The body disappears as the center of experience at the very moment that it functions best.Drew Leder
Where their body, mind, and breath once were, in one's lived space, there is now a palpable, visceral, and felt sense of emptiness. And over time, it is this presence of their absence that slowly fades.
In his book, The Absent Body2Note 2Leder, D. (1990). The Absent Body. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press., philosopher and physician Drew Leder draws on a similar phenomenon to describe how we become estranged from our own bodies. Just as we acclimate to the absence of someone we've lost, Leder argues that in everyday life, we often acclimate to the absence of our body itself. Our body, including our mind and breath, while foundational to all experience, frequently recedes from awareness, especially when it functions smoothly. It becomes absent even as it structures our world.
While this absence can be understood as beneficial3Note 3This aspect of the body disappearing as a good thing is worth exploring deeper. In many conversations with my dissertation chair Dr. Cliff Smyth, we often talked about the experience-of-the-body-as-physical and how most people think of the body only symbolically. One reading he pointed me to was the work of Kristin Zeiler, who used Leder's idea on the dys-appearance of the body in pain and illness, and posited eu-appearance (using the root eu meaning good or well) — suggesting that the lack of awareness of our body can be ideal. It means we can be absorbed in whatever we are doing. Abbie Galvin often says that you know when you are in the center of the joint in a form when you don't feel anything. So there is a lot of feeling and sensing needed to get to the point of not having to feel and sense, and instead, just be. — Zeiler, K. (2010). — freeing us to experience ourselves at the center of a sphere of concentrated radiance, able to focus on the world and function well — it comes with a risk. When our body is absent from our awareness for too long, habits normalize the body as peripheral to the mind that is centered. The forgotten begets more forgetting, and the remembered begets more remembering. As Leder suggests, the body tends to appear only in moments of breakdown. By then, we may have lost a fluency within our bodies that we once had.
Without techniques that restore function as well as awareness of what we need and when, we risk knowing our body only through its pain, dysfunction, or decline. Over time, this absence becomes more than a coping mechanism; it becomes an embodied pattern of disconnection.4Note 4Fuchs, T. (2010). Phenomenology and psychopathology. In D. Schmicking & S. Gallagher (Eds.), Handbook of phenomenology and cognitive science (pp. 194–200). Springer Science & Business Media. See also Fuchs (2013) on the feeling of being alive, and Fuchs (2022) on the disappearing body in anorexia. One in which sensation is muted, presence is replaced by performance, and the body becomes something we manage rather than inhabit.
The body and breath flatten, and so does the mind.
This phenomenon is not just individual; it is also cultural. We live in a world that rewards the appearance of doing, often at the expense of sensation and slowness, or of being. In such a system, the body becomes either a tool to optimize or a problem to fix. We are trained to dismiss our own whispers until they become too loud to ignore. We pathologize, simplify, and diagnose. Culture flattens the body.
And when embodiment is not modeled, not understood, and not practiced, our kinesthetic traditions become more dilute, and we slowly forget how to inhabit ourselves.
We become spectators in our own bodies.5Note 5Behnke, E. A. (1997). Ghost gestures: Phenomenological investigations of bodily micromovements and their intercorporeal implications. Human Studies, 20(2), 181–201.
But what if presence is not only something we regain in crisis? What if it can be cultivated before it breaks down?
Somatic practices, contemplative movement, and even the simplest acts of reinhabiting our bodies — like feeling our feet on the floor or tracking our breath — can begin to reawaken our body's role as a source of implicit direction. These practices help restore a more continuous, subtle kind of presence, and this one is not dependent on dysfunction to make itself known.
These approaches are not about achieving some ideal state but about remembering the body's thesis: that it is a living process, and to attend to it is to re-enter a relationship that grounds us in our whole selves, in time, space, and being.
They teach us how to have a body, how not to lose our minds, and how to feed our spirits.
To heed our body's thesis is to begin singing our song again — not as background noise, but as the primary melody of our lived experience.
We each have a song in our bones. A song has a current, meter, it has a tone, and all songs have breath. Our song invites expression, generates insight, and connects us to each other.
The world needs our songs — not the song we've been told to sing, but the one that feels, moves, and radiates.
The world needs to hear the song in your bones.
Throughout this work, I use the words body and bodies or bodily to mean a constituent part of the self distinct from mind or mental. I acknowledge that this is a Cartesian perspective. However, linguistic conventions require the use of different terms to describe these aspects of human life, and the use of non-dualist language, such as in Merleau-Ponty’s later works, has by no means been established or is familiar to most readers (Merleau-Ponty, 1968). However, the rationale throughout is grounded in the assumption of mind and body unity; even if those aspects of experience are sometimes described differently, they are always in a relationship. Therefore, the use of body and similar terms in this context does not refer just to the material body but to the body as the lived and experienced body described in phenomenological literature and somatic thought.
My eyes first opened to mind-body medicine when I was part of the US rowing team in the 1990s. I was struggling with injuries, existential questions, and other health issues. The regular options available to me were not helping. So, I began searching for alternative frameworks and other ways to understand what I was going through.6Note 6I found a copy of the following book in Chattanooga, TN — my first book on Taoism. It had a chapter on injury, fatigue, slumps and other good stuff. Huang, C. A., & Lynch, J. (1994). Thinking Body, Dancing Mind: Taosports for extraordinary performance in athletics, business, and life. Bantam Books. I have explored integrative medicine and holistic philosophies as they relate to my experience of my thinking, moving, and sensing ever since.
After almost a decade of elite rowing, I found Ashtanga yoga, which I practiced for close to twenty years. I studied Hanna Somatics with Eleanor Criswell7Note 7Eleanor Criswell — Novato Institute for Hanna Somatics. for nine years. I also took the academic route and earned a PhD in Mind-Body Medicine. I spent two years researching embodiment and did my dissertation on eating disorder recovery through that lens.
I learned about Katonah Yoga® while reading someone else's dissertation8Note 8Engelken, E. (2021). The Body as Storyteller: How Unconscious Familial Content Lives in Body Symptomology. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses. (Proof that people do read other people's dissertations.) during my research. I went to the Katonah website, and from the first words I read, I haven't looked back.
The Katonah yoga framework has helped me organize myself from the inside out. It has taught me how to cultivate a practice that supports my life, and that evolves with me as I navigate the normal and challenging cycles and seasons. I am in awe of how this yoga works, and how it is the only way I have found to apply phenomenology, post-colonialism, and a post-lineage approach to understanding myself in a real way — one that doesn't just include the body but centers bodily experience alongside the mind and implicit.
The day I read that dissertation was a life-altering, right-place, right-time synchronicity for me. If you, like me, need a different context for your body and want your practice to encompass the entirety of your life, rather than focusing on a lineage or a pose, perhaps this work is also already resonating with you.
This book is intended as a companion to the classes I currently teach. It reflects my understanding of embodiment theories, along with the material I continue to learn from the teachers under whom I study.
It matters through which thoughts we think our thoughts. It matters through which words we word our worlds. At times, my use of the word body will be a reduction. But even when it does, I invite you to feel into a broader definition.
Zoom out, blur your eyes, try not to let your literal mind take over. These practices serve as a bridge between the material body and the cosmos, encompassing nature, the planet, and the aquifer — all of it.
I had a teacher who used to say, much of yoga is taught, and much of yoga is caught. Meaning, let the material wash over you and see where it goes, lands, and what sticks. The sections I present here create a framework to begin or deepen your own embodiment practice, but there is so much more than what is on these pages. The menu is not the meal, and the map is not the territory, as the saying goes.
In the prevailing Western narrative, we are taught to zoom in on the site of an issue in order to fix it.9Note 9I’ve heard Abbie Galvin refer to working with foibles and conundrums many times. I love using different words for the things we always talk about in order to have a different experience. If our knee hurts, rest the knee. If our back aches, strengthen the back. This view assumes that where it hurts is where the problem lives. It’s a kind of kiss-the-boo-boo approach — soothing the immediate discomfort but also reinforcing a framework that isolates and pathologizes.
People often come to yoga with pain, and of course, pain deserves attention. Pain is a signal from the body, a message that something is out of balance and asking to be noticed. However, the site is not always the source. As somatic pioneer Ida Rolf famously used to say, where you think it is it ain’t. It’s like a crack in the foundation of your house — the stress may appear as a leaky radiator, a window that won’t open, or a door that won’t shut, but the source is hidden deeper in the structure. The body’s framework works the same way, with strain transferring from one part to another.
In the body, pressure in the lower back, for example, often traces back to the hips, hamstrings, or even the shoulders. An issue in one shoulder might be traced back to the opposite hip. The body is an entangled network that works together, not just in the physical plane, but in the astral plane; whether it functions as designed or through patterns of compensation, it is always the whole body. In short, pain is rarely isolated, and where it hurts may also be an invitation to see the body as an interconnected whole.
Of course, this can feel confusing when someone feels something pop or has an acute injury during a single movement. Those moments are real, but often what pops or breaks in the body is the most vulnerable link in a longer chain of imbalance. Another paradox is that strengths often present as weaknesses, or vulnerabilities, because they have been overused. The movement itself may be the tipping point, but the deeper story usually began long before, in patterns of tension, over- or underuse, or stress held elsewhere.
Pain, then, is not always the problem itself; sometimes it’s the body’s way of drawing awareness to a larger pattern of tension, misalignment, or even unprocessed emotion. By zooming out beyond the single site of discomfort, we can start to understand foibles, conundrums, and even pain not as isolated flaws to be corrected, but as invitations: a doorway into deeper awareness, new movement patterns, and ultimately, healing that goes beyond symptom management.
The astral body is often described as the subtle body or the part of you that dreams, imagines, and experiences more than just the physical. When you sleep or meditate, your awareness doesn’t disappear; it shifts. Traditions refer to this shift as the astral body moving in the astral plane. The astral plane has different explanations depending on who you ask, but generally speaking, it refers to a landscape made of archetypes, images, and energies rather than matter. You’ve touched it if you’ve had a dream so vivid it shaped your waking life or felt your spirit traveling while your body remained at rest.
Many, including me, view the material body as also the astral. Meaning our body is not just matter. Phenomenologist Elizabeth Behnke describes this more complex idea of the body as being our sedimented corporeal infrastructure. It is the implicit layering of bodily life — the habitual orientations, tensions, and micro-patterns that accumulate below conscious awareness over time. This infrastructure is not simply muscular or postural; it is the pre-reflective field through which experience is organized. It is the tacit scaffolding of experience.
When placed alongside esoteric traditions, this phenomenological account shares commonalities with descriptions of the astral body. In mystical and yogic frameworks, the astral body is the subtle vehicle through which the soul perceives, dreams, and travels. Like Behnke’s sedimented corporeal infrastructure, the astral body carries impressions of lived experience, both personal and collective. It is not the spirit in its essence, but the subtle strata of embodiment, a blueprint imprinted with memory, emotion, and archetype.
In this sense, the astral body may be understood as a mythopoetic rendering of what phenomenology names as sedimentation — the ways the body remembers beneath conscious remembering. Both point toward a dimension of self that is neither fully physical nor purely transcendent, but rather the in-between architecture where spirit navigates its ongoing relationship with form. Not to be stuck in a form, but to understand its pliancy and its fluency.
We can also think of this as a blueprint, or the tracing paper of the self — layered over time with lines of habit, history, and dream. Breath animates these lines, traveling through their passages the way the sense of home fills a house. Some pathways are clear and resonant; others are obstructed by sedimentation, stale air, and stagnant water. To engage metaphor, through posture, or practice is to fold, unfold, and re-fold this subtle architecture, opening new routes for the spirit’s movement.
The astral plane is the fold between maps: one map of flesh and routine, the other of archetype and imagination. Where they overlap is how we cross the threshold.10Note 10For more on thresholds there is a beloved episode of On Being with Krista Tippett and the late John O’Donohue: The Inner Landscape of Beauty. Or O’Donohue, J. (1997). Anam Ćara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom. HarperCollins. I would also reference the seminal work of Turner, V. (1969). Betwixt and between: The liminal period in rites de passage. In V. Turner (Ed.), The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (pp. 94–130). Chicago, IL: Aldine Publishing. A lot of these words are being used as metaphors. Because a metaphor is not just a description; it is a fold in perception, bending the literal into the imaginal. When we talk about our body as a house, our breath as a wave, or our liver as a portal, we are offering a way to inhabit the astral body. Metaphor folds the invisible into form, turning what is implicit into something you can orient by.
Metaphors are not simply decorative or embellished ways to describe experiences; rather, they structure them.11Note 11Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (2003). Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago Press. To live inside a metaphor is to live inside a possibility. In practice, metaphor becomes the hinge — one part in the body, one part in the cosmos. When you bend into it, you don’t leave yourself behind. You enter the blueprint. You step into your astral body.
Because our sedimented corporeal infrastructure can harden into rigidity, not just of the body, but of perception and possibility. Our sedimented infrastructure is what steers us. If left unconscious, this sedimentation drags us into closed futures, repeating old grooves. However, if we become aware of it and learn to re-pattern, we can open up to futures that are more spacious, creative, and free.
This is where understanding the body as more dimensional than just physical becomes essential. In the astral plane, the self is not bound by bone and flesh but moves according to images, geometry, and orientation. The astral shapes the physical, and the physical shapes the astral. To become spherical in the astral is to refuse rigidity, to soften our edges, to bounce back better, and to imagine ourselves not as a line marching forward, but as a sphere, equally open in all directions. To find our center and circumference is to discover orientation: a center that grounds us, and a circumference that gives us reach. To become voluminous is to inhabit more space than our contracted habits allow and to breathe ourselves into width, depth, and height, claiming the full measure of our subtle body.
Ultimately, when the body is aligned in the astral plane, meaning the physical body, the mental, emotional, our memories, our imagination, and our dreams and visions, we can meet the moment and, as Drew Leder said, the body disappears. Because in that moment we are presence. It’s somewhat paradoxical, but knowing the moment the body disappears takes its opposite. It takes learning to sense, feel, and move the body so that the channels are available for currency to flow.
This guide comes from a very hopeful place for me. Because this is a hopeful practice. Hopeful because metaphor is a way of folding into new possibilities, of entering the astral body, the subtle architecture that carries us beyond the grooves of habit. To practice metaphor is to open to futures that are spacious rather than rigid, spherical rather than linear.
The architecture of the body is not separate from the architecture of the stars. When we find right angles, right fits, and function, we don’t just stand taller; we begin to live inside the blueprint that connects us to nature’s larger design. In that alignment, healing, attunement, and revelation happen naturally.
And yet, for all its subtle dimensions, our body is also here, weighty, temporal, and always carrying the imprint of where we’ve been and the possibility of where we are going. To speak of the astral is also to remember the messy, literal, ordinary body, the one that eats, breathes, grieves, and grows. It is this body, the living bond between past and future, that grounds the blueprint in flesh.
We are here to have an experience, gain new insight, learn, and grow.
This is the introduction to The Song in Our Bones — a book on embodiment and the mind-body practices of Katonah Yoga®. The remaining chapters are available in the print edition.