I was listening to a podcast a few weeks ago, and the guest on the show used the phrase “embodied understanding” to talk about something he’d learned but was struggling to actually do.
Hearing the phrase was like an aha moment for me. It was the right way to describe something I’d been thinking about.
I’m a fan of John Vervaeke’s 4 Ways of Knowing model, which uses propositional, procedural, perspectival, and participatory as categories of knowledge.
When we think about understanding something, we often talk about knowing it in a propositional or procedural sense. That is how school teaches us to think about understanding.
To me, embodied understanding means knowing something holistically, covering not just the propositional and procedural but also the perspectival and participatory.
Instead of thinking about whether you understand the book you just read, it’s more valuable to ask yourself if you have an embodied understanding of that book.
I’ve noticed a pattern in many successful people: They talk about listening to audiobooks repeatedly in their formative years.
Sara Blakely talks about listening to Wayne Dyer tapes on repeat. Donald Trump listened to Norman Vincent Peele tapes over and over again. Tony Robbins talks about listening to Jim Rohn hundreds of times. Joe Rogan talks about listening to Tony Robbins tapes.
Today, with Spotify and Audible at our fingertips, it is easy to live in the shallows—to never even finish an audiobook, let alone listen to it ten times. It’s easy to switch to something new and novel and hard to stick with the same thing. This leads to a lot of shallow, propositional knowledge and very little embodied understanding.
To use a book to gain embodied understanding, you likely need to read it at least 3 times (in under two years), likely more. This is why, in religious traditions, you don’t just read the holy text once and move on; you read it daily.
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