (vulnerability) The three sections of the book also provide examples of how embodied enquiry is not just a philosophical perspective but also a practice with very tangible implications for research, psychotherapy and spirituality. The integrating theme that is threaded through these three practical contexts is the concern to articulate and demonstrate a knowledge-practice that is both personally transformative and intersubjectively humanising. The ideas and illustrations in the book may be particularly relevant in these current times where the de-personalisation and de-humanisation of self and other are rampant in obscuring the human ground that we share.