Philip Shepherd, Radical Wholeness: The Embodied Present and the Ordinary Grace of Being.

Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2017, 328 pp.

By Sarah Stewart-Brown

Philip Shepherd is unusual; at the age of 18, he relinquished a place to read physics at the University of Toronto, took a cheap flight to London, bought himself a bike and pedalled to Japan. For a year or more, he lived outside, sleeping rough, attuning to the natural world and the different cultures he passed through. What made him go was clarity that there was something wrong with the values, habits and behaviours of the culture he had grown up in, and what made him head for Japan was an experience of Noh Theatre – a timeless, deeply spiritual style of acting.

He returned home with an ability to see the way the Western world’s view of the meaning of life blinds and binds us; in particular, the way we have valued the contribution or our ‘head centres’ over those of our ‘belly centres’ and ‘masculine’ attributes and aptitudes over ‘feminine’. Together with an ability to experience the world through the body, this gave him a radically different view of reality, one in which the wholeness and interconnectedness of everything was a given. He calls this ability Holosapience. Working as an actor and carpenter, raising his family in Toronto, he devoured books, spoke with many wise people and developed workshops in which he experimented with ways to pass on the abilities he had honed for himself.

This book, published in 2017 when he was in his 60s, is his second. It sets out his thesis and his solutions including some of the key practices of his workshops. His first book New Self, New World describes the journey to Japan and his discoveries in more detail. Philip’s thesis is that people who grow up in the Western world learn to live in their heads, prioritising cognitive intelligence over intelligence experienced in the body, exalting autonomy, independence, objectivity and the scientific method, and valuing knowledge over experience. He quotes the anthropologist who studied the Anlo Ewe peoples of West Africa because they seemed to be describing abilities Philip had developed on his journey. Teaching their children to ‘feel, feel at flesh inside’ they experience themselves as porous, feeling the world passing through them and changing them from moment to moment.

Such experiences reveal the essential fallacy of independence.

He goes on to describe the ways in which severing ourselves from the body’s intelligences has led us down paths that are destructive to life, ours and that of ‘all our relations’ a term indigenous Americans use to refer to the non-human world. His understanding of embodiment is different from that offered by other ‘embodiment’ teachers who invite us to ‘listen to the body’ and often to ‘direct the breath into the belly’. This, Philip would say, is not compatible with wholeness because it requires a separate part to be doing the listening and interpreting what it hears, and taking charge of the breath. Embodiment, he says, enables us to listen to the world through the body, attuning ourselves to the world through the body’s sensitivity and intelligence. We don’t develop this ability by doing, but by surrendering to the essential fluidity of the present. Embodiment enables self-knowledge, a world-centred, experiential understanding of self which promotes a sense of wonder, ease and humility, in contrast to objective knowledge which promotes a self-centred sense of accomplishment, power and entitlement.

Philip recognises that individuals may be born with different sensitivities with the implication that we may have different abilities, but he suggests that we can’t have too much sensitivity. The issue with sensitivity is reactivity. If we are able to receive and experience the world without reactivity, all sensitivity is valuable. So in learning to experience radical wholeness we need, he says, to develop the capacity to integrate the neuromuscular contractions and psychological defences from which the ego derives, so that we can receive and experience without reactivity. The pathway involves breathwork, learning to allow breath that moves the back and sides and is initiated by a release of the pelvic floor. It involves the experience of rest, where the opposite of rest is not movement but internal conflict. It teaches the development of receptivity in a world where doing is valued and receiving is not. And it involves the capacity to integrate contractions, defences and reactivity by becoming grounded.

Philip’s work, unlike other embodiment practices, goes beyond the belly centre (Hara, Tonden, Dan Tien or Kath of the spiritual traditions) and shines a light on the perineum, the small circular muscle at the centre of the pelvic floor, as the powerhouse of integration. His workshops show participants how to enable the energies of contraction to soften, dropping down to the pelvic bowl, and ultimately to the perineum and the feet. Key practices are described. Written with fluidity and clarity this book is inspirational and a delight to read.

Sarah Stewart-Brown is an Emeritus Professor of Public Health at University of Warwick.