What if your body was talking to you in myths and symbols?
What if the myths you know, the dreams you have, the stories playing out in front of you, and even the random thoughts that compel your thinking, were messages from nature to you?
According to Mehrabian, in interpersonal communication, words are only 7%1 of what conveys meaning to another. The remaining 93% is made up of vocal tone and body language, with body language taking the majority at 55%. But many of us have become word-focused, spending much of our time sitting at computers, texting, and otherwise communicating within a small band of what’s available to us. Could that focus have inadvertently trained us become hyper-sensitive to the 7%? Could it have also dumbed us down on the remaining 93%? (um, I’m raising my hand here, I love written language, perhaps too much.)
Cultural ramifications of a narrow band of conveyance
If one’s culture was focused on parsing and policing2, ever so vehemently, the intended meaning of words, how would we develop as relational humans? Could our deepest nature —our tie to nature — adapt to these self-imposed horse blinders and start dropping clues where our attention already is?
What if the seminal texts for most religions were just that, texts? Devoid of tone and body language, and therefore limited. We all can figure out how that could strangle the bands of understanding meaning between people, but what about the meaning within people? Or between nature and people?
What if someone is literally, or proverbially “out in space,” out of touch with their fragile-yet-powerful embodied nature. How could you reach them with written words? Would symbols break through? Or mythic stories? How about Art and Music?
What would do it— what would help a person experience knowledge, from within? If they live in a prison of their mind, would they perhaps get clued in by an algorithm: maybe endless ads for inflammation or menopause? Maybe these language-based tools (like algorithms and AI) are just a reflection of what any one of us needs to thrive: nature’s feedback which is complicated, universal, and informs us deeply inside.
Nature Talk
What if our body needed to talk to us, but we haven’t been listening. What if we didn’t know how to listen? Would our body load our dreams full of more colorful symbols? Would yelling/telling archetypes appear in movies that make our bodies cry? Would we binge watch shows that feel compelling to us? Would external symbols3 and larger than life characters4 arrest our attention and help us feel ourselves?
This has been my experience, or at least, my experiment these past 2 months: the nature that surrounds me is talking to me in a rich and complicated language. And it is always right.
Leading up to this, I had not been listening to my body for a long, long time. I’m a wordsmith, a symbol-smith and someone who communicates to others for a living. I am on a computer most days, most of the day, alone. And, other than an occasional yoga class, I didn’t know how to listen to the entirety of what my body was telling me. Other than a pain here, a condition there, I didn’t know how to actually tune in and understand the 93% of my experience on this planet, until I asked myself the above question, and listened to everything.
And…my body talked back, kindly, in a language I’d become good at noticing.
What I’ve experienced is that that my dreams have gotten richer, more epic in scale and scope, and my desire to move my body has too. I always needed yoga classes and walks, but now I also need to do oddly embarrassing dances at home, and take dedicated forest baths, and symbol-searches mean everything to me.
Collective Myths, Movies, and Stories: the language of groups
When studying screen writing, I learned that there are really only 19 stories: “boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl again” is one of the classic 19. And those of us who have been listening to stories our whole lives (pretty much every human on earth), we instinctively, and emotionally react when a story is well told. Stories move us emotionally, because they convey universal meaning of human nature. As an aside, each of these 19 stories have perhaps 3-7 key characters each, making the key classic character-actor count come in over 100.
Kind of like the archetypes5. When you really get down to it, no matter the culture, the stories, and even the seminal religious texts, there tend to be only around 100 or so characters whose actions drive the flow of history. The Prodigal Son story has been told a thousand times in a thousand ways, so has Adam and Eve. If you move from culture to culture, some of these great stories appear, with slightly different names and interpretations, but there they are. As we can see in the Greek Myths and Shakespeare, well-told stories are never boring, and can be presented in new settings with great affect on audiences. That’s the power of art. It literally moves us. And I am learning, that move comes from within, even if the story first appears without.
A good artist lets his intuition
lead him wherever it wants.
A good scientist has freed himself of concepts
and keeps his mind open to what is.Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
Okay, so back to our bodies talking
While I can’t translate back into text exactly what my body has been telling me (think jamming 93% of a pie into a single 7% slice), I started paying attention to my dreams each day and making note of them. I also started noticing which archetypal stories moved me most in literature, in the news, in movies, etc.. What became clear was that stories were everywhere, told by friends, on social media, and in the natural world where I spent more time noticing the habits of birds and creatures, and Symbols. And deer, fox families, squirrels, groundhogs, osprey, wren and fish were all up in my face with so much to say…
What I also discovered was that my affinity to space travelers, and individuals who seem to also have preoccupation with space, feel like kin to me, but also, out of touch kin. Artists like David Bowie and his filmmaker son Duncan Jones, thinkers like Tim Ferriss and Elon Musk (though I really don’t like the man), Ram Dass and his eastern-tinged spacey travels in consciousness, and even my political nemesis who boldly (and outrageously) co-opted Star Trek symbolism, all touch my emotional self with feelings of affinity, anger, and even maternal instinct.
Okay, so what does this mean? What it means — to me—is that I had become fractured. Focused more on the outside, on words, more on “space” than “earth.” In a practical sense, I saw this as my body telling me my mind was expanding outward too far, that I was losing my humanity, which is, my feet on the ground in the here and now. I’ve been remedying this, by tuning in to the entirety of what nature has to say, and acting on it. And it has helped.
So, what’s the application here?
If you were to note what moves you emotionally, perhaps you’ll also begin to tap this wider band of knowledge too. Classic mental self-reflection is not enough, there is no way that 7% language-based communication can address the whole you. But if language is a love of yours, symbols may help more, and stories even more than that. And authentic movement, actual movement, perhaps most of all. Just make your moves through time and space yours, make them loving, and respect the source. You are mysterious and amazing, and have stories to tell as powerful as the ones that speak truth through the ages.
Thank you for reading. Thank you more for reading nature.
- Read more: https://worldofwork.io/2019/07/mehrabians-7-38-55-communication-model/ ↩︎
- Referring to ‘cancel culture’ and ‘wokeness’ here, both which are word-focused. ↩︎
- Some of the most powerful worldly leaders have manipulated the language of symbols to their benefit. See this piece for an outline: https://www.ushmm.org/antisemitism/what-is-antisemitism/origins-of-neo-nazi-and-white-supremacist-terms-and-symbols ↩︎
- This article has an interesting take on larger than life characters. I think some are manipulating myths for personal gain. More here. ↩︎
- An Archetype can be understood as a primordial image, character, or pattern of circumstances that recurs, and thought consistently enough to be considered a universal concept or situation. Read more: https://www.britannica.com/topic/archetype ↩︎
