Embodiment Studies

This paper contributes to the growing interdisciplinary literature linking neuroscience, ritual studies, and community psychology by reframing the circle not as a symbolic or cultural artifact, but as a measurable bio-resonant technology.

Most prior studies treat group healing primarily as social or psychological phenomena — emphasizing narrative catharsis, identity formation, or group support (Frank & Frank, 1991; White, 2000).
This paper expands that understanding by integrating biophysical coherence and acoustic entrainment as essential mechanisms within the collective healing process.

Drawing from research in polyvagal theory (Porges, 2011), collective heart coherence (McCraty & Childre, 2010), and sonic anthropology (Feld, 1996), this framework positions the circle as a self-organizing field of physiological synchronization.
It proposes that mutual regulation, synchronized sound, and narrative resonance are not separate domains but expressions of the same harmonic law of coherence.

By bridging recovery circles, chanting rituals, and ceremonial gatherings, this paper shows that the geometry of equality inherent in circular formation—combined with shared vibration and emotional transparency—constitutes a living interface between biology and consciousness.

In doing so, it adds a missing embodied dimension to the literature on community healing:
the recognition that collective coherence is both emotional and electromagnetic—a dynamic pattern through which human beings stabilize trauma, amplify empathy, and return to shared order.

Ultimately, this paper reframes healing circles as ancient, evidence-based coherence engines—an emergent meeting point between neurobiology, ritual technology, and the physics of compassion.

The Templeality of a Neoillusionist Embodiment unfolds as a twelve-part meditation on the sacred architecture of being, where flesh and consciousness conspire to reveal themselves as temple, sanctuary, and liturgy. Drawing upon sources as diverse as Plato's cave, Ibn ʿArabī's Perfect Human, Husserl's epoché, Merleau-Ponty's flesh, Kashmir Shaivism's spanda, Rumi's oceanic verse, and quantum physics' wave collapse, this work assembles a Neoillusionist vision of embodiment as both question and revelation.

Against traditions that treat matter as prison or illusion, the Neoillusionist insists that body is already liberation, already the shimmering threshold where perception makes itself sacred. Each meditation explores a facet of this architecture: the primordial mirror, the cartography of flesh, the geometries of becoming, the physiology of prayer, the dance of appearances, the alchemy of incarnation, the phenomenology of sacred flesh, the metaphysics of movement, the poetics of perception, the ethics of embodiment, the eschatology of flesh, and the return wherein temple and worshipper are one.

What emerges is not a doctrine but a quality of attention: to inhabit the body as cathedral of consciousness, as both sculptor and sculpture, as both seeker and sought. The text situates Neoillusionism as a phenomenological-mystical method that honors philosophical rigor while refusing to sever art from life, poetry from ontology. The Templeality of a Neoillusionist Embodiment proposes embodiment itself as the ultimate sacred architecture, a place where metaphysics is not theorized but lived, danced, breathed, and continually consecrated in the intimacy of awareness with itself.

The rapid development of artificial intelligence technology raises fundamental questions about human uniqueness. This paper, from an evangelical theological perspective, elucidates the essential characteristics of human embodiment and spirituality that AI can never achieve. Based on biblical anthropology, it demonstrates that the human body functions as an integrated being serving as a vessel of spirituality, not merely material existence. While examining the feasibility of implementing virtual embodiment and spirituality through AI, it shows these are imitations, not substitutes for true embodiment and spirituality. The study grounds human dignity in the "image of God" (Genesis 1:27) rather than technological capabilities, providing guidance for churches navigating the AI era.

This personal essay documents an intimate process of self-examination triggered
by the 2019 annexation of Jammu & Kashmir through the removal of Article
370 of the Indian constitution by India’s Modi-led government. Drawing on Carl
Jung’s analytical psychology as explored in his 1916 work on the psychology
of the unconscious, I engage in an exploration of self by connecting it to the
Kashmiri collective unconscious. Informed by Sufism (Islamic mysticism), daleel
wanen (story-telling), Zindagi hund tajrube (lived experiences), and Zindagi hinz
dastan (life narratives), I show how the collective unconscious of Kashmir holds
embodied refusals and reclamations.
Exploring the “unconscious” offers insights into what Jung calls the common
“bond of desire and longing.” For Jung, these deep-rooted aspects of human
nature connect individuals at a profound level, crafting a collective unconscious
of humanity—containing memories, experiences, and symbols common to all
humans across time and cultures. In this essay, I do not look at his work strictly from
a psychological perspective, but I aim to explore the notion of bodily refusals.
What role does the unconscious play in reclaiming coherent self-knowledge under
cataclysmic political upheavals? Do such events induce “non-being” through
undemocratic imperial statecraft, violent militarization, and extermination? What
does such induced “non-being” mean for a Kashmiri feminist political theorist
rooted in such an inheritance?
Living far from Kashmir, I piece together memories triggered by the 2019
annexation and how it blurred lines between home and academic study. I grew
up in the political community of downtown Srinagar, the heartland of rebellion
against Indian rule. I explore my own self-construction by relaying and
reviewing the lives of kin and community members who embodied, performed,
and improvised womanhood. I reflect on my childhood and adolescence during
different political periods, in different contexts, and intergenerationally, to explore
how Kashmiri womanhood is entangled with the collective unconscious to reveal
a site of decolonial praxis and knowledge generation. I review the inter-relational
life of my mother (mae), my maternal grandmother (Bobe), and especially my
paternal grandmother (Raje or Dadi) as templates of womanhood in the Muslim
matriarchal cultures of Kashmir. I also map manhood relationally, as depicted
by encounters with men in my life—my father (Abu), brother (Boi), a medic
(Muzafer), various counterinsurgents and Indian Army soldiers. As figures,
each offers a relational understanding of self, morality, and virtues that shaped
my character. Exploring these daleels (stories), I underscore the violence of
“nonbeing” and show how it is being resisted through the dialectical experience
of Kashmiri womanhood.

This article examines what happens in the experience of embodiment when a person is immersed or clad in technologies designed to redefine the edges and to extend the communicative capabilities of each individual body. The article also analyses how multisensory communications technology is currently challenging contemporary definitions of gender, community and technology.

The Who-scape is vast, the Doctor and his companions traversing time and space for over five decades. This makes it the longest running science fiction series in television history. One referent for this paper is thus the actual historical extent of Doctor Who, in particular the way in which specific eras of production-always seeking new audiences-locate themselves in history and in context. Our concern here is the two recent series of Doctor Who (2005 and 2006) and how they speak from within the social and political context of our time. The other referent is Ursula le Guin's story, 'Vaster than Empires, and more slow' (1975), which tells of a group of visitors to an apparently uninhabited planet. They discover, through the perceptions of one of the party who is an empath, that the sentient life-form on the planet is arboreal. The trees around them are the major life-form and are, in fact, in shock at encountering life that this collective life-form does not recognise as sentient. The central concern of the story is the nature and meaning of difference; whether these disparate life-forms can recognise each other's validity and right to exist.

In this paper I address the interplay of body and soul, this world and other-worldliness, that is created by the concept of Purgatory and which is arguably the reason for the cultural persistence of the term in western societies.  John Neumeier’s ballet, Purgatorio is a useful touchstone for this reason, the physicality of ballet demonstrating for the viewer that emotional, psychological and spiritual experiences are not simply in the mind but affect the individual bodily.