#82 Agrita Dandriyal on sense-making through the place of the body
“This is age-old knowledge. This is how civilizations were built. This is how we are present today - through lived experience, through passing down stories and keeping those stories alive, because stories have life in them. They are living entities in their own ways, and so when we tap into our intuition, it is a calling for that sensuous knowledge, it is a calling for that knowledge that our ancestral bodies hold, our spiritual bodies hold, but also our physical bodies hold, and we get to remember that knowledge when we connect to other physical bodies, when we build those deep connections based in reciprocity and care.”
Take a pause and ask yourself - have you tuned into your senses today? Have you been able to take a moment to tap into the senses that help regulate and make meaning of our inner landscapes as portals to the ever-changing outer worlds?
As we begin to come to the end of the year, we hold space in this reflection episode for the sacredness of the places of our bodies in helping us navigate and make sense of these challenging and constantly changing times. By weaving together sensuous experiences throughout the episode, our host Agrita Dandriyal grounds the body as the primary place we make sense of our inner and outer landscapes in a call for deep remembering of our roles and responsibilities as current stewards and future ancestors of the land.
What will be covered:
Grounding gratitude for the senses in the monthly meditation
Setting foundations of sense of place in our childhoods through interacting, living, and perceiving the physical environment
The role of play in finding place as children through sensuous experience —> Agrita’s first conscious memory of finding place in community and her body through the sense of touch and play
Materiality of sense of place - basing material and non-material relationships through being physically present in place
Framing sense of place as a cultural ecosystem service in conservation practice and the limitations of over-simplification of this sense of
Sense of place and sense-making as a social construct
Who is enabled and disabled (link to Sunaura’s page) to be in tune with and make healthy, positive meanings out of experiences
Tapping into intuition for deep remembering of our place in the collective and ecosystem
Minna Salami’s work on Sensuous Knowledge: Unlearning Europatriarchal knowledge through relearning knowledge as based in experience, kaleidoscopic, alive and living within
Linking to finding sense of place as children through sensuous knowledge
Placing ourselves in the sacred site of the body: honouring indigenous ontologies of place and extending out to the ancestral world as we find ourselves within our own bodies
Connecting mind, body and spirit in a culture of disconnection
Reciprocity and care of the sacred body that tends to and nurtures our beings
Soundscape ecology and conservation - safeguarding the melodies of the body, honouring each sound of the individual and collective
Stepping into our responsibilities as future ancestors of the world by supporting young people in finding place for themselves in a world that strips away sensuous experiences from current children at a very young age
Episode resources:
A Sense of Place: Human Geography in the Early Childhood Classroom (Brillante and Mankiw, 2015)
The ecosystem service of sense of place: benefits for human well-being and biodiversity conservation (Hausmann et al 2015)
Episode on inner landscapes: Nayo Shell on being seen in the natural world as people of colour
Somatic Work: Toward A Sociology of the Senses (Vannini et al., 2010)
Episode on systemic disablement: Sunaura Taylor on tracing ecologies of multispecies disablement, injury and resistance
Divine Beauty: The Invisible Embrace (John O’Donohue)
Minna Salami’s Sensuous Knowledge:
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Mind Full of Everything is a podcast calling for the radical healing of the self and community to outgrow the broken dominant culture of radical individualism and disconnection from our place as interdependent beings, so that we can collectively re-envision a safer, healthier and equitable world. Each episode takes a healing-centric approach to explore the embodied ways in which we can collectively restore and transform our journeys as stewards of community and earth through conversations with writers, researchers, coaches and educators, as well as reflection episodes with the host Agrita Dandriyal on her journey navigating the world as a deeply conscious, culturally-rooted and relational being. Learn more here.
