Reclaiming our bodies and the urban environment

A manifesto of sorts for the freedom of bodily expression

This is a somewhat unusual post. It contains an impassioned email correspondence with a dear friend, dated some time in December 2011. I was 27 when I wrote it. As with many fruits of one's youth, I find that it reads a bit naïve. But its general gist still very much resonates with me. It was written around the time M and I discovered parkour – but it would be another 6 months before we  would both experience the thrill and empowerment of the movement art. Although I can no longer count myself as an aspiring traceur (a practitioner of parkour), I retain a genuine admiration for people who live and breath the form or indeed any 'grassroots' expression of the body, e.g. breakdancers. 

The so-called urban movements of breakdancing, parkour, tricking, free-running are archetypal examples of the outward intelligence that imbues each and everyone of our bodies. These activities emerged in a po-faced society (i.e. the Western world) that quite drastically severed being from body, at least from the time Descartes proclaimed 'I think therefore I am'. The body is seen in this society as an automaton, its principal raison d'etre being to transport the head, which carries the brain, around. If one is to get ahead in life in this society, the qualities associated with the body, such as emotions, are to be reined in by the rational mind. Thus self-expression and exploration of outward bodily intelligence through movement – in the way of the breakdancer or contemporary dancer or traceur – remain at best a fringe activity practised by good-for-nothing loafers. Additionally, we are conditioned to ignore the body's inward intelligence – exactly its emotions, sensations and messages because these are seen as being beyond reason and therefore not conducive to furthering the aims of the economy. Society's belief in the primacy of reason and its presumed source, the mind, which is treated as quite separate from the body, has conditioned us to give very little thought to the way we carry our bodies – until some form of pain or illness beckons.

When we do get moving, many of us take up fitness activities that treat the body as an automaton, an object that needs tending to in a mechanical way. Hence the plethora of classes at the gym with names like 'Arms and Abs'. 

Whenever you run, cycle or swim, you set your body on an automatic journey of repetitive motion. Once you attain a comfortable level of speed and oxygen intake, your mind disengages further from the body, carried away from the present moment and down the frenetic stream of your consciousness. Your body goes on autopilot, its task being essentially mindless, a no brainer. 

Crucially, through the constant repetitive motion of these activities, you reinforce movement patterns down to the cellular level of your body, whether or not those movement patterns are beneficial to your being's overall wellness. I often observe runners with poor alignment and technique, which means that they are having to use more muscular force than is necessary if they paid attention to allowing their bones and joints to move freely and therefore function properly as a weight-carrying framework. 

Please understand that I have nothing against running or cycling per se. I think these are wonderful activities that have their place in keeping us healthy and happy but only when they're engaged with mindfully (and certainly not in a gym). My point here is that these activities do not generally ask us to be intelligent with our bodies. A part from improving aerobic fitness, strength and speed, they do not test the body's agility, co-ordination, balance and ability to improvise. By focussing on the measurable aspects of fitness (aerobic metabolism, strength and speed), these activities – and gym activities in general – treat the body exactly like a machine, and an entity that's separate from who we are. 

So back now to parkour.... Without further ado, here is the email that I wrote to my friend circa Dec 2011.

***

Dear C,

I've just returned from a very enlightening and personal trip to Paris! I have been dying to write to you for the last couple of days because of something that happened to me while I was there. An epiphany of sorts! Paris is fascinating not only for its vast and rich history but for its not inconsiderable contribution to 20th century urban culture. This is apparent in the facade of the city: its resplendent beauty is interrupted and stitched through with a forbidding postwar brutality. M and I visited La Defense, the business district that was designed over the last 50 years, and all we could see were the endless possibilities for the traceur bent on reclaiming the urban sphere, not to mention anyone else interested in realising their full citizenship in an iconoclastic way. Our experience was amplified by our discovery of an issue of Stradda, a Parisian magazine, in a quaint dusty bookshop in Montmatre that featured traceurs, breakdance crews and street circus freaks.

As Steve Pavlina rightly reminds us "Humans are not meant to be raised in cages, you poor thing". M & I are more and more convinced that human beings are not built for sedentary living. The nature of children is always instructive. Without computer games and the internet, you can barely get them to sit still.

Modern life has made our minds very clever but also made us very dumb about our bodies. The upshot is that we don't need to become cyborgs before becoming less than human.

The rigidities and conventions of modern life have alienated most of us from our bodies. When we were children we were wholly, unconsciously in touch with our instinct to move and to explore the miracle of our bodies. Have you ever seen a child fascinated by his or her own feet? 

Then we grow up and somehow it becomes embarrassing for us to spontaneously break out in dance on the streets or do stretches while queueing for the toilets at a shopping mall. If anyone of us harbours an urge to dance (and sing) in public, the urges are quickly snuffed out by self-censorship. These activities are seen as spectacle that have their place on stage or in the movies. Despite everyone's ability to dance and be creative with their bodies, society has cordoned off bodily expression from the masses behind professions (e.g. the dance profession) and purpose-built spaces (e.g. nightclubs, even gyms). (I am reminded of a  girl, possibly aged 10 or 11 years old, who was behind me in a queue for the toilets at Gare du Nord in Paris. To kill time, she was marking out what looked like a street dance sequence. Her mother or guardian gestured that she should dampen it down despite the fact that she was being far from disruptive. Parents always know best.)

Does it seem absurd to you that in order for us to move our bodies expressively we have to allocate time to do it, and that most of us do it in expensive cages e.g. gyms and nightclubs? 

We have access to streets, offices, corridors, train stations, parks in which there are no laws preventing us from moving in any which way we want but we are socialised to use most of these vast spaces for simply getting from A to B. Our cities, after all, were built to mobilise the masses as efficiently as possible for the sake of the economy! 

Unlike children who freely climb here, swing there, bend, twist, shake whenever they please, most of us have neutered our physical vocabulary to movements that enable us to uphold the very system that has encouraged this impoverished vocabulary. The saddest example of this is, of course, the daily car and train commuter. 

There is no poetry in our movements, only functionality. We've come to believe that the poetry of movement, or dance, is something you have to go to a special school to learn; that not every body can be a canvas for free exploration. Many of the moves that I learn in my street dance classes initially feel 'unnatural', but I see nothing inherently unnatural about them.

Coming back to Paris. Maartens and I were very lucky to chance upon a vast exhibition at the Centre Pompidou on the history of contemporary dance. Seeing footage, photography, models, artworks of this art form, in which the aesthetic and athletic perfection of classical ballet is subverted in the development of more conceptual forms of dance that are truer to the human spirit, touched me in the most unexpected way. While the intellectual aspects of contemporary dance may not be accessible to all, the forms of bodily expression it contains are. (We should all be able to roll around on the floor, jerking this way and that, like a serpent, without embarrassment, if we so wish!) This realisation that such bodily expression is practised by so few, in so few places, and under so few circumstances really upset me. While we place so much emphasis on the right to freedom of speech in the public realm, why aren't there more people defending the right to freedom of bodily expression?

Our dumbness or blindness to our bodies comes down to our lack of body awareness. I'm not talking about the issues we have with our weight and diet and so on. The fact is, most of us have little consciousness of our habitual patterns of movement as well as of the movement aptitudes of our bodies. I realised this as I studied the movements of this particularly elegant woman at a cafe in Paris. As she took off her coat and mounted a stool, she did so in such a graceful manner I could almost see a series of dance moves materialising. But I wagered that she had no idea how she looked as she moved nor how she could consciously express herself with her natural elegance. 

So, where to from here? As a first step to bringing the body back into the fold of every living moment, and to shake up our sedentary modern lifestyles, M and I recently started doing simple physical exercises at our respective workplaces. There is nothing new about this. But unless you work for progressive companies like Google where rollerblading around the work campus is de rigueur, most of us, as members of standard corporate cultures, are likely to attract looks of incomprehension if not downright discomfort from colleagues whenever they catch one of us doing a set of push-ups by the desk. Both of us can vouch for this! (As an aside, both M and I have wondered why it is that only certain corporate executives get to enjoy the privilege of a personal putting green in their offices.) The good news is, despite the wall of resistance, I have had one first-hand account, from a colleague, that having the urge to move isn't unique to me! "I just want to get up and run around," she said while remaining plastered to her seat. 

What M and I are doing is not radical at all. If anything, we're introducing something natural - our urge to move - into an unnatural way of life.

When I've been very bored, I have fantasised about breakdancing and doing acrobatics in the middle of the office, parkouring over office partitions and on desks. In fact, at the dance exhibition I mentioned, M & I were very impressed by the filmographic work of the Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson. It was a video (set to music but not a music video) of a creative work place on a working day. Everything looks normal until certain 'employees' do freeze-frame hip hop moves mimicking the nature of the work at that work space in the middle of real employees going about their work. 

Workplaces aside, M & I have also started to use the vast amounts of space we have as residents of a city for purposes other than to get from point A to B. For instance, while waiting for friends at the entrance of a Metro station in Paris, the two of us did some stretching to the inevitable bemusement of passersby (and a dog). We've also practised dances we both learned while waiting for a train. 

At 27, I think I might have found my calling. I want a hand in changing the prevailing system to one that encourages all of us to use our bodies more expressively every day. It's very idealistic, and I have scarcely formed a plan of how I'm going to do it.

As Nietzsche said: "Every day I count wasted in which there has been no dancing". So together with traceurs who are reclaiming the surfaces of their cities, I want every person to reclaim and celebrate the miracle of his/her body.
That's everybody.

Can yoga be considered an art form?

I was mining my brains the other day for an example of a creative activity that I do regularly – besides writing. I was prompted to explore this route while flipping through an old copy of Wallpaper*, that pretentious design magazine that still charms my socks off. It happened to be the 'handmade' issue. As I blithely examined the many objects of desire and their makers embalmed in matte high definition, the question of whether I could ever join the artisanal trade surfaced. Did I have it in me to produce something tangible and of value that spoke of some creative identity? Obnoxiously (although not entirely surprisingly) the immediate thought that stole into the theatre of my mind was a resolute non! As if that wasn't enough, the self-reproach brought with it my old (but valid) conviction that my hands have and will always lack the dexterity demanded to make things that people actually want to buy. It's an ability gap that explains my genuine bewilderment each time I see contestants on the Great British Bake-Off pipe macaroons into perfect little mounds. To my enemies: if you ever want to undermine me in the quickest, most effective way, ask me to untie a knot or thread a needle. I will go into a frightful tizz.

To understand where this post is going, the magazine flipping was my way of further decompressing after finishing my sixth yoga session for the week (it was a uniquely productive week I must say). After doing so much yoga, my mind was on higher plains where splendid insights happen. Including this one: Wait a minute... Yoga is art... isn't it?

If someone had put this statement to me just a few months before, I would have deemed it a highly risible sentiment, an affected current of hot air in the same realm as £60 leggings from Sweaty Betty http://www.sweatybetty.com/. But now, with said lightheaded mind shift, the thought made a certain kind of sense to me. Even my core was resonating with it and not because the class I'd just finished focussed solely on sucking up the elusive mula bandha.

Like the chemistry between lovebirds, this realisation happily defied words. Yet I felt the compulsion to capture it in the best way I know how. In words in other words. Typically, my scriber's kit consisted only of the notepad on my phone. So clumsily I tapped the following:

Yoga is an art form. Not just in the sense of sculpting the body but as a visceral, creative process by which I mean space is created for the mind-body to explore and express itself; pushing boundaries, seeking the line between comfort and discomfort – emotionally as well as physically. Getting to know oneself at its core, and what's common to all humanity. Unlike dance, the outward expression of yoga is driven by an internal inquiry into the nature of the mind's interplay with the body, and the feeling and implications of the body's commitment to the postures (asanas) – many of them unconventional rather than unnatural. Who is to say which poses are natural?

I know right? I was surprised too! Now onto the difficult but fun bit: parsing this subterranean muttering.

Yoga is a creative process

Take Paschimottanasana, that hamstring-lengthening forward folding pose that's about as simple to do as its name is to pronounce. Know it? Your legs are straight out in front of you as you fold your torso forward with the aim of touching your chest to your knees (or shins if you have an extra special something) while keeping your spine as straight as possible. This is one of those poses in which it really helps to have a sense of humour. Only when you are able to laugh at yourself are you likely to be kind to your body in a pose that can potentially do a lot of damage. Being aggressive with the pose is otherwise about as effective as losing it big time towards a rebellious teenager. Your body senses your aggression and so naturally puts up its defenses, making you feel even stiffer and more frustrated than you wish to be.

To get the most out of the pose, then, you need to disarm your body with compassion and humour. In so doing, your body relaxes and becomes more receptive to being 'duped' out of its comfort zone. A relaxed body will naturally open up. It's analogous to enjoying that eureka moment of creative insight while soaking in the bath.

The language of opening up is the breath. I find that by drawing in deep breaths to generate some 'prana' (energy-giving life force or qi as the Chinese call it), I gradually massage away the bits in my body that feel constricted and uncooperative. Breathing animates the dark spaces in my body, infusing vitality into every cell. At the same time my body sends live feedback to my mind, signalling whether I should deepen further into the pose or simply be content with the stage I'm at. It's all very intelligent and unpremeditated.

As long as I'm in the pose, my mind is constantly dialoguing with my body, creating the space that might have been elusive yesterday and might very well be elusive again tomorrow. Meanwhile, my mind gains firsthand knowledge of the state and mood of my body, and its current perimeters. The attentiveness and dialoguing is the mind-body* 'internal inquiry' that you might recall from my stream of consciousness set out above. (*It is in fact my conviction that the mind and body are inseparable. Not only do they constantly talk to each other, what affects one affects the other. But in this post, I will save myself the tedium and simply refer to the mind-body with the abbreviated 'body'.)

How is this like art you ask? I imagine the yogi here as a potter getting acquainted with a chunk of clay of a certain quality then applying her knowledge and craftsmanship to shape it in the best way she can. In yoga (or indeed any movement activity), your body is the material you've got to play with.

Getting acquainted with your body means tuning into its condition in the present moment. Just as you get different qualities of clay, which can depend as much on its temperature as its intrinsic nature, your body is never the same from one day or moment to the next. Getting the most out of poses like Paschimottanasana – and to avoid injury – requires you to be attentive and responsive to your body's momentary urges. This means outcomes necessarily vary. But just as being blocked as an artist can be soul destroying, the body's volatility can be similarly frustrating for the yogi who is trained to think only in terms of linear progression. Why, she asks, could she comfortably touch her toes yesterday and barely do so today?

The upside of the body's mercurial nature, however, is that it keeps things interesting. There is no such thing as a dull routine in yoga when practised mindfully. Like the creative process, yoga is a journey, and the yogi's raw material – the mind-body – is an organic, living, changeable thing.

Looked at this way, Paschimottanasana can be much more than just a way of stretching a notoriously tight muscle group. It functions as a vehicle for exploring who you are as a mind-body. And because many people struggle with the pose, you may be inclined to spare a thought for the rest of humanity while in the pose! Wouldn't that be nice?

Not only that, as a process of self discovery, yoga shines a light on how bloody amazing our anatomy really is. For instance, raising both arms to align vertically by the ears (without scrunching up the neck) depends on a complex mechanism that belies the apparent simplicity of the action. To do it in the most unobstructive way, your mind needs to tell your body to rotate your upper arms away from your body – i.e. externally rotate the arms, as a yoga teacher would say – as you raise them to vertical. All the while, your shoulder blades need to simultaneously rotate upwards and outwards away from your spine. Did you even know that you can consciously control the various muscles on your back to realise this movement? I didn't until I started doing yoga.

Yoga tests boundaries

Yoga is challenging. Yes. It. Is. Anyone who has ever tried to break their desk-bound habit by doing Adho Mukha Svanasana or 'downward facing dog' knows yoga can be a total mind-body bruiser.

To quote one of my favourite yoga teachers, Mimi Kuo-Deemer, yoga gives you the chance to 'play your edge'. That is, to explore the limits of what is physically and mentally possible for you at a given moment.

One of the best tests of one's limitations is when defying gravity. One of my favourite poses is Bakasana or 'crow pose', which literally asks you to hang in the balance. You begin by assuming a squat position, your legs about the width of your yoga mat. You then place both hands flat down on the ground in front of you. To prepare to take flight, you tuck your knees up into your armpits and carefully gauge how much you should tip your entire body forward onto your triceps so that your feet can float away from the ground while your are in balance!

The forces of physics may remain constant, but in my experience, my own harmony with these forces is not. Like many creative activities, the process of getting into an arm balance is a playful exploration of the body's capabilities and the mind's willingness to let it assume an unconventional shape. At the same time, the pose requires a certain amount of bloodymindedness (e.g. success in the pose requires the momentary suspension of fear) not to mention intense concentration lest one falls painfully out of it. Luckily, just as the mind has a memory, so does the body. It therefore does get easier.

Yoga uncovers the soul

As in all forms of expressive art, yoga encourages practitioners to strip away their guard and expose their vulnerable selves. True expression comes at the expense of the ego and all its undermining chatter. The exemplary pose that comes to my mind is Anjaneyasana or 'crescent moon'. It's an asana of sheer surrender short of outright prostration. You're in a lunge, on one knee, your hip flexors on the extended leg are stretched good as you tilt your pelvis forwards. You raise your arms towards your ears, lifting your ribcage and tightening your abdomen so as not to compress your lower back. If all goes well, these actions serve to open your chest up to the sky, exposing your heart to all and sundry. In facilitate the process, you hang your ego out to dry so that your inhibitions can slide away to the beat of each breath. Personal experience has taught me that tightness or discomfort while in the pose usually correlates with how much pent up emotion or stress I bring to my practice. The pose therefore challenges the yogi to really let go and perhaps make way for strokes of genius à la Jackson Pollock or Charlie Parker!

Yoga returns to a place of innocence

Although there are better and worse ways to align the body while in a posture, yoga offers you a lot of freedom to assume bodily shapes not typically sanctioned by modern society. It is the very strictures of being chair-bound and screened off from our spiritual and corporeal natures that cause so many of us to become dumb in our bodies. While there's a lot of talk in the media and pop culture about the dumbing down of our minds by Google and reality television etc. comparatively little noise has been made about the concurrent dumbing down of our bodies by modern living. Yet this process begins from the moment we enter into that self-conscious phase known as adolescence. It is during this hormonal chapter that we are socially conditioned to whittle down the immense vocabulary of our bodies that our childhood selves once freely enjoyed exploring. Unless you're a gymnast, who at 16 would voluntarily walk on their hands, scamper around on all fours or climb monkey bars?

With school curriculums around the world singularly focussed on shaping minds for a life of employment, kids everywhere are being taught to drive a wedge between their minds and bodies. Then once they hit adulthood, their minds and bodies no longer work together in a meaningful way beyond getting from point A to point B in a prescribed manner.

Also, what kind of an adult would freely wish to gallivant around the city in bare feet? Probably not somebody who is 'right in the mind'. In fact, who actually consciously notes that they have feet in the absence of painful aberrations like bunions and ingrown nails?

The twin evils of a drastically pared down bodily vocabulary and detachment from the ground we stand on undercuts our body's natural intelligence, from balance to coordination to agility.

So being barefooted in yoga and taking poses like 'child's pose' as an adult effectively amounts to thrusting a big middle finger at the caged existence of modern life. In yoga, you are encouraged to assume postures that look silly to any self-respecting adult but would be eagerly imitated by a child. An example resonant with the times is learning how to 'twerk' the proper way! Your legs are astride and pigeon toed as you fold forward at the hip joint while keeping your spine super straight. But in order to keep your spine straight, you need to tilt your sit bones straight up towards the sky so that your bum sticks right out. I'd like to see Miley Cyrus twerk this way and then come into a tripod headstand. Only then may she gain my respect!

Yoga is poetry in motion

In the kind of yoga I do, you don't just assume postures in isolation. In vinyasa flow yoga, you move in a sequence and, importantly, you synchronise each movement in the sequence with a breath. One way of interpreting the term 'vinyasa' is the linking of the breath with movement. As your practice matures, you begin working toward a state in which your body, guided by prana via the breath as opposed to the will or ego, moves seamlessly into and out of postures in sequence while striking the right balance between tension and relaxation in each pose. Despite the varying intensities of the poses, the mind will ideal rise above the effort in an almost trance-like tranquil state. I can only imagine how an adept yogi is able to let their intuition (rather than an outside teacher) guide them through a sequence of postures that is effortlessly tuned to what their body needs. In this state, the body is free to transmogrify like water filling different shaped vessels, as Bruce Lee once said. The ultimate happy state is one of 'flow', which is what the eminent psychologist Csikszentmihalyi defined as the complete absorption in an activity where both ego and time fall away.

To summarise: the art of yoga can be in the form of the internal inquiry you make while in a pose as well as the egoless flow of movement from pose to pose. It's poetry in motion! And yet, even at this level of adeptness, one's yoga practice continues to change. The body – being alive – naturally continues to evolve (or devolve, as the case may be). Over time, the body will strengthen, and yield, and age, inevitably drudging up new challenges for the mind-body.

But the artist in the yogi thrives on that which her conscious self cannot control as it is a genuine source of creativity. It's like improvisational jazz. You are given a few elemental building blocks that beget multiple permutations and possibilities.

One important difference between art, including music, and yoga is that there is never a finished 'product' in yoga. An individual's yoga practice (as opposed to yoga as a sport or trademarked method) can never be commoditised.

One of the first lessons I learned from my yoga teacher Mimi is that, beyond the body's own daily evolution, a yoga practice can be livened up simply by entering into poses with a beginner's mind. As creatures of habit, we tend to do sequences like the sun salutations in the same mindless way after we've got the basics down pat. This is the dark side of unconscious competence. So, says Mimi, why not challenge your experience by tricking your mind into thinking outside of a locked pattern of movement?

I have to admit I don't always do this. Sometimes I'm just in the mood to get the sun salutes over and done with when my teacher is inclined to power us up with chattarangas (the yoga push-up) ad infinitum. But on the occasions when I do go tabula rasa, I find my experience is invigorated with sensations, space and harmony that are pleasantly unfamiliar.

I guess the upshot here is that on the days I feel creatively stunted, doing a bit of yoga is the medicine I need to get those creative juices flowing again!

What I think about when I'm running: Fjällräven

When I go running (which isn't often), my mind is usually humming with the following thoughts: am I running on the balls of my feet as opposed to thumping down on my heels and doing my knees in while I'm at it? + am I breathing through my nose so that a) I can allow oxygen to properly massage my internal organs and b) I don't look like a dog panting on a hot day when it's only the beginning of March? + did I lock both door locks when I left the house? I live in Hackney, after all.

But today I also thought about Fjällräven, and the mixed feelings it engenders in me.

Okay, so let me back track by way of explanation. About two years ago, I started seeing funny looking satchels stamped with Fjällräven on the backs of people walking and cycling around Hackney. It was an inexplicable sartorial movement that had suddenly emerged in which its participants, I not being one of them, traded in this indecipherable codeword like a modern day version of Freemasonry. 

But it was right in my face, despite the fact that I have only just learned how to spell 'Fjällräven' so that I could Google it.

Just to be clear, I don't usually care much for the latest fashion fancies. But because Fjällräven sounds suspiciously Scandinavian (associations: progressive, simplicity, NOMA, elves), I could hardly ignore the phenomenon entirely, try as I might. 

Brings back unflattering memories

Two years on and there's no sign that the Fjällräven takeover of the streets of East London is slowing down. I'm also where I was two years ago in relation to the 'movement'. On the outside peering in. I've been held back from joining the fray by a nagging question mark over how unattractively utilitarian the brand's satchels look. Despite coming in all sorts of primary colours, the satchels are symbols of austerity. They look just like the kind of backpacks from my childhood that I didn't want because only the poor kids wore bags without furry animal prints on them. As it turns out, Fjällräven backpacks were designed in the 1970s as a solution to the back problems of children saddled with unwieldy 1950s backpacks. But it's hard enough for an adult, let alone a child, to be wholeheartedly convinced by the brilliance of function over form. In any case, looks can be deceiving; a Fjällräven satchel will set you back a cool £60-£80.

Moreover, for all their hardiness and lack of gloss, the satchels don't seem to weather all that well. From the evidence on the streets, they seem to stain and fade easily. Which is probably why they are perfectly suited to their primary market – hipsters (or should I say 'early adopters') in shabby chic East London. I include in this crowd the Fjällräven-clad young woman who sparked my thinking about the subject during my run when she overtook me on her bicycle.

Fjällräven's takeover of London's streets is both a good and a bad thing.

It's remarkable how trends come into being, especially when their lackeys are divorced from the original philosophy behind the product at the forefront of the trend. I wonder how many of Fjällräven backpack wearers know about the social significance of their purchase and unwitting brand ambassadorship? Are they even fans of trekking – the brand's original niche? Fjällräven's website confirms my long-held suspicion that the brand is another one of Scandinavia's triumphs in down-to-earth social progressiveness. It proudly advertises itself as a 50-year-old conscious enterprise doing good work for the environment and small businesses as well as taking care to look after its employees. Not least, its products, as illustrated by its signature satchel, are mostly worthy design solutions, and mostly for outdoor adventurers not urban creatures.

And yet for all its worthiness, I cannot bring myself to support the brand – at least with my money. Quite apart from the fact that I still think a Fjällräven backpack leaves much to be desired aesthetically, its near ubiquity on Hackney's streets tells me that if I were caught wearing an as-yet unstained version, whatever little credit I have in the trend stakes will be hoovered up in no time. (So I lied. I do care about fashion fancies.) So while Fjällräven may wish to raise its believers' social capital because it is associated with All That's Good on the planet, its very popularity in this corner of the planet may just undercut that wish. It seems, then, that I will have to wait until the hype has gone the way of the Macarena so that Fjällräven can go back to being an obscure hard-to-pronounce brand that people buy into for no other reason then that its products work. In other words, better Kathmandu than Herschel.

So much for what I was thinking about when I went running today.

"We are not the victim of our genes" and other life changing lessons

I was brought up to believe that reality is fundamentally materialistic. Not in the acquisitive sense, of course, but in the sense that reality is a) made up only of physical matter (no matter how small the scale) and b) all matter (from planets to electrons) can be measured (if it can't it doesn't exist) and c) all matter is governed by predictable, deterministic laws of nature. In this stark view of reality, there is no room for blurred grey areas, freewill, romanticism and religion. Airy-fairy terms like 'spirit' , 'soul', 'miracles', and 'God' all make reference to things that are immaterial. To resolve this awkward affront to the materialist world order, these terms should be accorded the conceptual status of other figments of the imagination, such as 'Santa Claus'. And the ultimate mysterious ephemera that has plagued philosophers for centuries – known as 'consciousness' – should be brought down to earth and reduced to electrical signals taking place within the physical brain. Even that grand antithesis of Newtonian determinism, quantum physics, should be co-opted so that a mechanistic logic can continue to prevail unto eternity.

I'm writing this post having just finished Bruce Lipton's The Biology of Belief, my curiosity with immaterial reality and its place in science freshly stoked. I trace this curiosity back to the tectonic quarter-life crisis I weathered in 2012. I was an atheist until events in life catapulted me onto the fence of agnosticism. But the aftershocks of the crisis were so deep that I detached myself even further from organised religion and became a self-described 'spiritual' person for whom believing isn't just about seeing.

It was around this time that I took up yoga and qigong. Both of these ancient practices focus on unblocking a person's energy channels for the purpose of fostering inner vitality. The transformation that resulted from my new hobby was almost immediate (although it has taken some effort since to maintain it). I became calmer, yet more focussed; more flexible yet stronger; more connected with my surroundings and less self-centred. My empathic side got its place in the sun, beaming not only towards my fellow human beings but also towards nature. I realised more and more that humans are part of a greater ecosystem and that the disharmony we have created with our environment by being too brain smart and testosterone-driven is leading to our demise with a lot of collateral damage. 

So it was against this mental backdrop that I came across Lipton's book.

Just like me, Lipton was a dyed-in-the-wool materialist. But unlike me, he spent the last 35 or so years studying the behaviour of human cells and can count among his various achievements the mastery of stem cells cloning. The Biology of Belief is a science book written for the layperson and it is very well done. Lipton writes lucidly with a knack for using easy-to-understand analogies to convey the fiddly bits of how cells work at a microscopic level as well as more theoretical concepts. 

Unlike most other popular science books, the backbone of The Biology of Belief is a touching account of Lipton's personal transformation from being a scientific materialist to being someone who has probably found an answer to how science and spirituality intersects.

To save you reading the book (although I highly recommend it) I present you with 8 lessons I learned from Lipton. Together they have happy implications for preventative health care and not so happy implications for conventional medicine and the pharmaceutical industry.

Lesson 1: Going beyond Darwin: we are not victims of our genes

Despite incredible advances in science, Newtonian mechanics still rules in biological research. This is most apparent in the reigning 'ideology' of genetic determinism: our fates are sealed by the genes we have inherited. But as Lipton says, “defective genes acting alone only account for about 2% of our total disease load”, and that the most common killers, such as heart disease and diabetes, “are not the result of a single gene, but of complex interactions among multiple genes and environmental factors”. In his mind, the biotech industry is barking up the wrong tree.

Lipton is an advocate of a new(ish) strain in biological research known as epigenetics, which hands power over to the environment in determining how well or ill you'll turn out to be. “Epigenetics [is] the study of the molecular mechanisms by which environment controls gene activity.”

The “molecular mechanisms” referred to form the crux of a Copernican Revolution in the thinking about cell biology. The conventional wisdom is that the brain of the cell is contained in its nucleus, which houses its genetic material – DNA. That's because it was assumed that the behaviour of the cell – and when writ large as an entire multicellular organism – must be determined by that genetic material. Environment has very little influence on behaviour. Lipton undercuts this thinking with a thought experiment (although there's no doubt that he's actually done this) whereby the nucleus of a cell is removed – a process known as enucleation. Would an enucleated cell survive? If the cell's nucleus is functionally equivalent to the brain, you'd think that chopping its head off in this way would kill it. But such cells do survive! An enucleated cell can survive for up to two or more months! What removing the genetic material does is destroy the cell's ability to make copies of itself and to replace bits of itself that have gone faulty through normal wear and tear. The inability to keep itself in mint condition is what eventually kills the cell rather than the lack of genes.

Lesson 2: It's the membrane, stupid

So where is the cell's brain? Lipton says it's the cell membrane (mem-brain, get it?), which is essentially the cell's skin. If you were to remove it, the cell wouldn't last a day. The membrane is what allows the cell to communicate with its surroundings, and therefore to come up with ways to survive in an ever changing environment. Similarly, us humans communicate with our surroundings via receptors in our skin, in our eyes, on our tongues, inside our ears etc. A person who is blind, deaf, has aguesia (the inability to taste) and can't detect when his hand is submerged in burning coals won't survive for very long.

So it is the function of the cell membrane that gives the cell intelligence. Intelligence, widely understood, is an organism's ability to interact with its environment in a way that leads it to survive (and hopefully reproduce). The stimulus-response mechanism that's implicated here is the most basic unit of information exchange. The cell membrane is therefore the frontier of intelligence! According to Lipton, it is the molecular mechanisms happening at the cell membrane that governs cell behaviour. It is at the membrane that the cell is able to detect and respond to certain environmental stimuli, chemical (e.g. nutrients, hormones) or electromagnetic. And it is at this critical juncture that the environmental stimuli are able to switch genes on and off.

Lesson 3: It's the environment, stupid

“Environmental influences, including nutrition, stress and emotions, can modify those genes without changing their basic blueprint” (Lipton, p.37)

This is one of the tenets of epigenetics. To begin to even understand it, we have to go back to Biology 101. I'll let Lipton do the teaching with his 'sleeve' analogy:

“In the chromosome, the DNA forms the core, and the [regulatory] proteins cover the DNA like a sleeve. When the genes are covered, their information cannot be “read”. Imagine your bare arm as a piece of DNA representing the gene that codes for blue eyes. In the [cell] nucleus, this stretch of DNA is covered by bound regulatory proteins, which cover your blue-eye gene like a shirtsleeve, making it impossible to be read. How do you get that sleeve off? You need an environmental signal to spur the “sleeve” protein to change shape, i.e., detach from the DNA's double helix, allowing the gene to be read. Once the DNA is uncovered, the cell makes a copy of the exposed gene. As a result, the activity of the gene is “controlled” by the presence or absence of the ensleeving proteins, which are in turn controlled by environmental signals.” (Lipton, p.37-38)

So this picture of how things work at a cellular level completely overturns the conventional Primacy of DNA doctrine whereby “DNA is implicated as a “source” that controls the character of the cell's proteins” and therefore the structure and behaviour of the cell (Lipton, p.33).

As mentioned above, the cell membrane is where all the intelligent action is happening. The membrane is embedded with tens of thousands of what Lipton calls “perception switches” or protein receptors. Each of these are “tuned” to or activated by a very specific environmental stimulus. For instance, histamine receptors are activated by histamine (us allergic types will have many times experienced the work of histamine) while estrogen receptors are activated by estrogen. Different nerve cells in the central nervous system are activated by chemical secretions known as neurotransmitters, enzymes and so on.

It's the simultaneous reading by these reflexive perception switches of the cell's environment which gives rise to the cell's complex behaviour.

According to Lipton, the bottom line is that we are designed by nature to fit a certain environment. “In fact, every functional protein in our body is made as a complementary “image” of an environment signal.” (Lipton, p.159)

Interesting thought: If humans are made in the image of God, then the environment is God.

Unfortunately, we have so radically changed our environment that our genetic makeup is no longer complementary to it. In other words, the rate of cultural evolution has so overtaken the rate of biological evolution that it has led to what the evolutionary biologist and author Daniel Lieberman calls “mismatches”. This mismatch is most evident in health. In his book The Story of the Human Body (2013)  he argues that diseases including certain cancers, heart disease, Type II diabetes, osteoporosis and even myopia (short-sightedness) are all consequences of our body's evolutionary adaptations being out of synch with our modern lifestyles and environment. After all, our bodies were built to move (a lot) and not to sit in chairs all day snacking away at sugary and processed foods.

In other words, certain environments can literally bring out the best and worst in people.

Lesson 4: Could Lamarckism be back in fashion?

Lipton is now one of many scientists who is resuscitating Jean-Baptiste Lamarck's evolutionary theory, which was superceded by, and therefore a victim of, Darwin's 'survival of the fittest' theory. Lamarck focussed a great deal on the interaction between an organism and its environment, as well as on how the cooperation between organisms and species allows entire ecosystems to evolve and thrive. In other words, it presented the antithesis of Darwin's theory which focusses on individual survival in a cut-throat world where every man is for himself. But despite the supremacy of Darwinianism in biology (and, more worryingly, in politics, economics and sociology), biologists have long recognised the phenomenon of symbiosis or the interdependence of organisms for collective survival. To understand symbiosis, look no further than your own gut, which supports a vast society of microbes. Without these microbes, you would have trouble digesting your food and fighting unwelcome pathogens. Equally, without your need to digest food and fight unwelcome pathogens, there would be no need for these microbes.

Yet it appears that a systems theory of biology as advocated by Lipton still remains at the fringes of biological research.

What's most interesting for the purposes of this exploration is that the aspect of Lamarckism that was laughed into its grave by Darwinians is now being given a second chance. This is the thesis that organisms can pass on novel adaptations or traits acquired during their lifetimes, to their offspring. The German biologist August Weismann famously conducted an experiment to test the validity of Lamarckism by chopping off the tails of rats and seeing whether their offspring would be similarly tail-less. Of course they weren't. So much for Lamarckism then.

Now fast forward a century to studies that show that epigenetic modifications to genetic activity can be passed on to younger generations. Recall that environmental stimuli can modify gene activity without changing the DNA sequence of a gene. This can be done by modifying the 'sleeve' of regulatory proteins that has bound to the gene, thereby switching it on or off.

Lipton says: “[T]hose modifications, epigeneticists have discovered, can be passed on to future generations as surely as DNA blueprints are passed on via the double helix.”

But the story doesn't end there. This sharing of epigenetic modifications doesn't just happen between generations. Genetic information can be transferred among members of different species through a mechanism duly known as genetic transfer. Understanding this illuminates the dangers of tinkering with nature artificially, not least by genetic engineering. Lipton cites a 2004 study (p.14) that showed that people who eat GM food are susceptible to altering the character of the beneficial bacteria in their intestines. Implication: “There is no wall between species”.

Lesson 5: Quantum physics gets to the heart of life

Having been a materialist for much of his professional career, Lipton ignored quantum physics for as long as he possibly could. Quantum physics had no place in the Newtonian mechanistic understanding of biology in which all players can be measured in mass and weight (atoms and molecules) and events happen in a linear fashion à la Newtonian mechanics (A causes B causes C...). When Lipton finally woke up to the power of quantum physics, the effect on his thinking was transformative. He recognised the importance in biology of the fundamental principle that an atom can both act like a particle and energy (waves) and that, ultimately, mass and energy are inextricably intertwined as in Einstein's famous E = MC2.

“Each atom is unique because the distribution of its negative and positive charges, coupled with its spin rate, generates a specific vibration or frequency pattern.” (Lipton, p.87)

For the first time, Lipton could see the revolutionary potential this 'new' physics has on our understanding of health and disease. It was 1982 when he had this epiphany. Alas, biological research remains stuck in the 'dark age' of the reductionist and linear approach of Newtonian mechanics in which cells are merely cogs within the body's assembly line.

“The reductionist model suggests that if there is a problem in the system, evident as a disease or dysfunction, the source of the problem can be attributed to a malfunction in one of the steps along the chemical assembly line.” (Lipton, p.72)

This approach has filled the pockets of the pharmaceutical industry, which is intent on discovering and selling 'magic bullet' drugs to alleviate single sources of malfunction.

This blithely approach ignores the fact that “the flow of information in the quantum universe is holistic.”

“Cellular constituents are woven into a complex web of crosstalk, feedback, and feedforward communication loops. A biological dysfunction may arise from a miscommunication along any of the routes of information flow.”(Lipton, p.72)

An informational minefield

It is therefore crucial that biologists take on a systems approach. Such an approach clarifies why many prescription drugs, which target a certain malfunction in the body, often have side effects, some of them fatal. For instance, it has been shown that synthetic hormone replacement therapy can increase the risk of cardiovascular disease and stroke.

Lesson 6: The primacy of energy

To recap: the epigenetic thesis states that it is the environment that governs the behaviour of everything from single cells to multicellular organisms like humans by controlling the 'reading' of genetic material. The environment includes not only physical stimuli like nutrients, neurotransmitters and hormones but also 'invisible' stuff like electromagnetic radiation i.e. energy.

Apparently there have been “hundreds upon hundreds of scientific studies” that have shown the epigenetic effect that energy has on regulating “DNA, RNA, and protein synthesis...” (Lipton, p.81).

“The behaviour of energy waves is important for biomedicine because vibrational frequencies can alter the physical and chemical properties of an atom as surely as physical signals like histamine and estrogen.” (Lipton, p.86)

We now know that a cell can only survive if it is able to receive and interpret environmental signals. Crucially, its survival depends on the speed and efficiency in which it is able to do this.

Back in 1974, an Oxford University biophysicist named CWF McClare revealed that:

“Energetic signalling mechanisms such as electromagnetic frequencies are a hundred times more efficient in relaying environmental information than physical signals such as hormones, neurotransmitters, growth factors etc.” (Lipton, p.81)

and,

“Energy signals are 100 times more efficient and infinitely faster than physical chemical signalling. What kind of signalling would your trillion-celled community prefer? Do the math!” (Lipton, p.82)

Despite a respectable body of research, the role of energy in biological mechanisms does not feature in biomedical science curriculums in the US (at least). If the life sciences are to progress, there needs to be an interdisciplinary field that encompasses biology with quantum physics, electrical engineering and chemistry.

Perhaps then scientists and those practising 'allopathic' medicine (i.e. the conventional medical practice of using drugs and surgery to fight disease) will take more seriously the power of alternative therapies (e.g. qigong, yoga, reiki, acupuncture etc) that use energy to heal.

Ironically, despite its contempt for alternative therapies, science implicitly acknowledges that every single one of us is a varying energy field. This is why conventional medicine uses such technologies as fMRI, PET and CAT scans to detect abnormalities in a person's energy field.

A person can therefore quite literally have 'good vibes' or 'bad vibes'. Good vibes is a way to describe what is essentially the 'constructive interference' or 'harmonic resonance' of frequencies while bad vibes is a way to describe what is essentially the 'destructive interference' of frequencies. A well-known example of constructive interference is when an opera singer shatters glass because the frequency of her bellowing matches and then heightens that of the frequency of the glass. On a more ephemeral level, an example of constructive interference is the chemistry one feels with another who is on the 'same wavelength'.

It's fascinating how language contains so much implicit wisdom!

Not only this, but the very foundation of an organism's communication with its surroundings is it reading energy fields. If someone with bad vibes walks into a room, it takes an incredibly insensitive person not to notice that person. And yet this kind of insensitivity is abound.

“Because humans are so dependent on spoken and written language, we have neglected our energy sensing communication system. As with any biological function, a lack of use leads to atrophy.” (Lipton, p.90)

Energy healers or people who work to unblock energy channels aim to promote constructive interference in our minds and bodies.

But we can also do this – with our thoughts.

Lesson 7: Mind over Body

After hundreds of years under the rule of Cartesian dualism, the science world has finally reached the stage that it is able to recognise that there is no fundamental difference between mind and body. Even single cells have a mind in that they are aware of their surroundings enough to be able to respond to it.

Furthermore, if mind is simply energy, then, as we saw earlier in the section on quantum physics, mind is entangled with body (matter). Mind and body influence each other.

“Thoughts, the mind's energy, directly influence how the physical brain controls the body's physiology. Thought “energy” can activate or inhibit the cell's function-producing proteins via the mechanics of constructive and destructive interference.” (Lipton, p.95)

This paves the way for our understanding the healing power of positive thinking (constructive interference) and explains a whole lot of mind-over-body phenomena: from why we lose our appetite when we are under great stress, to the placebo effect, to how qigong masters are able to balance their throats on sharp spears, to why yogis are able to walk on scorching hot coals. Lipton also talks about the so-called 'nocebo' effect or the power of negative thinking. He cites a famous 1970s case in America in which a man who was diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus died – but not from having cancer. An autopsy revealed that he only had a few cancerous specks on his liver and one on his lung – certainly nothing fatal.

“Troublesome nocebo cases suggest that physicians, parents, and teachers can remove hope by programming you to believe you are powerless.” (Lipton, p.113)

Again this all comes back to the epigenetic thesis that it is the environment (in this case thoughts) that controls the behaviour of an organism.

It all bodes ill for the pharmaceutical industry. As we've seen: thoughts can propel behaviour more efficiently than physical molecules (e.g. drugs).

Lesson 8: Conscious Parenting and the Subconscious Mind

Does epigenetics have implications for parenting? Lipton cites pioneering research by the likes of Thomas Verney (1981), David Chambers (1998) and Peter W. Nathanielsz (1999) as well as more recent studies that illuminate the unmistakable effect both parents have on the wellbeing of their child while it's still in the womb. The findings extend well beyond congenital disorders such as fetal alcohol syndrome to encompass how parental attitudes and beliefs at the prenatal stage can have a significant effect on the child's eventual physical and mental wellbeing. A child that was conceived with love and the support of friends and family will likely be better off than a child who was unwanted or whose parents were undergoing high levels of stress (emotional, financial etc.) during pregnancy.

Through the principle of epigenetics, parents are unwitting “genetic engineers” of their child's mental and physical wellbeing. So both parents have a duty to their child to maintain a happy and healthy prenatal womb environment.

“In the final stages of egg and sperm maturation, a process called genomic imprinting adjusts the activity of specific groups of genes that will shape the character of the child yet to be conceived.” (Lipton, p.142)

Of course we all know that the environment continues to have an effect on child development after birth.

Lipton talks at length about the formative role of parents, teachers and peers in programming a child's subconscious mind, which, in evolutionary terms, is the oldest chunk of our intelligence that's one above our mammalian instincts.

The conscious mind is the seat of freewill, creativity and self-awareness, and therefore it's no surprise that we are led to believe that it is the conscious mind that controls the levers of our behaviour. Yet, only about 5 per cent of what we call 'the mind' is conscious.

And so it is the other 95 per cent – our subconscious mind – that holds the levels of control. The subconscious mind is a fast, efficient information processor that reads environmental signals both outside and within us and then, in response, it automatically taps into a memory bank of innate instincts, learned behaviours and perceptions. It is the subconscious mind that evaluates moment to moment the signals coming from a changing environment and then determines which learned behaviours and perceptions are most appropriate for that moment. This background humming of activity frees up the conscious mind to daydream about plans and visions for the future or rue over past events. If the subconscious mind is the quiet task master that gets on with it, the conscious mind is the wayward visionary that, for some of us, doesn't get much done!

How does parenting come into all this? The subconscious mind of a young person is like a blank slate. It readily absorbs the attitudes and beliefs and behavioural patterns of parents, caregivers, teachers and friends without discrimination. These attitudes, beliefs and behavioural patterns of other people become 'hardwired' in the subconscious which then shape that person's own attitudes and beliefs about the world. Why do you think it's common for a person to think or act like Mum or Dad? So while the conscious mind gives us a sense of “self”, the subconscious is really a mash-up of thoughts and behaviours coming from outside.

Inheritance, then, is not restricted to the transfer of genes from parent to child.

Sadly, the aims of the conscious mind often clash with those of the subconscious mind. To repeat, the subconscious mind is the quiet task master while the conscious mind is the wayward visionary. And in the business of behavioural control, it is the hardworking subconscious mind that is almost always guaranteed the upper hand. For instance, if you were brought up to believe that life should be about securing a well-paid job in a large corporation, no matter how dull the job, you may find yourself stuck in that job for longer than you'd wished because your conscious mind – the receptacle of your dreams and creativity – is losing the battle with your subconscious mind. Or if you are gay and were raised in a society that believes that homosexuality is a sin against God, then you're likely to face some troubling existential struggles.

In my case, recall at the start of this overly long post that I was programmed to believe that reality is absolute and material. Despite my turn towards a more holistic belief system, I still detect 'tension' within me whenever I read about spirituality and energy healing. The hold of a materialistic worldview is just that strong.

That's why much of modern psychology is geared towards re-programming a person's subconscious, to undo thought patterns that may not be healthy for the individual in a changing environment.

So to end (!) – contrary to the doctrine of genetic determinism, “no matter how “good” one's genes may be, if an individual's nurture experiences are fraught with abuse, neglect, or misperceptions, the realization of the genes' potentials will be sabotaged.” (Lipton, p.146)

In other words, the responsibility for our wellbeing and that of the ones we care for lies with us.