Embodied Cognition (Patreon)

• If you’re new to LMA, start with our table of contents

Metacognition is thinking about thinking and is the default colonial teaching method, especially for sports and physical movement. Liberation Martial Arts, however, fosters embodied cognition where the practitioner attunes to their senses and connects dynamically to their environment. Rather than the closed loop of metacognition, embodied cognition is interconnected. Reconnecting with yourself reconnects you to the environment, and the environment is reconnected to you.

Coloniality defines "environment" as the nonhuman natural world. In Liberation Martial Arts, "environment" means your surroundings, people, community structures, superstructure, and conditions. Your environment is everything. Rejecting colonial ideas means rejecting the colonial definition of words. How we use words matters, so it matters that we are using specific words or common words differently from coloniality.

Prior to spirited training, we embody cognition. Rather than reclaiming our bodies, we re-embody. Once we embody cognition, we can embody wisdom and knowledge. Flow in Liberation Martial Arts is not a mental state but the constant flow and interplay of senses and actions that occur without gap between the individual and their environment.

Embodied knowledge is knowledge gained through the senses, and embodied wisdom is the depth of that knowledge. Another way to think about embodied knowledge is situated knowledge. Rather than random and irrelevant information, it roots knowledge (relevant information plus application) to a situation through experience.

The world moves at game speed. Game speed means being alive and present in the world, especially during physical movement. The speed of action or sport, game speed, is faster than metacognition. For example, recalling information and then processing it, as in thinking about how to process and apply it, is dangerously slow. Being out of your body for that long leads to poor performance and harm.

At game speed, you have to pay attention to your environment and senses. Imagine taking your eyes off the road during a high-speed chase for that long. Imagine being on a call. Even if your eyes are on the road, they're not really on the road. Even being lost in thought can mean missing an exit. The world seems to move faster than it is if you're not paying attention to it. Not attuning to it makes everything slower because of setbacks, having to do something again, or missed opportunities.

Imagine thinking about instruction or processing feedback in the middle of skateboarding, bouldering, kickboxing, grappling, basketball, or catching someone as they're falling. Imagine thinking about what you want to say and waiting for your partner to stop talking rather than listening to them. Imagine a parent being in their head rather than attuning to their child.

Another term for metacognition is self-consciousness. When you are self-conscious during physical movement, you not only get worse at the task but often choke. There's also the problem of working memory; it can only hold so many pieces of information and only for so long, increasing the likelihood of choking. Self-conscious training and memorizing direct instruction not only prevent improvement and learning but can also cause you to regress. Being self-conscious and putting yourself under a microscope requires you to quiet everything else out, including learning and improving. Practice does not always make you better; it can also make you worse.

Metacognition doesn't live in the world. It assumes ample time, space, and low stakes—a world most don't live in. It's a colonial cognition.

The speed of words is slower than game speed. Thoughts are often slower than game speed. There's urgency and stakes when things are alive and dynamic. Many of us exist in a world where our houses are already on fire. When the house is on fire, you don't have the luxury to wax poetics in your mind. You can only perceive and respond. Things that pull you out of perception and action are often called distractions.

Embodied cognition is about developing your senses to better perceive your environment. It's naturalistic cognition. Enhancing the signal from your senses and rooting to your environment means quieting and regulating your internal systems. Embodied cognition means self-regulation.

Self-monitoring runs contrary to self-regulation. In fact, self-regulation keeps the self-monitoring tendency in check. Metacognition means self-monitoring, and it pulls you out of embodied cognition. Thinking about everything you do increases tension and anxiety, agitates your internal systems, boosts internal noise, blocks relevant information from your environment, worsens performance, and increases psychological and physical harm.

If you put novice dart throwers in a room where they can only see the dartboard, given enough tries and time, their performance rapidly improves. When you instruct them and make them aware of their technique, they are forced to self-monitor and get worse despite getting more practice. (My examples are also summaries of academic research.)

Similarly, athletic performance and skill acquisition drop off once you put people in front of a mirror. The mirror induces self-monitoring but also disassociates the performer from their movement. You don't watch your movements as you're doing them; you navigate physical movement through feel. Imagine trying to drive a car where you can't look through the windshield, but instead, you have to look at a monitor giving you a live aerial view of your car. You're disconnected from the experience of driving a car. You can probably still do it, but not nearly as well as you could from your own perspective.

The mirror is the observer's perspective, except reversed. If you have writing on your shirt, the mirror will reverse it. If you point at the mirror with your right hand, it points back with its left. People assume training in front of the mirror is beneficial, but if you think about it, it's obviously not. It disassociates. Why is this not intuitive? You're looking at yourself, processing that information, flipping it in your mind, thinking about how you're moving, and then monitoring yourself to make an improvement. This is metacognition. This is colonial bullshit. You're wasting your time looking at and criticizing yourself rather than looking at the system feeding you bullshit.

Practice and even perfect practice do not make perfect and can often worsen performance. Perfectionism, extreme self-monitoring, often worsens performance. It delays reaction, deteriorates aim, and suppresses adaptability.

These are the problems and dangers of instructor and instruction-led (technique-led) learning—the colonial method. It's a hard process rather than a smooth, flexible, and natural one. More feedback and instruction means more metacognition and self-monitoring, more anxiety about potential feedback, and worse performance.

Worse than metacognition, however, is disassociation. Though disassociation is never named, many popular fitness activities are engineered for disassociation. All elements, from the environment to the use of colors and lights, music and volume, mirrors, instructors, duration, temperature, intensity, conventions, etc., are designed to elicit disassociation (e.g., spinning classes, boot camps, high-interval training classes, etc.) and pull you out of your senses.

Dissociation was perfected in the colonial factory and military systems because alienated workers and soldiers make for better drones and robots. "Robot" originally meant slave. Fitness and exercise deliberately draw from the factory and military systems, just as the US education system does. For a worker to repeat tasks like a machine, they must be alienated from the process and disassociated from themselves and their environment. For an imperial soldier to kill people of color without consciousness, they must be disassociated (however, the military also sorts for people who like that shit). For you to engage in physical movement where you're ignoring signals from your body, ignoring injury, and your internal scream for adaptability and attunement to the greater environment, you must be disassociated.

Rather than disassociation that still carries tension and anxiety while ignoring the systems that alert us of threats, injury, and harm, the LMA approach uses self-regulation where our internal and sensory systems are still active, but tension is reduced to decrease the likelihood of injury. Self-regulation is really self-calibration. You're calibrating to your environment and situation. Tension is a barrier to your actual potential and adaptability to your environment. Self-regulation eases that barrier.

When you dissociate, you're not operating at your actual potential, you're rigid and nonadaptive while insisting on continuing or demanding more workload than you can manage. For the pleasure of capitalism, disassociated people work themselves to injury or death.

When traditional and native cultures ran long distances, they were attuned to the greater environment. It was a necessity and a relationship with the land. In colonial society, ultramarathons are about disassociation and the ability to disembody. Rather than an unwanted effect, that's the goal. Coloniality is not land-based or attuned to the greater environment. Since it only sees itself in the metaphorical mind, everything else is ignored or extracted from, and colonized people are used as alienated bodies or killed.

Disassociation is the opposite of embodied cognition. It's disconnection from your feelings and senses. You're not only uprooted from your environment, your roots are cut. Disassociating from your environment is disassociating from yourself. Connecting to your environment means connecting to yourself. You are living interplay between experience and the world. For coloniality to be successful, embodied cognition must not only be abandoned but erased. It's a cognition you're not allowed to know exists. If you do become aware, you won't be afforded the conditions to develop it, or you will be diverted to a capitalist version.

Connecting only to yourself without the context of your environment assumes you are only information. This is a harmful assumption because not only is there no personhood in a vacuum, but it also reduces and dehumanizes you from living interplay into irrelevant and decontextualized intellectual property. If you are intellectual property, who owns you?

You are not actually connecting with yourself or finding meaning; you are instead isolating yourself from the context of your environment and greater meaning. Coloniality wants you to believe your essence is ultimately capital, and the meaning of life is to refine yourself down to pure fictitious capital.

Capitalism and coloniality already disassociate and alienate you. The oppressor's only answer to its diseases is to sell you more disease—more disassociation and alienation. The last thing it wants is for you to connect your suffering to the system that's causing it. Cognition, or recognition and awareness, is the opposite of disassociation and alienation. However, you can't be aware of your malady if you're constantly bombarded with more malady. You can't be aware that you're drunk if they keep you drinking.

Loud external noise that overloads your ears, eyes, or haptics drowns out and disconnects you from signal—your internal and sensory systems. Rather than one with your environment and yourself, you're disconnected from both. Capitalist coloniality cleverly markets disassociation as "an out-of-body experience" or simply an intense "experience" worth paying lots of money for. Coloniality tells you to pursue intensity, those things that drown out and disconnect you from your senses.

Everything is American football: more intensity, doing things harder, being more rigid, following orders, endless repetition, and ignoring pain. Regardless of the physical activity, it becomes American football. Even if you hate football, you become a football player. If you are an American in America, your physical therapist, massage therapist, talk therapist, and doctor all see the abuse of American football.

Unsurprisingly, things that pull you out of being alive in your environment and the moment are sold as making you feel "alive." Who gets to define "alive"? Watching colonial media's portrayal of genocide and killings, who gets to define anything? The oppressor. Just because they tell us what something is doesn't mean it's true. However, that means pushing back against generations of indoctrination and coloniality. What is coloniality? The set of attitudes, values, ways of knowing, and power structures upheld as normative by Western colonizing societies and serving to rationalize and perpetuate Western dominance.

Aren't we always experiencing the colonial world without our senses? Coloniality's "escapes" and "experiences" are just more intense versions of the same rather than the opposite. Why would they ever want you to escape their system or feel something other than itself? They fool you into thinking you're getting something different by giving you a louder or softer version of the same. Yes, louder and softer are different, and those are the only differences you're allowed to "experience" rather than an alternative to coloniality and capitalism. In the US two-party system, you have a louder and softer version of the same settler-colonial party.

Coloniality only allows for metacognition, disassociation, and their various injuries and maladies because embodied cognition would bring awareness to the disease and a revolution for the cure (the end of coloniality).

Coloniality isolates, embodied cognition interconnects. Meaning is about something greater than yourself. Zoom out from yourself and you'll find your environment. You can't find something greater than yourself by isolating yourself from that which is greater. You can't "find yourself" by decontextualizing yourself from greater meaning. Yet coloniality has tricked the world into believing you can.

– Sam