Embodied meaning is a radically different approach to the dominant way of understanding meaning, and how we see meaning is at the bedrock of how we see almost everything else.

I first encountered embodied meaning myself in the 1990’s, when my wife, who was studying linguistics, got interested in a long, rambling academic book called Women, Fire and Dangerous Things by George Lakoff. At that time, I was beginning to think about the Buddha’s Middle Way as the most important insight for human practice, in a way that then led me on to research a Ph.D. in the subject. As the full implications of embodied meaning began to dawn on me, they gradually began to form an important part of my understanding of the Middle Way.

Now, more than 20 years later, I am about to publish my own book on embodied meaning: Embodied Meaning and Integration. I want to explain why it became so important to me, and also why I think it should form an important part of the perspective of any Buddhist practitioner.

Embodiment and disembodiment

First, let me try to put the whole idea of ‘embodiment’ in a wider context. People may at first quite rightly associate embodiment with practices such as yoga, that help us to become more directly aware of our bodies and more fully inhabit them. That’s very important, but that’s not the end of embodiment. More basically, it means fully acknowledging and working with the condition of having a body.

This would not be necessary if we didn’t have a strong opposing tendency to become disembodied: that is, to assume that sets of beliefs that we have arrived at entirely in the abstract, without any recognition of our particular position in them, are the whole story. This tendency is associated with the over-dominance of the left hemisphere of the brain (particularly the left pre-frontal cortex, associated with goals and propositional beliefs) over the right. It is the right hemisphere that links our awareness to the state of the body and our surrounding environment – an awareness that is undermined and disrupted when we get locked into repetitive, self-reinforcing mental loops that keep uselessly reasserting our beliefs and goals regardless of whatever else is going on.

So we only need embodiment as a relief from disembodiment, because disembodiment leads us into maladaptation, dogmatism, repression, and conflict. Buddhist tradition has all sorts of ways of talking about both the problems created by disembodiment and the ways that practice can help us be more embodied. ‘Proliferation’ (papanca) is perhaps the most important of those, which anyone who has tried meditation will be familiar with.

Often we get locked into cycles of craving, hatred, or anxiety that prevent us from maintaining the wider and more sustained awareness we seek in meditation. Often the best solution to such self-reinforcing hindrances is to connect to awareness of one's body, which then gives our over-dominant obsessions a new context and thus weakens their grip. Though ‘embodiment’ doesn’t seem to be a traditional Buddhist concept, it is extremely basic to the practice of mindfulness.

Embodiment in the Buddha’s Middle Way

I have also always been struck by the importance of embodiment at the crucial point in the symbolic story of the early life of the Buddha. Gotama first leaves the palace he was brought up in, with its strong conventional expectations, and goes into the forest where he learns from two different religious teachers. After realizing the limitations of what these teachers could offer, he goes on to fall in with a group of ascetics.

Hindu asceticism is the ultimate expression of disembodiment: your ‘true self’ tries to repress the recalcitrant desires of the body through the practice of austerities, inflicting pain on oneself in order to gain merit, or to free oneself of the body altogether to reach ‘enlightenment’. Gotama realized that this approach simply didn’t work: the more you try to conquer your body and its basic desires, the more you deny your basic reliance on them, and the more weakened and alienated you become. You are trying to saw off the very branch you are sitting on.

At this point, however, the Buddha recalled a childhood experience of spontaneous meditative absorption, sitting under a rose apple tree. He realized that spiritual progress involves working with one’s body, not against it. I see this as central to the recognition of the Middle Way that followed.

Critical thinking about disembodied assumptions

However, the Buddhist path has never just been about bodywork practices, or even just about mindfulness meditation, important though these are. To become effectively embodied, we need to tackle the conditions that create disembodiment, which does require critical thinking about our intellectual and moral assumptions when these have the effect of perpetuating disembodied assumptions.

If we do not also work with these underlying assumptions, they may simply appropriate the fruits of a meditation practice to use them for dogmatic or repressive ends, as the samurai did in Japan. It’s quite possible to be superficially embodied in your immediate experience, and yet also working against the wider perspective that following through the implications of embodiment can give us in the longer term. It may at first seem contradictory that embodiment requires attention to our intellectual beliefs, until we reflect that it does not consist in a rejection of the mind to embrace the body alone, but rather a fuller recognition that body and mind are interdependent aspects of the same system.

Many disembodied assumptions are passed on through our culture and educational system. These assumptions are found in various western philosophies and in the technologies with which we are increasingly dependent. You can hardly get more disembodied in practice than being locked into a dopamine loop that keeps you glued to your mobile phone. As Iain McGilchrist’s work has highlighted, the history of modern civilization is increasingly one of abstracted left hemisphere over-dominance.

This disembodied way of thinking, whether explicitly formulated in philosophy or implicitly practised without reflection, is what I call representationalism. The fact that there has been no clear term for it so far is a measure of how far we take it for granted. Representationalism is an understanding of meaning that makes it dependent on a relationship to a supposed reality of some kind. There are many versions of representationalism, but they all involve claims about what is ‘really’ the case which are supposed to get their meaning from lining up with reality.

The alternative: embodied meaning

Like fish who swim in the sea but don’t realize it, we are only likely to understand both the assumptions we have been making about meaning, and the negative effects they have been having in maintaining craving, hatred, and delusion, if we become conscious of an alternative standpoint. That takes me back to George Lakoff and his book that I started reading in the 1990’s. Lakoff, who is a linguist, worked closely with Mark Johnson, a philosopher, to then produce a series of mould-breaking books about embodied meaning, some co-authored and others individual. What they offered in those books is nothing less than an alternative to the representationalist assumptions about meaning that have been keeping us on the reinforcing treadmill of believing that what we are discussing gets its very meaning from ‘reality’. Instead, they showed how our experience of the meaning of even the most complex and abstract meaning comes from embodiment.

Embodied meaning is built up in increasing layers of complexity from early childhood onwards. One can see the process of its development both in the external or neural terms of new links in the brain and nervous system, and in the internal terms of our developing web of associations.

As infants, our experience starts out undifferentiated, but we gradually start to ‘make sense’ of things by associating one experience with another. The first uses of language also help us to do this further. So, for example, a child learns to associate a set of differing, but similar, experiences of interacting with cats, both with each other, and with the word ‘cat’. This is what Lakoff and Johnson call a ‘basic level category’. As we develop, we can extend these categories both in more general and more specific directions (‘animal’, or ‘Siamese’).

So our basic sense of the meaning of words (and also of anything else – pictures, sounds, or symbolic objects) has nothing to do with propositions about reality. It makes not the slightest difference whether the things we find meaningful ‘really exist’ or not. One of my daughter’s first words was ‘zebra’ – an animal she had never seen, but only encountered in stories and pictures! Embodied meaning is associative and experiential.

Lakoff and Johnson’s genius is then to go on to explain how all the most complex adult language continues to depend on that basic deposit of infantile meaning. The key mechanism for this is metaphor. We learn to understand a new kind of experience by relating it to other experiences, and so may create complex abstract language that implicitly refers us back to basic experience, whilst helping us to navigate new ideas and situations. So, for instance, a ‘field’ with walls around it and sheep in it, is metaphorically extended to become an academic specialism.

The Value of Embodied Meaning for Practitioners

The notion of embodied meaning is of immediate practical value because it provides us with a new way of framing practices that may be already familiar. We are not only motivated to practise by being taught specific new things we can do, but by understanding their overall value and benefit as part of a wider vision that is not only framed by tradition.

We are in the habit of separating the ‘cognitive’ meaning of language as representation (the ‘meaning’ we can look up in a dictionary) from the ‘emotive’ meaning we experience (what something ‘means’ to me), but the two are not separable except by convention. Both are made up of associations. It is by recognizing and working with these associations that we can practise with them. For example, the metta-bhavana or loving-kindness practice in Buddhist tradition can be seen as one of expanding the meaning of a person for us, so as to enable positive emotions towards them to develop. We do not direct goodwill towards a good friend, a neutral person, or an enemy in the abstract, but by expanding our understanding of them to include new associations that stimulate our goodwill.

We do need beliefs about the world as a basis of action, and in order to form such beliefs we need to assume that the meaning of the terms we form our beliefs from is stable, even though it isn’t! However, if we can appreciate that the meanings we look up in a dictionary and share with others from day to day are provisional and contingent, dependent on our embodied experience of meaning rather than ‘reality’, we have a far-reaching and profound way into Buddhist practice. It is also an approach that discourages us from absolutizing the Buddhist concepts and doctrines that are helpful as tools of that practice. For example, we may have learnt a particular technique of meditation that has worked for us for a while, but we then find we need to adapt or change it, we may come to realize that the very meaning of ‘meditation’ is not a form in abstraction from our specific, embodied practice of it. Like the meaning of any word, but perhaps to a particularly marked extent, meditation depends for its very meaning on our own experience of it – which may be very different from others’.

To use words and other symbols helpfully, we need to realize that although they don’t have any essential meaning, we can work effectively with them through the integration of our experience of their meaning. This is what we often refer to as ‘learning’, but it is learning of meaning, not of ‘knowledge’.

When we don’t understand what we encounter, we can stretch ourselves into understanding of it that connects our bodily experience with new possible perspectives. Think of a skilled teacher, explaining a new abstract concept with a concrete example. At that ‘aha’ moment when we start to understand the concept, we have made a metaphorical connection between the abstraction and our basic associative meaning experience. The same process applies to understanding the meaning underlying the beliefs of people we are in conflict with. When we understand opposing perspectives, we don’t necessarily have to agree with them, but we are nevertheless in a position to learn from them, and thus create a basis for resolving that conflict by reframing the meaning.

Conclusion

Since the first impact of Lakoff and Johnson’s insights (which only ever happened in a limited linguistic and philosophical academic world), my impression is that those insights have been widely diluted and appropriated, just as the Buddha’s Middle Way has been diluted and appropriated through the centuries of traditional Buddhism. Whenever great thinkers come up with new approaches to understanding the way in which we think about things, the almost inevitable tendency of human culture seems to be to assimilate these to metaphysical beliefs in one way or another, rather than continuing to recognize and develop them as a way of working with the process by which our experience gets turned into new judgements and actions. The Buddha, uniquely, seems to have stayed practically focused, even when people endlessly pestered him for revealed ‘truths’ about the universe. If embodied meaning had been available to him, he could well have used it to point out to them how far their very assumptions about the meaning of the language they were using was from a practically helpful one.

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Embodied Meaning and Integration: Overcoming the Abstracted Grip on Meaning in Theory and Practice, by Robert M. Ellis is due to be released by Equinox on 15^th Sept 2025. A detailed chapter summary can also be found on Robert’s website: https://www.robertmellis.net/lesson/embodied-meaning-and-integration/.