SONAR BODY

tools for noticing in eco-embodied research 

​How do we notice? And what notices what is noticing? Where does intuition arise, and how might it guide the way we design and create? 

This 2-hour workshop invites participants to explore the unique intelligence of sensation, perception, and movement. Through gentle, embodied exercises, we’ll engage with space, materials, and the natural world, dissolving hierarchies between thought and feeling to uncover new insights for design. Ideal for PhD students and researchers curious about how embodiment can inform creativity, aesthetics, and sustainability.

We explore through the body

While the invitation is to relate and access a knowing stemmed in the embodied experience, we draw from conceptual and theoretical research to inspire and contextualize the work.

Below are some frameworks to support the practice:

Somatics

Befriending the inner landscape...

Somatics refers to the study and lived exploration of the body as experienced from within. Rather than viewing the body as an object to be observed or corrected, somatic approaches prioritize first-person experience: sensation, movement, breath, posture, internal states, and the nervous system.

At its core, somatics is concerned with how we sense ourselves: how we perceive tension and ease, activation and rest, connection and disconnection. Through attention to sensation and movement, somatic practices support nervous system regulation, self-awareness, and the capacity to respond rather than react. 

Somatic work draws from experiential anatomy, neuroscience, trauma-informed practices, and movement-based inquiry. It recognizes that the body holds memory, intelligence, and adaptive strategies shaped by lived experience.

In somatic practice, sensation becomes a primary source of information and learning.

References:
  • Bessel van der Kolk: The Body Keeps the Score.
  • Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen: Sensing, Feeling, and Action (Body-Mind Centering)

Embodiment

Knowing and relating through lived perception...

Embodiment describes the process of living, knowing, and relating to the world through the body. While somatics emphasizes internal sensation, embodiment emphasizes relation: how perception, movement, and awareness shape our engagement with others, space, and environment.

From a phenomenological perspective, the body is not something we have, it is how we are in the world. Perception is always embodied, meaning, language arise through lived experience, and the body is the ground through which the world becomes meaningful to us as individuals and collective.

Embodiment is therefore not only inward-facing. It is relational, expressive, and situated. It involves how we occupy space, how we gesture, how we orient toward others, and how we are shaped by, and shape the world around us.

References:
  • Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Phenomenology of Perception
  • Maurice Merleau-Ponty: The Chiasm, from The Visible and the Invisible

Shapeshifting + Reciprocity

Reciprocity, transformation, and becoming-with...
Shapeshifting, here, does not refer to imagination alone, but to a somatic-perceptual shift... a change in how we sense, move, and relate that allows us to temporarily inhabit other rhythms, forms, or perspectives. To allow ourselves to become porous and permeable with the world around us, the non-human, inviting a reciprocal quality to relation.

Drawing from ecological philosophy, shapeshifting describes the capacity of the body to attune to non-human forms of intelligence: land, animals, weather, sound, texture. Through sensory reciprocity. Perception becomes participatory rather than extractive.

David Abram describes this as a reciprocal relationship: we do not merely perceive the world; the world perceives us. Through attentive presence, the boundary between self and environment becomes porous, allowing new ways of knowing and responding to emerge.

Emergence refers to how new patterns, insights, and forms arise through interaction rather than control. Small shifts in attention, movement, or relation can generate unexpected transformations at both personal and collective levels.

References:

  • David Abram: Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology
  • David Abram: The Spell of the Sensuous
  • adrienne maree brown: Emergent Strategy

Lost by David Wagoner
​An invitation to meet in the forest:
LOST BY DAVID WAGONER
​
Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.

DETAILS:
Monday January 13th, 1 to 3pm
​At Spirit Park

What to wear & bring:
  • Please wear proper shoes suitable for walking on uneven, possibly muddy, ground
  • Dress with comfy warm clothes and in layers. Maybe gloves and a toque or waterproof hat.
  • Since rain is expected, waterproof clothing is strongly recommended
    (A simple rain poncho is better than an umbrella, as we’ll want our hands free and be able to move.)
  • A small notebook or journal
  • A pen

Personal items:
  • Try to travel light. We will be walking, moving and exploring with our full bodies.
  • We can have one or two bags to hold water bottles and notebooks.
  • We can leave extra belongings safely in my car if needed


Optional:
  • A thermos with warm tea for after the walk.
  • A small snack, depending on your needs and the weather
​
Meeting point:
​Spirit Park through Chancellor Boulevard
Link: ​https://maps.app.goo.gl/32zYtjGj92AHnt8q7