Rewilding the Human Body

On an increasingly imperiled planet, in a world where human technologies manufacture ever more disembodied realities for us, the question of how we are to live becomes more urgent. Two newer books, Call of the Wild: How We Heal Trauma, Awaken Our Own Power, And Use it For Good, by Kimberly Ann Johnson (HarperCollins, 2021) and Stalking Wild Psoas, by Liz Koch, (North Atlantic Books, 2019) answer the question with a call to our animal intelligence, our more wild selves.  

And what is this call of the wild? Johnson writes: “It is unconditioned expression. It is innate power. It is the awakening of instincts. The call of the wild is an invitation to freedom—to hear who you are and be who you are…the call of the wild implores the untamed and undomesticated you” (Johnson, 200). Both Johnson and Koch explore human physiology and embodiment from a holistic, organismic perspective. Both are interested in how human bodies metabolize experience, and what supports us in ”turning toward rather than overriding our internal sensory system [which] allows our innate intelligence to dissolve strictures, change processes, and innovate new ways of being” (Koch, 67).

Much of the content in Johnson’s book is based on the practices and principles of Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing, a therapy approach informed by the natural cycles of physiological arousal and discharge native to most animals. Johnson takes the reader on a clearly guided tour of the nervous system, integrating attachment theory, sex therapy and collective healing along the way. Each chapter integrates theory with practice, offering experiments in sensory awareness and somatic boundary setting, successively deepening skills that readers can work with to support their own nervous system regulation.

Koch’s brand of rewilding is rooted in bio-intelligence, what she defines as the “recognizable universal patterns that reveal the capacity of nature to self-organize and self-regulate” (Koch, 28). This is different from the Cartesian bio-mechanical perspective, in which humans are conceptualized “as a static machine that utilizes energy to perform an activity” (Koch, 6). 

Koch developed her approach to body work, Core Awareness, over many years of experimentation and observation, weaveing insights from embryology, plant medicine and other disparate fields to craft an artistic vision of the psoas. Rather than approaching psoas as a discreet muscle to stretch, condition or manage, Koch’s approach to psoas is “a bit like grasping a cloud or holding water in one’s hand. Psoas is not tangible; rather it is a stable, vague knowing, defined more by what is not there than what is” (Koch, 102). This is to say, psoas is not just muscle, but messenger. Physiologically, the psoas plays an important role in our assessment and response to threat. But more than that, Koch’s poetic language aspires to express the deep wisdom of psoas as an organ of perception. 

Drawing heavily from Emilie Conrad’s Continuum Movement, Koch identifies the fluid system of the body as primary. In this way, Koch’s approach differentiates itself from Johnson’s, going a gesture deeper into the layers of evolution. Her exploration of the “fluid midline” identifies three gestures that help us to orient towards safety when under threat—curling, freezing and arcing. Within a bio-intelligent paradigm, each gesture is understood as a messenger. Gestural patterns give us information about our life experiences and how we’ve responded to them. A ridged spine, curled shoulders, or chronic neck pain may be indications of habituated gestural patterns, patterns that may have evolved from a single incident trauma but are often expressions of lived experience through time—sitting for hours at a computer each day, growing up in an emotionally desolate household, living in a culture that privileges some bodies at the expense of others. Working with the kind of intuitive movement Koch teaches is one way to support those habituated gestures in unwinding. 

While Koch’s exploration of the psoas will feel most accessible to those who already engage a regular movement practice, relationship with nature or other bio-intelligent practice, the richer and more universal reward here is the call for decolonization of the body. So often our collective efforts for social change and evolution recapitulate a bio-mechanical view in which body functions as object, expending energy in pursuit of an external good; more equity, better living conditions, etc. The bio-intelligent perspective imagines a more expansive vision of change, one whose impulse is not bound by bodies driven to discreet outcomes, but inclusive of the unfurling, branching and exploding that is continual fluid expression. As Koch puts it, “decolonizing our static, mechanistic perspective of body is not only a cognitive process requiring the reevaluation of language, assumptions and intentions but also a sensory process requiring a shift in our awareness towards subtle impressions that evoke new experiences of self” (Koch 105).

Johnson confirms the bio-intelligent view in her chapter titled “Activate Your Inner Predator.” She is direct in clarifying that “the capacity to occupy the predator is different from actually acting as a predator and it is also different from desiring that role or wanting to be in charge.” Here, Johnson continues her exploration of nervous system activation and discharge. Having built capacity in previous chapters to track, sense, orient and ground, the reader is now invited to reclaim their wildness: to growl, bark, hum, claw, slink and rumble. For some, this might be literal; for others, the invitation might be more about imagining and sensing in the body a response to experience aligned with our deepest sense of self knowing. Expression through our predator selves is for Johnson yet another embodied aspect of bio-intelligence that expands our capacity to experience life and move towards greater coherence.

Both Johnson and Koch are committed advocates and sage guides to the wild wisdom of the body, not separate from Self, undifferentiated from mind. “Rewilding invites us to collaborate with the earth and let ourselves be taken into life’s spontaneous regenerative processes: a gesture of self-actualization that brings forth what belongs to us. In other worlds, reconceptualization of our place in this wild world”(Koch, 131).