Learning to think with our bodies
Waldorf, Steiner, & Interiors
My homeschooling study recently took a plunge into the kingdom of Rudolf Steiner and Waldorf education. It’s been a delightful dip, fruitful for my family’s and my human formation—albeit a bit wild at times. Among these wild and wondrous ideas, one of my favorites is Waldorf/Steiner’s insistence on the role of the human body in what he calls “living knowledge.”
In the main text I’ve been reading, a collection of lectures he gave to Waldorf teachers, Steiner writes of the increasing abstraction with which we treat children and education. “The modern age has proved that it lives in abstractions,” he claims, noting evidence in much math instruction, which relates little to a child’s lived experience and sensory way of knowing.
Steiner’s “living” education on the other hand begins within the body and in awareness of the whole. For every subject taught to young children, he recommends engaging the body in rhythm and movement before sitting down. For example, for arithmetic, we count to twenty-four, stepping carefully each time we say the number, so that our bodies learn the pattern and sequence. The Waldorf model also suggests consistent use of natural materials like acorns for counting and story telling. All learning, especially for younger ages, takes place initially within physical experience, so that the body comprehends even before the mind.
Through these insights into human learning, Steiner observes that the head has less of a role in knowing than we like to think. “The head is really only an apparatus for reflecting what the body does,” he explains, “The body thinks, the body counts. The head is only a spectator.” Again returning to Mathematics, he contends that the fingers do the counting for the head and not the other way round; the head depends on the hands.
Although even in Waldorf-style learning, children gradually reach levels of abstraction from physical experience, they first receive many years of rootedness in sensory life. This ensures that the abstraction will never actually be abstract; it will have arisen from deep, interior knowledge.
Many of us believe one of the key obstacles to our achieving our desired interior spaces is lack of confidence. This seems to some extent true. For various reasons, we have been trained to doubt our inclinations and intuitions around things we don’t have ample experience with (perhaps a symptom of the expert class society?). This is something that can be remedied by a bit of learning but mostly courage.
However, underneath the confidence concern, some of us also tend to over-think. As Steiner observes, we live in a highly abstracted world. Culture and education have told us that our minds will provide solutions. If we only do more research, sit down, think more, we will achieve what we need or want. Ironically, our minds—as in our exclusively rational capacity—sometimes get in the way of receiving experiences and sensing the way forward.
We over-think with our brains. Instead, we need to think with our bodies.
I am no master at this, often over-considering, second-guessing, back-tracking, but Steiner has affirmed what I sensed for a long time: that environments speak to our bodies, suggesting in an affective way, whether we can rest in them, whether we should be on alert, even what might make them more beautiful.
As an exercise, if we stop and consider places we love to be in—whether indoors or out—and quiet the ramble of thoughts—we can notice the physical experiences they provide. Although words like “warmth,” “sharpness,” “stillness,” and “vibrancy” are helpful, these enter into the realm of the explicit and articulate, and so I hesitate to even consider them. The real experience is something deep within us, in our chests and guts and feet. It is deeper than words.
Similarly, I’ve realized that when I initially approach a room to begin designing it, I enter into the project more intuitively than rationally. I feel the space with my body, sensing the lighting, the dimensions and scale, the color possibilities, the soul—all pre-rational. Only from here can I progress into the phase of measuring and sketching layouts, and those become distracting and bewildering if I cannot return again and again to an intuition of possibility.
As an exercise, if there’s a room (or any realm of life really) that you want to make more beautiful or fitting, try first experiencing it in this way: through your senses, without conscious thought. Where are the areas of light and clarity and movement? Which areas feel cluttered and dim? Is your body able to rest, or is it tense and alert? What colors do you sense? In our interiors and our interior lives, these intuitive experiences might reveal what needs attention, just as they reveal which changes will best suit us. For physical spaces, move through them with your body, letting things attract your eyes and touch.
After first relaxing our cognition and engaging through physical experience, observing what is and what can be, we can enter the realm of measurement and articulation: the various discrete parts and how they fit together—colors, sizes, patterns, pieces of furniture. Last, we return to the composition of a whole. But, if we began by attending freely, physically, intuitively, the whole will already be there.
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I hope you had a lovely Thanksgiving!
-MCA
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