I was delighted to have a conversation with Philip Shepherd, called a Renaissance man, about the ideas and practices in his book “New Self New World”, Re-covering Our Senses in the 21st Century”. Philip’s work resonates with mine, so I loved hearing his wisdom of developing a new relationship with our body, where we see and experience the world through our body.
 
Philip is an adventurer, who as a teenager cycled alone through Europe, the Middle East, India and Japan. He is an actor who has played lead roles on stages in London, New York, Chicago and Toronto, featured roles in movies and television shows, and has studied classical Noh theatre in Tokyo, and Kathakali in the south of India. He is an internationally produced playwright. He has designed and built several houses. He is an internationally celebrated workshop leader and speaker. And he is an author. His book, “New Self New World”, has been widely hailed as a masterpiece for its original insights into the unseen paradigms we live by – and for showing how all of those paradigms arise from a single source: our relationship with our bodies.
 
Philip shares the history of humans as we moved away from trusting our “gut” intelligence, some 1400 years ago, to a time when the centre of our heart was seen to be where our intelligence surfaced, to finally the brain in the last 200 years. Unfortunately, the views of the brain operating separately from our body and our spirit have pervaded our consciousness throughout the Machine Age and the Technological Age. Whilst objective, reductionist paradigms have resulted in enormous technological advances for our civilisation, there have also been adverse consequences of believing the brain is separate from our body.
Philip, describes the time when humans first rode the horse as an icon for the human view of believing the mind is a higher power than our connection with our body and the body of the earth. With our feet off the ground, and our heads in the clouds, many people have been more pre-occupied with finding a solution “out there in space” for challenges within our society and looking “outside of ourselves” for our answers. We now know the heart and the gut have intelligence and the brain does not operate in isolation to the body. Even with this new knowledge it takes time to change our behaviours, especially when we are more often than not, as Philip says, “unconscious of the paradigm”, that impregnates the way we do things.
With this knowledge that the brain, heart and body work together we can consciously choose daily to re-connect and embrace our whole intelligence. From this place we are more likely to make choices that give us great personal freedom and reduction of alienation, stress and anxiety and for those in positions of power, they may be more likely to make choices that nurture our built and natural environment, as one where living beings flourish.
It is people like Philip Shepherd, who are at the forefront of bringing this knowledge to our awareness that we can consciously choose to re-connect to our senses and our whole body intelligence to gain incredible inner freedom and a re-newed capacity to thrive with one another. As Philip’s title of his book, New Self New World, so aptly describes, when we experience a new self we create a new world for ourselves.
So, what are you waiting for? It is time, to re-connect your thoughts to the deep wisdom in your body, so that you create exponential shifts in the clarity and choices you make for your life, work, community and business.
I hope you enjoy the conversation with Philip as much as I did, on this evolutionary topic of re-connecting to the intelligence in our senses and our body for this next stage in our evolution.