The Body as a Landscape

“Anatomy is the map and the terrain… but embodiment is when we walk our landscape barefoot.”

This quote comes from Andrea Olsen, a dancer, writer, and professor who teaches in both the dance and environmental studies departments at Middlebury College. Her work sits at the intersection of movement, ecology, and body awareness — and it’s been gently guiding my class themes this month.

I’ve been thinking about what it means to be in the body — not as a shape or a structure, and not as a project to manage or improve — but as a place to live. A landscape to inhabit. To feel. To trust.

In yoga, we often talk about alignment. And there’s value in understanding structure. But embodiment isn’t about assembling parts. It’s about listening to the whole.

It’s not about performing a shape — it’s about being it.

As we practice, the floor is our most reliable — and constant — prop. From that place of support, we’re noticing how the body meets the earth. Where we grip. Where we soften. What steadiness feels like today — not as an idea, but as a lived sensation.

Last weekend, I had a trapeze lesson (yes, really!) and what struck me most was how completely disorienting it felt to move without the ground beneath me. It made me think about proprioception — our sense of where we are in space. When we’re off the ground, that internal compass gets fuzzy. We lose our bearings. But on the mat, the ground becomes a guide. Through our feet, hands, breath, we start to feel our way back into our bodies — into awareness, into belonging.

Because the body isn’t just a vehicle for the practice. It is the practice.

It’s how we experience texture, gravity, sound, space. It’s our first home. Our first environment.

Olsen also writes, “The body is the medium through which we know the earth.”

And that feels true to me on every level.

We aren’t separate from nature.

We are nature. Like the land, we shift and breathe and carry memory in our bones.

So this month’s practice is a remembering. A re-rooting.

Less about fixing. More about feeling.

Less doing. More being.

Let your breath move through you like wind across a field.

Let your body be how you know the world.

Let the ground remind you: you already belong.