{"id":74177,"date":"2026-09-03T11:01:09","date_gmt":"2026-09-03T09:01:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/?p=74177"},"modified":"2026-09-03T11:01:14","modified_gmt":"2026-09-03T09:01:14","slug":"making-meaning-with-our-bodies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/making-meaning-with-our-bodies\/","title":{"rendered":"Making Meaning With Our Bodies"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Developmentally, what does it matter if we learn to wash the dishes by hand? After all, in the future, we will have AI robots to do that. Laura Scappaticci met with Adam Blanning, doctor and co-leader of the Medical Section at the Goetheanum, to discuss the moral significance of embodiment.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Laura Scappaticci: As an anthroposophical physician, when you hear the word \u201cembodiment\u201d what comes to mind?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Adam Blanning: <\/strong>Do we really feel comfortable in our body? Does it feel like a home? I think all of us fall in and out of being at home in our body. Sometimes it feels like it doesn’t match who we are, or like it’s not safe to be in. Sometimes we don’t receive clear signals from it. Other times, we may feel, \u201cI don’t know if I can handle all of this\u201d and we pull back, out of our bodies, particularly if we are overwhelmed or if something traumatic or even just surprising happens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Patients say, \u201cIt’s hard for me to know when I’m really tired or when I’m really hungry.\u201d I know adults who were successful athletes in their teenage and college years. They learned to ignore or override those signals and that gave them incredible performance in the moment. But if you can’t feel whether you need to eat because you’re trying to meet a certain weight, or you keep running, no matter what your body is telling you, that is an aspect of disconnection from the body.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In my work as a school counsellor, I notice my students with ADHD, ASD, and mental health challenges sometimes run fast and hard to get to their next class, or fidget, or need to take several breaks.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wonder about children coming into a world that’s so much more stimulating and so much faster than it used to be. Our bodies are also denser and not so easy to slip into. This makes children feel, \u201cIs this place really my home? Does it match what I’m looking for?\u201d If they\u2019re not sure, it\u2019s like there’s a part of them that holds back or stays a little higher. I can\u2019t say exactly where this is spatially, but sometimes there\u2019s the sense that a person feels that they are not quite ready to be here, in this place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Part of not being embodied is not having much feeling of oneself. There are beautiful indications from Rudolf Steiner that the sense of touch is about how much we experience ourselves change. For example, my fingertips barely change if I touch my soft shirt. I know it’s soft because my fingertips hardly indent. If I touch a pen, I know it’s hard because when I push on it with the same pressure as my shirt, my finger tips indent quite a bit. I’m touching, inferring about the pen, but I’m really feeling myself. Fidgeting, running, squeezing, are actually wise ways to try and find our way into ourselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In our times, embodiment is an individual journey. We don’t run, crawl, and climb the way we once did. There are now all kinds of things that disconnect us from our body. But, many things that might be interpreted as distractions or problems may actually be helping children and adults orient and embody themselves. Movement is a perfect example. I could think about moving my body, but then it’s just in my thinking. If I’m really going to move my legs, if I’m going to run across campus, then I have to go all the way into the physicality of my body. I have to claim it and move it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

People give the example of the tractor replacing the horse-pulled plow and the impact it had on our connection with the land. On a day-to-day level, it’s a very different experience to put the dish in the dishwasher than to put my hands in hot soapy water and scrub it clean.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Absolutely. These efficiency devices are for our head but not for the rest of our body. Jan G\u00f6schel from the Section for Social Inclusive Development uses an interesting phrase: \u201cthrough-carnation\u201d rather than incarnation. It means we have to come into sufficient conscious connection with ourselves\u2014we really have to take hold of the body\u2014before we can wake up to the outside world. Many children today show patterns of needing additional experience and repetition to really feel at home in their body. It’s like trying to put on a glove or a boot that does not quite fit: it takes more effort and time. These children are working a lot to be in their body, and they may not always be able to express who they are as clearly through speech or activity, even when there is no greater developmental or physical challenge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let’s use your example of washing the dishes in warm water. You are learning to use your hands, you’re learning to feel the texture and warmth of the water. Beyond that, you are actually accomplishing something. You have to get into your arms. Your arm has to go into the water. You have to feel what’s there. You have to feel the dishes, and then do something. Some children and adults love being in the water because they’re really working hard to connect with the world around them. How many dishes they wash may be a variable. It’s not about \u201cmaximum efficiency,\u201d as so many things are these days\u2014they are really working to get into their body.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is possible, of course, to bypass the experience of what it’s like to be in the warm, soapy water with the dishes. There are dishwashers, disposable dishes, or eating in restaurants where the dishes are taken away. We could say, \u201cDevelopmentally that doesn’t matter very much because who will really need to know how to wash dishes in the future? There will be an AI robot to do that for us. So why should anyone learn how?\u201d But the process of coming into yourself, into your arms, into your hands, into the water, engaging with something else and doing a moral deed, is a really important part of embodiment. Being in your body feels good because you can do something with it. There’s a moral purpose to being in a body and incarnated. Sometimes when we’re only working at the thought level\u2014answering emails, doing computer tasks\u2014we’re really busy. But at the end of the day, it’s hard to see that anything has changed or how deeply we have gone into ourselves. Maybe not going so deeply into ourselves any more has become the norm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Interoception\u2014the awareness of our body\u2019s internal sensations, like hunger, heartbeat or pain\u2014is a hot topic in mainstream research. We talk about it in the podcast Extending The Art of Healing Through Anthroposophy. How does it relate to embodiment?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Interoception is about sensing signals from our body. We might notice it, for example, in children who are really sensitive to the outside world and get totally engrossed in what they’re doing. Then they suddenly realize, \u201cI have to pee,\u201d and it’s too late. This is common when you’re potty training, but if you get to be six years old and it’s happening, then it\u2019s something different.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another variation comes with our understanding that we incarnate most easily into our heads. That’s where we’re awake first and then we work our way down. It is hard for some children to get all the way into their bodies. It’s not that they are distracted by other things. They really can’t feel the message of hunger or that they need to stop eating\u2014they are eating more for touch than taste.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Interoception can be connected to our \u201csense of life\u201d, our sense of well-being. Am I nourished? Have I had enough? It’s also about noticing how tired we are, which we may have learned to ignore to maintain maximal efficiency. If we decided to go to work or not today based on how much energy we had, what would happen to the economy?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maximal efficiency disrupts embodiment.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s a fantasy. Our head can work with maximal efficiency but our digestion and our metabolism can’t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Can illness help people become more embodied?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Absolutely. It asks us to change a habit, let go of something, bring more consciousness to the body. In order to heal something, we need embodiment. For example, surgeons are brilliant; they stitch up the skin after surgery to help the wound heal. But our body does all the wound healing. Steiner talked about breaking a bone as being an important biographical illness. To heal a broken bone, you have to incarnate and embody all the way to your skeleton. He said the same thing about pneumonia. If our lungs become filled with fluid or mucus, to heal and clear every one of these tiny microscopic air spaces is a big embodiment process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Do our educational models impact embodiment?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think the whole Steiner\/Waldorf curriculum is about offering pathways of embodiment. Children stay much more active. Students do things in relationship to the seasons and the festivals. This kind of exploration moves us into and out of ourselves in many different ways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Learning how to handwrite versus typing on a keyboard is something we hear about more these days.<\/span>1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> We are seeing the embodiment consequences of this. If I have to write with a pencil, it’s kind of like washing the dishes in warm water. I have the thought of what I want to write and I have to go into my arm, into my hand, into my fingers, through to the point of the pen and how it meets the paper\u2014that’s a bigger connection than typing. If I’ve never done that movement with my body, if I’ve always experienced the shallowness of a keyboard, my perception of my body is different.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many parents struggle with their children\u2019s engagement with life, especially with their teens. It can be a real challenge to get them to do anything other than play video games or scroll on their phones.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This takes me back to the warm water and washing dishes. If it’s really hard to use our hands, then it may not be natural or comfortable to wash dishes. But we still want to engage in that process. We are not going to say someone’s a terrible person if they can’t wash them quickly or if they can\u2019t wash as many as somebody else. To take away that kind of experience because it is uncomfortable would be a disservice to the child. Steiner talks about what would happen if a person spent a lifetime in a room and didn’t connect to things outside. There is a poorness or thinness of experience. In the next incarnation, they don’t have the capacities and experience to orient themselves or to even find their way into a body again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What we gain through working with challenge processes has long term spiritual consequences. If I’m working in warm water, and I\u2019m not yet fully embodied and I can’t feel things very well, it may take me a lot of work to learn to feel the water. That means that over the course of a lifetime, I will gather incredible experiences about how I can really feel when I work with water over and over again. Later, I carry that wisdom with me spiritually. That’s totally different than believing that if things are difficult we should avoid them or remove them. This understanding brings a whole different level to medicine\u2014we realize why we want to work through a process, not just eliminate its symptoms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Is it a moral failing that I myself don’t go out and drive a team with a plow to work the earth? That I don\u2019t make every dinner from scratch? It opens up time for other things. But I think developing a sense of meaning, not just utility and efficiency, is important for our future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What daily practices can we do to strengthen our sense of embodiment?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a child, we have potential for many different directions of growth. As adults, we get more specialized, a little more narrow. So I think to re-embody, we should keep learning something new, do something creative. I recommend that people do something, at least periodically, that gets them warm all the way to their fingers and toes, whether walking or gardening or painting. Something where you feel, \u201cI just got all the way into myself.\u201d It’s nice to do something that reminds you that you have feet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On a spiritual level, we can do the same kind of process with reverence and devotion. Even though it’s not physical, you come all the way into yourself when you’re really present and noticing the natural world. Not just through your head, but through listening or watching. When you see the beauty or the goodness of something, that helps with embodiment as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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More<\/strong> Extending The Art of Healing Through Anthroposophy<\/a> podcast<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Developmentally, what does it matter if we learn to wash the dishes by hand? After all, in the future, we will have AI robots to do that. Laura Scappaticci met with Adam Blanning, doctor and co-leader of the Medical Section at the Goetheanum, to discuss the moral significance of embodiment. Laura Scappaticci: As an anthroposophical physician, when you hear the word \u201cembodiment\u201d what comes to mind? Adam Blanning: Do we really feel comfortable in our body? Does it feel like […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18301,"featured_media":73600,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8797,8805,9086],"tags":[11827,11832,8814],"class_list":["post-74177","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-conversation-en","category-medicine","category-youth","tag-ausgabe-33-34-2026-en","tag-english-issue-36-2026","tag-musings"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18301"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74177"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74177\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":74199,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74177\/revisions\/74199"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/73600"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}