Back to Short Stories & Essays

Feeling my Way into Embodied Research
Summer, 2014

Shortly before I left for southern Chile to begin my doctoral fieldwork, my supervisory committee gave me a valuable gift. We'd been through the discussions about what methodology I would use to explore the physical, emotional, psychological and spiritual effects of deep solitude on a human being—in this case me—as I lived alone in the wilderness for a year, and they had accepted that my approach would probably be a cross between social science and meditation retreat. I wouldn't go with expectations, a set hypothesis to test or a structured methodology to follow. My commitment was to stay in the wilderness for the full year and to remain mindfully aware of all aspects of the experience. I resisted even the obligation to keep field notes.

This approach grew out of the attitude I brought to graduate work. I'd begun undergraduate studies at age 40 after a motorcycle crash left me with a below-the-knee amputation. I'd immersed myself in biology and psychology and had at first felt like a dry sponge sucking up a flood of important knowledge. But by the time I graduated I sensed that something was seriously wrong. I went camping alone in the wilderness for two months to reflect. Out there I realized that I'd become an arid intellectual container filled with abstract theories and disembodied facts that had little to do with my own lived experience and fundamental questions about life. I'm not saying this is everyone's experience as an undergrad, but it was definitely mine.

My orientation to solitude and education grew from the soil of my younger life. For whatever reason—innate disposition, tension in my family, or, most likely, a murky mix of many factors—I'd spent time alone in the non-human world since I was a kid. There among the southern California trees, meandering creeks, and scurrying lizards, I usually felt more at home in myself than I did with other people. I wasn't big on authority, either. I barely made it through high school and when, a year later, I gave Berkeley a try, I didn't make it through at all. The classes distracted me from life on the street, and like those of my previous schooling they seemed intended to mould me into a well-trained and productive worker. I had other intentions for my life.

In my late twenties I found myself working as a logger on the west coast of Vancouver Island in British Columbia . Although attempting to be a hard-ass macho, as I believed the job required, that persona didn't really fit. I became aware of a growing feeling of disquiet and alienation and sensed I needed time alone with myself. I purchased a canoe and food for three months and headed into the wilderness. Although I'd previously spent time alone camping and fishing, and had developed the necessary survival skills, I wasn't prepared for what would happen to me psycho-spiritually during a long solitary retreat.

I almost went insane out there. I almost didn't come back. In spite of deep resistance, I was forced to face the existential terror that had lurked in the dark corners of my mind for years. Such angst seems to be an inherent condition of our lives that we usually avoid through various social means. Alone in the wilderness, I could no longer avoid the fear. In opening myself to this facet of existence, I also began to experience other deeper aspects of my psyche, and at times my sense of being a disconnected and somehow alien individual dissolved and I experienced myself as woven into a unified and flowing universe.

The direct experience of being an integral element of something greater challenged one of my culture's fundamental assumptions: that each of us is a separate autonomous entity with free will. Although there was deep joy in surrendering myself to this something greater, I couldn't make sense of the transformation within the context of my life with other humans. I decided that someday I would spend a year in complete solitude to further explore the experience and the questions that arose from it.

So when beginning graduate work, I insisted on two non-negotiable conditions: my research would involve living alone in the wilderness for a year, and I wouldn't leave any aspect of myself outside the university gates. I would include bodily sensations, emotions and spiritual insights, as well as intellectual analysis in my research. I would ask questions profoundly meaningful to me. I would explore my relationship with myself, with the non-human world, with other people, and with Spirit. Because I felt that the fractured compartmentalization of our minds and lives is a fundamental cause of social and ecological disruption, I chose the interdisciplinary Studies Graduate Program at UBC as the natural academic context for my explorations.

I selected my committee carefully, which I believed (and still believe) may be the most important step in earning a graduate degree. It's essential to keep in mind that a research project needn't be approved by the university as a whole, but only by the supervisory committee. It seemed to me that when selecting a supervisor and committee members, students often placed too much importance on expertise in their field of study and too little on interpersonal factors. Especially when doing non-traditional research, I felt that it was important to build a committee of open-minded professors who would be up for an adventure and with whom I could honestly communicate. For this to work, both student and committee members must be strong. If I formed a committee that was supportive of what I wanted to do, and also capable of supporting me, the whole process could be profoundly joyful and rewarding. If not, and my committee tried to mould me into following their agenda and into seeing the world as they saw it, it might feel like I had stumbled into a nightmare.

From the beginning, my committee members were excited about my intention to spend a year alone in the wilderness, but they had two conditions of their own: I would need to fund the project myself, and they didn't guarantee I'd receive a PhD for my efforts. The second condition changed when I passed my comprehensive exam, because from then on my committee was fully committed to my eventual success. Even so, as I was leaving for solitude, their parting counsel was: “Have a good trip. If at all possible, come back alive. If you discover during the year that trying to shape the experience into doctoral research is distracting you from the process of self-exploration and discovery, then forget the PhD. It's not that important.” They had invested more than three years work with me, and on my way into the unknown, they offered the gift of freedom to grow and transform myself in whichever way would be most meaningful to me. I believe this kind of trust and generosity is what students should look for in committee members and what professors should offer to students.

Actually, I did go into the wilderness with assumptions and expectations. Like everyone else, I carry a load of conceptual baggage when I step into the unknown—a gift and a burden from my culture. But rather than accept and build on my, often unconscious, assumptions, my intention was to unpack my bags and lighten my load. I took as one of my touchstones Jean-Martin Charcot's statement that, “Theory is good, but it doesn't prevent something from existing.” As much as possible, I would go as a radical empiricist, willing to experience and value whatever entered my field of awareness.

For me this attitude is, or should be, fundamental to all research. Rather than allowing a pre-given methodology to determine what aspects of the world were valid topics for research, my more empirical approach was to discover what aspect of the world fascinated and called to me, then find or develop a methodological approach that allowed me to explore my area of fascination. But it was also important for me to remember that I wasn't doing this in a vacuum. I was part of an academic culture, and so I needed to learn to dance in the hallowed halls. That meant grounding whatever methodology I adapted or developed in some recognized precursor. It also meant taking responsibility for framing my work in a way that made it accessible to others; building bridges that allowed others to cross to where I was.

During the year in solitude, I developed an embodied methodology based loosely on autoethnography. In my lexicon this was an academically acceptable term for placing myself in the situation of choice, seeing what would happen, and working to make sense of it.

My approach to exploration was mindful observation layered with analytic introspection, while recording my observations and ruminations in a daily journal. Exploring and writing about such an intensely personal experience is vulnerable to criticism. It may seem hopelessly subjective and self-absorbed. Yet as philosopher Michael Polanyi and psychologist Abraham Maslow, among others, point out, all knowledge is fundamentally personal knowledge.

In this case the knowledge was personal in the additional sense that I was not primarily studying anything outside myself, but rather my own experience of living in solitude and how I behaved in that environment. My intention was not to prove anything or describe solitude in an abstract, objective way, but to offer my personal experience in the hope that it would resonate with others and deepen our collective and multifaceted understanding of solitude.

(Note to the reader: This is the companion piece to my subsequent essay, Finding my Way into Embodied Writing .)

I did end up keeping a journal, which served as my field notes. See the companion essay Feeling my Way into Embodied Writing.

Becker, E. 1973. The Denial of Death . New York : Free Press.

At that point in the process I wasn't yet aware of literature I could cite to support my personal intuition that taking a holistic, lived experience approach to my research was not only valid, but in my case vital.

And eventually Examining Committee members and Exam Chair at the defense.

Charcot, J. M. 1966. Quoted in S. Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. p. 179. New York : Norton.

Carrel, A. 1935. Man the Unknown. New York : Harper & Brothers.
Goldstein, J. 1976. The Experience of Insight: a natural unfolding. Santa Cruz , CA : Unity Press.

Ellis, C. & A. P. Bochner. 2000. Autoethnography, Personal Narrative, Reflexivity. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (eds.), Handbook of Qualitative Research. Second Edition. Thousand Oaks , CA : Sage.

Kull, R. 2008. Solitude: Seeking Wisdom in Extremes . p. 77. Novato , CA : New World Library.