On Somatics and Creative Leadership

Alfonso Montuori: Well, hi, Nick.  

Nick Walker: Hi Alfonso.

Alfonso Montuori: What a pleasure to be here.  

Nick Walker: It's so great to say, it's always great to get to have a conversation with you. We don't usually do it this publicly.  

Alfonso Montuori: Right, right.  

Nick Walker: Here we are, talking about somatics and creative leadership.  

Alfonso Montuori: Exactly. Yeah. So we were just talking a little earlier and saying maybe it would be an idea for me to just give a little background on the whole idea of creative leadership as we engage with it here at CIIS, specifically in the, in the transformative leadership master's program. And then after that, have you get a sense of what somatics is, and then we'll attempt to marry the two. Right?

Nick Walker: Yeah, let's do it.  

Alfonso Montuori: Great. So creative leadership or transformative leadership, as we were referred to it in our program here at CIIS, is very much a leadership for a time of transition, for a time of transformation. I think everybody can see that the world is changing rapidly. There's chaos, there's confusion, there's a transition of a world that's trying to be born. And at the same time, there are movements towards going back to sort of idealized days before. Right? And so the question then is given all that confusion and the overwhelm and just the, you know, every time we turn on the news, there's something new and usually unsettling. How to deal with that. And one factor there is this idea of creativity. Because creativity is not just about, you know, creativity in the arts or sciences or developing new ideas and so on. But it's also very much a way of being in the world that is able to respond to the challenges of the world, but also generate alternatives to what's going on based on our values. Right? And so in that sense, transformative leadership is not something for which you have to be, you know, a CEO or president or any kind of formal role at all. I think in this day and age, everybody in a way is a leader because they're contributing to the direction that we're going in, which is also why it's important to have a sense of what's at play. What are the possibilities, the directions that we can go in? Right? And we always have to remember that, that not doing anything is also doing something.  

Nick Walker: Yes.  

Alfonso Montuori: To the extent that I don't vote, I'm also engaging. Right? And showing up. Right? So that all makes a difference. And creativity, just like leadership was for the longest time about the great man, you know, so these historical figures, always, always men and always great. With creativity, we had this idea of the lone genius, right? And that was sort of the dominant image of creativity. So now, though, we're seeing a much more complex picture of creativity as being distributed relational, but also having to do with self creation, creating who we are. And very much with a neglected area, for instance, like interpersonal creativity, right? In this polarized world, we're seeing so much conflict. How can we become creative about the way that we interact with others and create win-win interactions rather than based on, well, I win, you lose, zero-sum games, right? So creativity in that sense is much more, has a much broader reach and is much more relevant. I'll be the last one to say that the arts and the sciences are not relevant. My point here is that it's a much broader phenomenon that we're talking about here.  

Nick Walker: Right.  

Alfonso Montuori: So that is then essentially sort of this overview of creative leadership and transformative leadership because of these times that we're in. We need to show up differently, more creatively contribute because, you know, we know from, you know, chaos theory, the idea of the butterfly effect, small, small action, small processes can make a huge difference. So we have to pay attention to what we do and say, right?

Nick Walker: Right.

Alfonso Montuori: And there's always a glimmer of hope there that actions will have a much more far reaching effect. So, yeah, so let's leave that there for a moment and move on to the topic of somatics, which you are very knowledgeable about and a practitioner of, right?  

Nick Walker: Yes. That was a great explanation of creative leadership. I'm really excited by that.  

Alfonso Montuori: Thank you very much.  

Nick Walker: All right. So to explain somatics, I need to explain a closely related concept, which is embodiment. And embodiment is, our embodiment is what we're doing on a physical level. What we're being, what we're doing on a physical bodily level. We're all embodied all the time because we are bodies. So one of the symptoms of old patriarchal hierarchical models of top down, less creative leadership is this idea of separation of mind and body. The mind is king and the body is the lowly servant of the mind. But of course, if you look at how humans actually develop, we're not minds riding around in bodies the way people ride around in cars, we're bodies that think. And the human development process, right? We develop as bodies first in the womb and our cognitive capacities develop out of the process of being infants and exploring the sensory world and learning our way around our own bodies and what our bodies can sense, right? This is what the child psychologist Piaget called the sensory motor stage of development. And our sort of the roots of how we think come from that bodily sensory motor stage and we build on it from there. So we are always embodied by definition because we're always being bodies. And our psyches and our cognitive capacities, including our creative capacities, in a sense are enacted through the body. They're happening in the brain and connections, these webs of neural connection and everything we know and the way we think is encoded in the brain and webs of neural connection. The brain is part of the body and it's not separable for the rest of the body, right? It shares blood and other fluids and oxygen with the body and it's wired into the body with miles and miles of nerve cells. So we're these living body minds and we move the body and embody ourselves in the world, move around and experience the world through our bodies on a sensory level and perform actions and this builds new neural pathways, right? We move our eyes to read and we listen with our ears and all of this is building new neural pathways. And so in a sense, our whole psyche, our whole self and our capacities, our cognitive capacities, our psychological capacities, including those creative capacities, have their roots in how we use the body or how we use ourselves as bodies. Our late, wonderful mutual friend, Dr. Ian Grand from the Somatics program was a wonderful teacher in the Somatics program at CIIS for many, many years until he passed in 2017. And so when I went through that program, he was one of my teachers and I remember the first day of class with him, the first time I had a class, he asked if we could give some basic premise for upon which somatic psychology was built. And I thought it was very clever and first one with my hand up and I said, the organization of the psyche mirrors the organization of the body. And he said in his big booming voice, no, the organization of the psyche is the organization of the body. So that's embodiment. And so how I would define somatics based on that, is somatics is the practice of changing the self by making intentional changes to one's embodiment.  

Alfonso Montuori: Wow. So, you know, as you were talking so many things, I want to come back to that particular process…  

Nick Walker: Yes, absolutely.

Alfonso Montuori: And sort of the practices related to that, right? But as I'm listening to you, I'm thinking, you know, this whole academia in general, historically, and to this day, in many cases, is really about disembodied and dispassionate inquirers, right?  

Nick Walker: Right.

Alfonso Montuori: You don't have a body and you don't have feelings or, well, you do, but we're supposed to sweep them all under the carpet, right? And, and the same in, you know, in the way that people talk about economics, these concepts like rational economic man. Right? That's a concept that you almost think was invented by somebody who had never looked at what people actually do. You know, rational economic man. And again, these ideas that people are just sort of these calculating machines, calculating their own self-interest and so on. But the body and, and feelings are not part of it. Right? So that's a tremendous absence.

Nick Walker: Right.

Alfonso Montuori: That has, has been, well, I think now we're beginning to realize that we can go on this way, you know? Academics are not dispassionate. When honesty researchers get busted for being dishonest about how they work with their data, you start thinking, well, you know, maybe, you know, researchers have feelings, too, and egos and, you know, so it's time to reintegrate all that. So talk to me about the about transformation then, really, which is what you're talking about there.  

Nick Walker: Yeah. Yeah. Let's let's talk about that. So so yeah. So somatics is sort of by definition, a practice of making change. We talk about somatic work or somatic practice. It's a practice work designed to create some sort of transformation. And so we have… We are very, you know, we are feeling beings. We're not rational. And a lot of modern Western somatic psychology traces back to Wilhelm Reich, who was a crackpot in many ways, but very right about one particular thing. So Reich was a student of Freud's and Freud, Freud, of course, was very big on this idea that humans are not rational, that, that we're, we're driven by a lot of unconscious factors, a lot of factors that we're not really conscious of. And we think that we're rational, but we're actually, what we are is very good at rationalizing our behavior, which comes from, from, from very irrational things from habits we've developed and defensive habits we've developed that we haven't really questioned.  

Alfonso Montuori: Right, right.  

Nick Walker: And we really see this. I think this comes up very strongly in transformative leadership, where the biggest obstacle, one of the biggest obstacles to truly creative leadership often is when people are scared of uncertainty and scared of the loss of control. And it requires some embrace of uncertainty in order to be creative, because of the immediate response to any uncertainty is fear. Then it's just like try to clamp down and get control as soon as possible.  

Alfonso Montuori: Right, right.  

Nick Walker: So we need to transcend that impulse in order to, to start opening up the creativity.  

Alfonso Montuori: Yeah.

Nick: So, so, so, so Freud was recognizing that people had these impulses to control or to repress and hide certain things from themselves and others, you know, various sorts of guilt and shame and, and raw need. And then we're appearing to be rational and because it became very good at rationalizing and justifying their actions. But of course, if you look at, you know, the so, the supposed rational economic man, like a lot of economic people's economic behavior is based on this, this terrible, gnawing sense of scarcity and need, which is not rational.

Alfonso: Right, right.

Nick: So Wilhelm Reich's stroke of genius was recognizing this, this inseparability of the mind and body and saying, OK, well, you know, Freud says people are, are not rational and they have all of these psychological defense mechanisms and needs and the sort of habits of attempting to to control things and meet unmet developmental needs and such. They pass that off as rational behavior. But where do all of these habits live on a bodily level? So, so, so Reich had this whole idea around character structure and chronic people's chronic tensions that he referred to as character armor. And this idea that if a person, for instance, you look at like the very classic sort of macho, patriarchal control oriented, dominance oriented leader figure. And what you see is a limited emotional range where often they were raised in patriarchal cultures where they, they learned, you know, boys don't cry. Men don't express tenderness and such.  

Alfonso: Right. Right. Right.  

Nick: So here's the thing is, well, how do you not cry? How do you not feel tenderness? To do that… If you watch a child, if you watch a child's try not to cry or try not to be tender or vulnerable because it's, it's not a safe situation to do that, the child has to tense itself in particular ways. And you can watch like a child, try to, like a toddler trying not to cry, will tense its face in particular ways and tense its breathing in particular ways to stop that from happening. And so Reich's thesis was that sort of habit of clamping down physically to stop a feeling becomes a lifelong unconscious habits. And people's whole bodily structures and bodily organizations get formed around these habits, which they're largely unconscious of. And so you get, when you look at someone whose creativity as a leader say is restricted because all they want to do is clamp down and control or acquire more and more something.  

Alfonso: Right.  

Nick: Somewhere that's happening in the body, those limitations are manifesting as limitations and breathing as limitations in how the body can move because of deep muscular tensions that are permanently clamped down. And the person just thinks that's the way it is. That's the way, that's what it feels like to be in a body and isn't really aware of all the capacities there. And isn't really aware of all their emotional capacities that are connected to that. And so then the process of recovering the ability to feel and recovering the ability to say be present with uncertainty or with tenderness or with empathy becomes a process of releasing those bodily tensions, of changing the bodily habits that are connected to the emotional and cognitive habits. And it's, you know, practices that can do that are fairly intense often. And Reich was notorious for very intense practices that was just about breaking down the deep layers of armoring and not really thinking very much about how do you integrate all of that well. But the subsequent developments there in somatic psychology are a little more refined, and of course…

Alfonso: I'm assuming Rolfing was a spinoff.  

Nick: Rolfing was…

Alfonso: In some way…

Nick: In some way, it was connected. It came out of the same time period. So there was a mutual influence, but not really direct. But yeah, there were definitely similarities. And the Rolfers weren't paying a lot of attention to the emotional effects. They were aware that there was an emotional effect happening with the releases. But they weren't necessarily aiming for psychological transformation as much, but it certainly happened.  

Alfonso: Right, right, yeah.

Nick: And of course, the Rolfers, like Reich, had their own flaws in terms of… Reich had these ideas about what the ideal healthy person would be like. That was a particularly gender binary heteronormative westernized idea of where he thought if you could break down all the character armor, he had this very specific idea of what would the result be. And the Rolfers similarly were very like…

Alfonso: Yeah.  

Nick: This is what the perfect posture always looks like.  

Alfonso: Right, right, right.

Nick: So the move in somatic psychology, and we've seen a lot of that work at CIIS, sort of the move in somatic psychology in recent decades has been much more explore, explore and develop your capacities, explore and find out, rather than aiming for some platonic ideal.  

Alfonso: Right, of the perfect human.  

Nick: Right, exactly. Which has its own patriarchal, hierarchical slant to it. So instead there's just this, what capacities do you want to be able to access and develop? And what are the practices that will allow you to do it?  

Alfonso: Yeah.  

Nick: It becomes very relevant to transforming leadership.

Alfonso: Definitely. And I mean, I think one of the things that we're seeing so much of in the last two years, not that historically it's also shown up all the time, but these leaders with feet of clay, right? And of course, if you look at gurus, historically, there are any number of gurus exhibiting extremely problematic behavior, but of course with leaders as well, right? And interestingly, a lot of it seems to also be related to sort of forms of sexual domination and abuse, right?  

Nick: Right.  

Alfonso: So I'm wondering at a certain point, you were saying these people have a certain sense of being in the body, whether that then doesn't translate to how they see the whole world in a way, right? That they see the whole world through this lens of their own sort of mixed up embodiment, if you will, right?  

Nick: Yeah, exactly. Their own need, their own hunger.  

Alfonso: Right.  

Nick: Right. So there's, and I think that Carl Jung didn't talk about the somatic in a very direct way. He wasn't, he's not seen as a somatic psychologist, but Jung's work on the shadow is really essential and it meshes with the somatic so well, right? Jung's idea was people have this public, the public persona, the person they want to be and want to be known as, and the shadow side of that, there's a flip side of that, the shadow side, right? The persona is the part they bring into the light, but there's always the shadow flip side of the parts of themselves that they reject and keep repressed and keep hidden from themselves as much as from anyone else. That's the stuff that doesn't fit with the self image and the public image they want to cultivate.  

Alfonso: Yeah.  

Nick: And so Jung talked about how becoming whole requires owning the shadow or it leaks out. We project it onto some imagined enemy. We project it onto an enemy and you get people with all the isms, the racism and nationalism and stuff where anything we reject in ourselves, we end up seeing and hating in some other that we can imagine has this quality we can't face in ourselves. But also it leaks out in terms of the leader who's always presenting themselves as virtuous and admirable. Like, what about their lust and their hunger and all that, that ends up coming out in twisted ways because they're not owning it, because they're hating it and it festers until it comes out in some way that ends up victimizing others and undermining their teachings. So shadow work, the process of owning and integrating the shadows so it doesn't fester and leak out in toxic ways can also be done somatically. In fact, it's hard to do it in a non somatic way. And that if you, that act of becoming more aware of what's happening on a bodily level is an active and changing it, is a, is an active shadow work. The, the act of like, okay, if we're repressing some aspect of ourselves, the act of learning to not repress it and to own it and embrace it, involves some physical opening to it and allowing ourselves to embody it in an intentional way so we don't embody it in an unconscious and destructive way.  

Alfonso: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, this is very important stuff, because I mean, I think it's really clear at this point that, that leadership of any kind requires a great deal of self reflection. And I mean, and it doesn't even have to be again, leadership of people in positions of power, although there, of course, it would be particularly helpful, perhaps.  

Nick: Yes.  

Alfonso: But I think we are at a point kind of in human evolution, where it's become more and more important to sort of take responsibility for our own psyche, if you will. Right?

Nick: Yes, yes.

Alfonso: And, and, and, and that, that in order to, to have a, a society where we don't demonize others, we don't get so polarized the way we are now, we, we can have a better sense of how much we are contributing to the conflict rather than, you know, saying, well, they're the bad guys, like we're good, and they are bad, right? It’s classic tropes. So, so it seems like it's certainly when in our transformative leadership program, this sort of self inquiry becomes a big part of that. And, and it's, it's, it can be, it can be obviously a little difficult, difficult, tricky. But it's important work, because we can see, particularly if people do then develop certain degrees of power and responsibility. It really accentuates our, our, our problems, our shadow even more, right? When, when we have that sense that develops of sort of omnipotence, even if it's only in our little world, our little system, our little, right? I mean, you see this in the most well meaning nonprofits, you know, voted to the environment or whatever, you know, with good causes, but you see them fall apart very often because these problems emerge. And not just with the leader, but in the way that people interact.  

Nick: Right.

Alfonso: And, and, as you said, you know, this enormous amount of projection that can start happening. So, so I think this is, this is one of the key elements right now. Because we're seeing too much in the news about the, the, the, the flaws of leaders of all sorts, right?  

Nick: Right. And it's so much of it in terms of everything from, you know, people, you know, political leaders getting into wars, or nonprofits falling apart, people, you know, groups of people trying to cooperate, they're being torn apart by conflict, to like, you know, the abusive behavior of some teachers or domestic violence,  

Alfonso: Right, right.

Nick: All of this, so much of this is people's inability to do conflict well.  

Alfonso: Right.  

Nick: All right. The ability to navigate because people are different from each other. And so the ability to navigate differences and to navigate potential conflicts is, is an absolutely essential leadership skill. Without it, a person is only a good leader until they run into some sort of difference or, you know, conflict or, you know, difference, a difference of viewpoint. And then suddenly it all erupts into terrible flame wars and rage and, you know, attempt to clamp down and assert control and dominance.  

Alfonso: Exactly.  

Nick: Yeah. So anyway, this is, this is, this is, this is why Aikido has kept me engaged for almost half a century now, right? This is, this is why I love Aikido in particular as a form of somatic work. There's so many great forms of somatic work and they all have different purposes, but Aikido has particularly fascinated me and proven to be endlessly transformative and rewarding. Because it is somatic work done specifically around conflict and how we embody ourselves in situations of conflict. And so…

Alfonso: Right, right, right.  

Nick: This is the, so here's, here's, here's the thing with Aikido is it's a, it's a very interesting, very strange sort of martial art because it's not two people sparring with each other. It's one person giving an attack and you work with a partner and you trade off, you know, attacking each other, but it's one person like, you know, giving an attack, grabbing or striking or something like that. And the other person is finding a way to redirect the attack and connect the attacker to themselves and guide the attacker, you know, into a fall or into a pin or just away from them. So, so there's this like, okay, this person is, this person is suddenly, you know, grabbing me by the shoulders, grabbing me by the lapels and, you know, with a lot of fury and power. And how, how do I move in a way, and you know, maybe this person is really big and strong and how do I move in a way that does not kill or maim this person, but takes them off balance so that I can take them to the ground without hurting either of us. And the answer to how to do that is you have to be very relaxed. Because you have to feel everything that's happening in your own body. And you have to feel everything that's happening in your partner's body. You have to, you have an attacker. And the only way you're going to be able to take a bigger, stronger attacker to the ground effectively when they don't want to go necessarily is if you could feel where the openings in their balance are and where there's, where they're strong and where there's openings. Now to feel that you have to be very soft because if you tense up, all you feel are the tensions in your own body. So your own body has to be soft enough that it becomes an in, a sensitive instrument of feeling. But if you're being attacked, it's really hard to do that because the fight flight freeze reflex.

Alfonso: Right, yeah.  

Nick: And all of the bodily tensions arise. And so you have to be super aware of your own body to notice any tension that's arising and actively release it while you are being attacked and feeling what's going on in the attacker's body. So you can direct it the way you want it to go. It's enormously crazy complex to do all of that, which is why it's like a long-term, you know, it's a really long-term practice because it's just endlessly challenging.  

Alfonso: Counterintuitive, right?  

Nick: Super counterintuitive and literally, you know, like it goes, you're learning to transform because you're, you're overriding the fight flight instinct, which is like, I mean, that's like deep lizard brain stuff, you know, to, to learn to override that and change that. So you learn to flow and feel instead of the fight or flight.

Alfonso: Yeah.  

Nick: Like that's an ongoing practice that you never get good at. You get less and less bad at it. And so, so, so yeah, I, I love this. Now here, here's the magic of it though. Here's, here's where the real like somatic magic comes in, is that our, our range... Look, so creativity is by definition, you know, expansive, unlimited, right? There's, there's the, you know, there's so much outside the box we can find. But dysfunction and the tensions that block creativity are actually a very limited set of patterns. So each person actually in terms of like deep tensions and tendency toward like, you know, the, the physical states we go into when we're not doing well, and when we're not handling things well, there's actually a very limited range that each person has. So the thing is the physical reactions that a person has, you know, the bodily, the bodily, the way particular bodily tensions show up and particular tendencies to clamp down or force things, the physical reactions a person has when they're being grabbed, the Aikido practice, for instance, are actually just more exaggerated versions of the same physical reactions that they had, that people have in verbal conflicts and everyday stress situations, which means if you can learn to spot those patterns of tension arising in yourself, you know, in Aikido practice, when someone's grabbing you, from there, you can learn to spot them when you're in any sort of difficult situation. And release them in those situations too.  

Alfonso: Yeah. Oh, that's terrific. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So there's that wonderful crossover there. Yeah.  

Nick: Yeah.  

Alfonso: Nick, we have about 10 minutes left, and I was thinking maybe we could talk a little bit about something that we both are interested in and care about, and that's this idea of the creative futures. Right?  

Nick: Yes.  

Alfonso: Because in that sense, you know, transformative leadership, creative leadership is about leading into the future, how we show up and the creative futures really is there to address the fact that so many people have lost any sense of hope for the future.  

Nick: Right. And of course, if you're going to be a transformative leader, right, there's the question of what are you leading toward? Right? What are you creating? We have to be able to…

Alfonso: Exactly.

Nick: We have to have some concept of the future we want in order to have something to go toward.  

Alfonso: Precisely. Yeah. Because there's so much focus on the things that we don't want, whether it's racism or sexism or woke or whatever. Everybody's against lots of things. But we seem to have lost track of what we do want and what we would like to see more of. Right? So the idea of creative futures is sort of to develop some of the basic sort of core competencies to be able to participate in a way that is more generative, that is moving in a direction that develops a sense of agency and a sense of hope. Right?  

Nick: Yes.  

Alfonso: Because that's what people need, I think. Otherwise, a lot of people are just sort of giving up on the future. Right?  

Nick: Right.  

Alfonso: So, I mean, the things that you were talking about in terms of somatics, I think, play a huge role in preparing people to participate as transformative leaders, if you will, as individuals who are contributing to a future that they perceive as better or more desirable than all these futures that we don't want.  

Nick: Yes.  

Alfonso: So, and that's where creativity comes in, too. And again, not just in creating visions of different futures, but also how do we interact? You were talking about the Aikido and its importance in how we interact. And so it seems to me that that somatics and creativity there could create kind of a nice team in the way that we engage with others, remaining aware of who we are, and at the same time being able to embody the improvisational ability to deal with responses that may be unexpected or undesirable and shift towards more of a generative interaction. Right?  

Nick: Yes, exactly. Right. Because, okay, just say here we are, we decide we have a group of people, we get a group of people together, and they're influential in various fields or they're representing various groups and communities who have a stake in the future of whatever, whether it's the future of a country, the future of CIIS, or whatever it is. We get a group of people together and we start coming up with a common vision of the future. What do we all want? What do we want to be working toward? And someone in the group has an idea that hadn't occurred to me and is, like, seems just totally incompatible with what I was thinking. Now, if my reaction to that is, I have to shut this down, I have to, no, this is unacceptable, I have to shut this down, we're not going to get anywhere, right? Then they're going to be like, oh, this person's trying to shut me down, I'm not going to let that happen. And suddenly everybody's fighting and arguing and there goes the chance to create something better. Instead, it's just the same old, same old people polarizing and fighting with each other. So, what if someone comes up with something, says something that's totally, whoa, what? What if I have that somatic practice under my belt and I can say, I can feel what's happening in my body and say, oh, I'm clamping down, right? There's that thing I do where, like, my breathing gets shallower, you know, I start making myself bigger maybe, or, you know, I tense, like, you know, the eyes tense, you know, the hands tense, legs get ready for fight flight, I feel all of this. So, I know from my somatic practice of Aikido or whatever it is I do, how to let go, I'm going to take a breath and let this go. And once I've let that go, on a bodily level, suddenly there's room for something else. Suddenly there's space on a bodily level for me to listen and say something that is more constructive, that builds on this. And we can still disagree. I can still say, I'm not sure that's going to work. I'm having trouble seeing how that will be compatible. Can we talk about how we can make our goals compatible? But then we're having a creative conversation instead of fighting about it because the bodies are doing different things.  

Alfonso: Yeah, yeah. And I mean, it reminds me of Keats's term, the poet Keats, a negative capability. So, which is in a way this ability to stay with the chaos, with the uncertainty, rather than try to shut it down immediately because all that uncertainty or disagreement makes us feel uncomfortable, right? We want to go back to where we were before, but to be able to stay with that, and I think that what the somatics dimension does, it's so important is it gives people actual practices to be able to do that. And so, it's not just sort of a cognitive exercise or a reminder or some attempt at a psychological process. So, and I think that has become, in the psychology literature, you know, where we talk about tolerance of ambiguity.

Nick: Yes.

Alfonso: Which is directly related to creativity in the same way that intolerance of ambiguity is related to authoritarianism. Authoritarian individuals score high on intolerance of ambiguity. So, the ability to stay with that ambiguity is so important in a world, you know, my friend, the British Pakistani futurist Zia Sardar calls post-normal times.  

Nick: Right, right.  

Alfonso: When he first came up with that concept, people went, oh, well, I don't know. Right now, look around and everything is pretty post-normal, right?  

Nick: Yeah.  

Alfonso: That causes so much anxiety too. And so, that also causes people to look for somebody who will shut the whole thing down and make it go away, make that uncertainty go away, even if it means doing so harshly, right? Rather than staying with things because we're just not, we're not quite prepared yet to be dealing with the change and letting things emerge and creating trust among each other, right? Because that's another role of creativity, right? To create trust between people because now there's such a huge degree of mistrust, right? Everybody mistrusts everybody else, right?  

Nick: Right. And that's another form of intolerance for ambiguity and intolerance for uncertainty, right? I don't know this person, so I don't trust them. I'm not willing to let them in. I'm not willing to trust them. I'm not willing to listen to them because I don't know them. But of course, that becomes a cycle where, well, if you're not willing to give it a chance, then you never get to trust them. And so, it becomes people only trusting other people within some immediate in-group that agrees with them completely.  

Alfonso: Yeah, yeah, yeah.  

Nick: So, yeah, that tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity is crucial. And it's crucial for creativity because by definition with creativity, you're creating something new and you don't know exactly what it's going to be during the creative process.  

Alfonso: Right, right.  

Nick: So, you're exploring. Otherwise, you're just duplicating what already exists, right?  

Alfonso: Yeah, exactly.  

Nick: Which is the appeal of authoritarianism to people.  

Alfonso: Right, the conformity, yeah.

Nick: Yeah, they're terrified of the unknown and the uncertain. And they'd rather have some authoritarian who's going to likely, oh, I'm going to make America great again, right? I'm going to put everything back the way you remember it from 1950s television shows.  

Alfonso: From Father Knows Best.  

Nick: Right. Exactly. So, you won't have to wonder what's happening because everything is going to be exactly the way that you imagined it as a child. So, yeah, to get anywhere new, to create anything new and to let other ideas in to deal with, you know, to be open to the innovations that come with diversity and difference and synergy between different people and cultures and ideas, right? We need that talent for ambiguity. And the radical piece that somatic practices offer is the idea that tolerance for ambiguity is a teachable physical skill.  

Alfonso: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And in fact, I have a doctoral student who's doing her dissertation on just that right now.  

Nick: Beautiful.

Alfonso: Yeah. And another thing that I think is important here in this context is improvisation.  

Nick: Yes.  

Alfonso: Right? Improvisation is not something that we're aware of being taught in school or in any, it's just sort of lives in the arts rather mysteriously. But improvisation is so important because it really, the root of the word improvisation is improvisus, which means unforeseen. Right? So improvisation is all about dealing with the unforeseen that which wasn't planned for, wasn't expected. And this is, of course, something musicians, certainly jazz musicians and other improvisational musicians learn how to do. But it's still very much of a mystery to most people who don't realize that they actually improvise whenever they talk to somebody. Right?

Nick: Right.  

Alfonso: I mean, there may not be a world class improvisation, but it's still improvisation, right? So there's, you know, this is heartening to me is that there are so many resources and so many things that we can bring to bear to creating futures that are more desirable, that are, you know, not heading in the way of self-destruction.  

Nick: Yes.  

Alfonso: If I can be blunt.  

Nick: Yes, exactly. And improvisation also, right? There's a physical opening up to it to allow it, right? To, you know, where's that, that, the tendency to clamp down, you know, tendency to clamp down and not allow unfamiliar, the unfamiliar and not allow the familiar movement, the unfamiliar movements or the unfamiliar gestures, the unfamiliar ways of being.  

Alfonso: Right.  

Nick: And so there's this bodily aspect to improvisation of how do I let myself on a bodily level move into something new and become something new.

Alfonso: Right. And that reminds me of something that you were talking about earlier, sort of about the body and being. In a way, what we're talking about here is trusting ourselves.  

Nick: Yeah.  

Alfonso: Trusting that we don't need a script in order to work out exactly what's going on, right?

Nick: Right.  

Alfonso: And that we can be in the moment and, you know, for the jazz musicians perform in the moment and let go of all the music and even let go of the training that they've had and just play. Right?

Nick: Yeah.  

Alfonso: And one last thing, I think that there's been research on expertise by Dreyfus, the Dreyfus brothers at UC, and they found a number of levels of expertise, right? From, you know, take it from beginner driver, somebody that's still trying to figure out how to move everything around in the car to people who just, you know, racing car drivers. And what they found about the experts in all of the places that they explored them is that they knew how to improvise. They made no reference to any handbooks or manuals or it was, they were just there in the moment. Even those people who play chess and can just walk by 10 chess boards. And so all of that is an improvisational ability that shows up in so many different places. Right? So in the ability to deal with the unforeseen.  

Nick: Yes, exactly. And that's, there are some, there's a bodily component to all of that of allowing something to flow through you, right?

Alfonso: Yeah.  

Nick: Here I am, you know, essentially flowing with the unforeseen, right, as flowing with the emerging situation.  

Alfonso: Yes.  

Nick: So I have to be able to physically, to physically flow with the emerging situation. I have to allow responses to move through me, right? And as soon as I lock down and go into some old physical pattern of self-protectiveness, I'm unable to respond spontaneously to the situation. And so how do I, so it becomes, the release of tension becomes not just how do I stay out of old habits of defensiveness and fight flight and such like that, but also how do I make room for something new to flow through me? How do I make room for a completely spontaneous response to occur? 

Alfonso: Yeah. Yeah. That's beautifully put. Yeah, because that obviously is what it is in music too, right?

Nick: Yeah.  

Alfonso: Something new is coming through, but we don't know what. And so we have to trust ourselves. Yeah, and Nick, it's always such a pleasure to see you and to speak with you.  

Nick: Likewise, really enjoyed being able to have this conversation with you and do it in this intriguing novel public sort of way. So…

Alfonso: Right.  

Nick: Thank you. Thank you so much. And thank you to Public Programs for putting all this together.  

Alfonso: Thanks, guys. 

Thank you for listening to the CIIS Public Programs Podcast. Our talks and conversations are presented live in San Francisco, California. We recognize that our university’s building in San Francisco occupies traditional, unceded Ramaytush Ohlone lands. If you are interested in learning more about native lands, languages, and territories, the website native-land.ca is a helpful resource for you to learn about and acknowledge the Indigenous land where you live.

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