Philip Shepherd is recognized as an international authority on embodiment. His unique techniques have been developed to transform our experience of self and world, and are based on the vision articulated in his celebrated books, New Self, New World (2010) and Radical Wholeness (Nov 2017). The approach he takes heals the frantic, restless pace of the intelligence in the head, which tends to run on overdrive, by uniting it with the deep, present and calm intelligence of the body. This way of thinking is in contrast to the prevailing view of embodiment, which involves sitting in the head and ‘listening to the body. Instead, Philip helps us listen to the world through the body. His personal path to understanding has been shaped by his adventures as a teenager, when he cycled alone through Europe, the Middle East, India and Japan. Philip currently spends his time divided between teaching international workshops, running Facilitators Trainings, and participating in a documentary about his work.
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Contact Info
Website: http://www.philipshepherd.com/
Blog: https://philipshepherd.com/blog/
Most Influential Person
Marion Woodman (Featured in Dancing In The Flames www.DancingInTheFlames.com)
Effect on Emotions
We think of our emotions as personal, private things. We, we feel our experience as private and everything you experience is shared. It's just the nature of our reality.
And so to come into that grounded place of wholeness is to feel, not that contained charge of the emotion, but that dilation where it's not that the emotion goes away, but it becomes integrated, it's able to be integrated.
Thoughts on Breathing
Breathing is a huge part of what I teach and my contention is that the whole of the body should be available to the breath and if it's not, you're not in wholeness.
And we keep the breath out of our legs. We keep it out of our backs, we constrain it. So we, we talk from here and we lose our wholeness by constraining our breath. So it's the foundation.
Suggested Resources
Book: Radical Wholeness: The Embodied Present and the Ordinary Grace of Being by Philip Shepherd
App: Body World (Philip Shepherd's App to be released approximately April 2019)
Bullying Story
I'm thinking of one [bullying story] that happened very recently.
I facilitate teacher strings. So there are people who were learning to teach my work and a woman just wrote me back. There was a woman in her neighborhood who is something of a bully. We actually talked about it during the course and she said, what can I do about it? And I made some suggestions.
Well, she got back and sure enough, she went out walking her dog and there's this woman and there's no getting away and the woman comes at her and she'd just dropped more and more deeply into her wholeness, into her mindfulness, into that grounded, receptive chorus, responsive place.
And she said, the woman talked for about two minutes and then left looking slightly confused. And normally it would have been like 20 minutes of. And I really took heart from that. She didn't do anything but land in that mindful coherence of her awareness at this moment. I love where that went and how it went.
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