The Language of the Heart

In the meantime, Varela (1996) applied Laughlin's (Laughlin & Rock, 2013; concept presented by Laughlin at a conference in Osaka, Japan, in 1986 that Varela attended) term neurophenomenology to the study of subjective experience in a mindful state alongside scientific neuroscience. In order to study consciousness, neurophenomenology uses the method of phenomenological reduction (Cogan, 2015), or bracketing, the suspension of conceptualization and of one's habitual way of thinking about events and oneself to allow reflection on the emergence of the thoughts and sense experiences themselves. This orientation considers mind, lived body, and world as reciprocally overlapping and characterizes the relational as direct knowledge, or in Varela's (1996) words, "embodiment as lived experience" (p. 346). In the context of this discussion, embodiment will thus be defined as bodily direct knowledge, or the felt sense of the unfolding potential of the living self in the situations it is experiencing.