Mark Walsh, the proprietor of The Embodiment Conference, was recently challenged by cultural somaticist Tada Hozumi in an Open Letter, penned by Hozumi in lieu of accepting the invitation to speak at the Conference. Hozumi proposed that Walsh look more closely at the exclusionary economy of his ambitious project — specifically, at how it centers white men as the heroes of the somatic techniques that colonialism handed them. The letter, dignified and sincere, offered a concise and workable framing of a fraught issue. Walsh did not respond directly, but on his personal Facebook shitposted about being oppressed by “c*ntery” of social justice “twats.”Those familiar with this aspect of Walsh’s online persona were not surprised. He has openly risen to market dominance in the online somatasphere as a kind of Black Belt culture warrior, a Jordan Peterson in a jock-strap. In this bonus episode, Matthew reviews some of Walsh’s past online hits as a case study of how the wellness world can confuse acting out for freedom, somatic dominance for discipline, and allow charismatic men to weaponize unhealed wounds in the name of authenticity.Show NotesOpen Letter to Mark Walsh and The Embodiment ConferenceThe Embodiment Conference and “somafascism”: commentary from Ben SpatzMark Walsh to 2020 TEC invited presenter (the audio is from 2019)Statement: We need to divest from Mark Walsh and The Embodiment ConferenceYes, Mr. Walsh, there are Black people in Hungary. One of them was born there, in 1980, and is now an MP.Mark Walsh documentation
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If out of frustration you just deleted all of your yoga, spirituality, wellness content from your social feeds this fall, it's possible that you didn't get bombarded with adverts for the embodiment conference, which ran for 10 days in October.
But to be honest, the embodiment conference marketing was so saturating and loud that even if you did filter your feeds, the conference's founder, Mark Walsh, has a way of seeming to be everywhere.
And he might have tracked you down by text or cold call or thrust a flyer in your hand while you lined up for a COVID test.
Walsh is an autodidact embodiment coach based in the lovely hipster seaside town of Brighton in the UK.
A lot of people say a lot of things about him, and that's what my main reporting here will be about.
But one thing that everyone agrees on is that he is a manic, dog-on-a-bone marketer with a provocative online game.
And he's brought that game to the world of somatics, which, with its increasing intersection with the worlds of trauma awareness and social justice, might not be working out so well.
And with the embodiment conference, Walsh had a lot to market and a lot at stake in what looks to have been the most ambitious effort yet in the free conference and then I'll sell you access to the content game.
Walsh and his team put together a roster of 1,000 presenters who gave presentations about embodiment practices, mindfulness, dance, self-defense, trauma recovery, woke business practices, and so on.
It was a definitive who's who of the somatics world plus new age and wellness celebrities of varying degrees of credibility.
So some of the top names were Peter Levine, Gabor Matei, Tara Brock, Jon Kabat-Zinn, Bayo Okomolafe, Bonnie Bainbridge-Cohen, Philip Porges, Bessel van der Kolk,
Ken Wilber, Tammy Simon, Angel Kyoto Williams, Jack Kornfield, Sally Kempton, Leslie Kamenoff, Rod Stryker, Tom Myers, the list went on and on, collected together in 10 streams, which included things like coaching and therapy, dance and creativity, intimacy and relationships, martial and healing arts, trauma and social change.
Bottom line, the embodiment conference billed itself as a holistic, progressive think tank operation with utopian aspirations.
And in addition to the top-billed names, there were also some B-list culty types, but also some good friends of mine, which, if I'd taken the time and I'd had the bandwidth, I might have reached out to them and warned, this may be something you want to look at more carefully before associating with, on a couple of different levels.
I mean, first of all, this mega buffet model offers way too much for participants to engage with in detail.
And secondly, the website is impressive, but the vibe is kind of Amway or Ikea.
Also, it promises trickle down benefit, but I bet you won't see it.
And lastly, the organization and Walsh have fielded criticism that hasn't likely been addressed.
So, a note on the business side.
In earlier episodes, we've covered the model of the ginormous free conference and how the hook is in contact harvesting, affiliate deals, and package sales.
The embodiment conference currently boasts almost 500,000 participants in the original event, and they're now upselling the content packages at floating rates of 150 to 1,000 US dollars.
But then they also released the content for free for another weekend that just ended, or at least some of the content.
Walsh, the director, said in an email that their costs for the event were a million US dollars.
Now, he clearly has a tech, design, and production team, but I also imagine that he's paying the top names.
I could totally be wrong, but I don't think that Gabor Matei needs to do free stuff for exposure.
And typically with these events, the money hierarchy is clear.
Top names are paid in cash.
B-levels and lower are paid by being seen with the A-levels.
It's like an entertainment industry model.
So, I don't know, but whatever the reality of the embodiment conference is, economically, some basic back-of-the-napkin math says that they would need about 7,000 customers paying that entrance rate of $150 to break even.
If the cost really is $1,000,000.
And with 500,000 registrants, that's a conversion rate of 1.4%, which would be terrible.
Now, given that Walsh announced that he was in Turkey on a kinda holiday, quote-unquote, for two weeks shortly after the conference closed, I'm guessing he made bank.
Unless he's totally broke and scraping the bottom of the credit card barrel so he can have a steam bath in hookah.
So, big conference, probably big money, lots of hype, a 40,000 member Facebook group.
Is it a surprise that it has attracted controversy?
No.
Big, splashy things do.
But additionally, it's worth considering who the organizer is.
Mark Walsh presents himself as the working class Jordan Peterson of the somatics world.
He's been doing controversy for a while.
The current conflict began on October 18th, when Tada Hazumi, a cultural somaticist based in Vancouver, Canada, posted the following open letter to Medium.
Now, for those of you who didn't hear my interview with Hazumi in episode 24, I highly recommend it.
Not because of me, but because he's super smart, super interesting.
I won't read all of Hazumi's letter, but here's a big chunk.
Hi, Mark Walsh and the Embodiment Conference.
My name is Tada.
I'm a somatics practitioner who works in a field we sometimes refer to as cultural somatics, an emerging approach to embodiment that is distinctly concerned with the relationship between individual and collective change.
I've been invited by your team to speak at the conference and have been tracking your work to discern whether I should take TEC up on that offer.
My conclusion is that I've been invited to participate.
There's something important in the wins about that, so I would like to take the TEC up on that offer, but on my own terms.
That is to decline the invitation to speak in the Trauma and Social Change channel and instead offer this public letter that contains the bulk of what I would have to say in the first place.
A big part of this is that I do not want the ideas that I and my colleagues churn ourselves over to be tucked away in a channel that can be avoided.
I believe that matters of social justice, or whatever you want to call it, are foundational to what the conference is marketing as embodiment.
From this place, the first thing I would like to share with you, Mark, and the TEC community as a whole, is that embodiment as a modern idea and industry has been directly born out of collective disembodiment, a result of historical traumas from inter-European imperialism,
Which also includes invasions from and of so-called Asia, followed by what we now recognize as modern colonialism, which can be mostly attributed to pale-skinned European descendants, who we now refer to as white people.
This history of white disembodiment is why the current embodiment industry is dominated by white people, and especially white men, who have acted as founder-discoverers while the bulk of their actual practice has and continues to come from marginalized communities of color.
Somatic Experiencing, Hakomi Method, Continuum, Strozzi Institute and Generative Somatics, Dance Movement Therapy, you name it.
The core inspiration of these modalities comes from cultural practices such as Yoga, Qigong Energy Work, Indigenous Ritual, Internal Martial Arts, Afro-Diasporic Dance, and so on.
All of which arise from communities that have been in opposition to Western and White Imperialism.
Simply put, there are no modern Western modalities that we know of that do not find their origins in the white elite's fascination with the cultures of the mystical other.
So you can read the rest of Tada's letter there.
Hazumi also tacked on a voice message Walsh sent to someone Hazumi says was invited to be an embodiment conference presenter in 2019.
The message seems to be responding to a complaint about a lack of inclusivity in the programming.
So to just quote a little bit from the transcript of that voice message, which is on Hazumi's post, Walsh says that he's tired of random people from the internet throwing crap at him.
He describes that there's a kind of terrorism that's developed when there's a set of standards which are being imposed on the whole world.
He notes that, for example, someone said, oh, there should be more black people at this conference.
And you know, the Hungarian speaker was like, why?
There are no black people in Hungary.
And so on.
So the audio there posted to Hazumi's article gives a sense of the style and Walsh's attitude towards facts.
There are indeed black people in Hungary, including a young biracial MP who was born there in 1980.
And you get a sense from this voicemail of some of the conditions he sets for dialogue.
So, Hazumi wrote a really good letter.
Too good, in fact.
So much time and care put in, so much dignity.
And I say this out of respect for Hazumi, but also with some shame on my part, because I could have done something similar.
Not about race and indigeneity and colonialism, of course, but about misogyny.
This is back in 2017, when I withdrew from an event that Walsh invited me to.
So when I saw Hazumi's letter, I froze a little, because I remembered my silence and I also knew what I was up against, or rather what Hazumi's letter was up against.
I really wanted it to work, but I didn't think it would.
There's a phrase about pearls and swine, if I remember correctly.
The meaning and impact of Hazumi's letter, as well as what it would provoke, became clear just a few days after the embodiment conference finished, when Walsh posted the following rant to his personal Facebook feed.
Trigger warning here for foul, misogynistic language.
So now that the conference and biggest sales period is over, I can really talk some shit.
Really, the utter online cuntery I've put up with for the good of the conference for the past six months has been astounding.
Let's all say, well done Walsh for being a grown-up, but honestly, who wants the old Mark to come back and kick some arse?
I think people have started to see that many of those claiming to be the kind, noble, just defenders of the oppressed are just a bunch of twats.
They say they are being brave and claim moral superiority through the learning of new terminology, but I think we can see now they're conformist bullies trying a power grab from their own weird new privilege.
They are largely damaged, hurt people, yes, but enough of talking, taking crap from them.
Enough, enough, enough.
Even the most liberal, patient, and kind members of my team have been driven to screaming by these Muppets, and even the hardiest to tears.
They are bullies, and you're all complicit for not having the real bravery to stand up.
I have been too, I am ashamed to say.
I am utterly done with critic cretins now and bad faith terrorists now, though trying to intimidate good people doing good work.
Victim status claiming wankers, scoring virtue points and trying to control the world like online commissars or some kind of spoiled brat sub.
Middle class tossers misusing their education to gain power while claiming they have none.
Fuck off.
Hmm, maybe I'll wait until after my spa break to make the Maoists meow.
First, I sauna with a beautiful woman.
Living well is, after all, the best revenge.
But I have been taking names, and now I have fuck you money and lawyers.
Oh, and I'm all out of bubblegum.
So for those of us who are not British, a word about the cussing here.
Here in Canada, unless the kids have gone totally potty-mouthed in a way that I haven't heard, one would rarely hear the C word outside of a locker room or a hockey rink, and even then, almost never in mixed company.
So, to understand this a little bit better, I went to some reliable UK sources who said a few different things.
I was told that in working class circles, cunt and twat are commonly used and only acceptable when used to punch up, like at the Tories, for instance.
Now, Walsh has described himself to me in a DM as working class, so I don't know.
Conceivably, if Walsh is using the terms to punch up, and if he's really working class, it may be plausible that the rant is not misogynistic.
But he's punching down at people who are calling for more inclusion and diversity.
Also, Walsh is throwing this stuff at a majority women's market, and a global one that can't be expected to understand the nuances of working class cussing in the UK.
The bottom line here is that the provocation seems calculated to pretend to a humble social status, but also to insidership, in this case an identification with working class rawness.
But then, when the language predictably provokes discomfort or outrage, A poster like this can frame those responses as repressive.
And what do you know?
Repression is solvable through authentic embodiment.
Also notable here is the blatant admission of opportunism that Walsh was on good behavior during the sales period and that's why he didn't clap back at criticism.
Also notable is the plausibly ironic threat, I have fuck you money and lawyers.
Now, after Hazumi and others shared screenshots of this shitpost, Walsh issued a walkback.
I'll quote a little bit from it.
He calls his post a semi-serious, friends-only Facebook venting.
And he expresses surprise, quote, that a private post where I am wearing a kitten as a hat was taken so seriously.
But these are admittedly delicate times.
He describes that the stress of the conference has given him some health challenges, and then he sort of apologizes, sort of makes excuses by saying, I do have a big mouth and impulsive ADHD at times, and was venting in my own crude Anglo-Irish style, exhausted and with much accumulated annoyance.
Sorry if it's given you problems.
I am genuinely apologetic towards any speakers or staff who feel compromised, upset, or disturbed by my language.
Now, in that original friends-only Facebook post, the distinction Walsh makes between the old Mark and the new Mark is pretty interesting.
I've never met Mark in person.
We had a Skype call once, and we've exchanged a ton of DMs and some emails, which I'll get to, but the old Mark has always been visible.
And even though the new Mark is clearly serving his newfound mainstream status, I would argue that the old Mark has been at the center of his marketing strategy since at least 2017, when I first interacted with him at length.
So my story is that in January of that year, Walsh emailed me with an offer to present a 75-minute online lecture on ethical yoga marketing for some training or coaching program that he called Purpose Black Belt.
He offered to pay 250 British pounds, which was fair, although I'm not sure how much he stood to make from royalties over time.
He was very welcoming and complimentary, and I accepted the offer and I got as far as drafting notes for the copy.
But as I look back through my email now, I find that I sent a withdrawal notice dated about two weeks after my acceptance.
And in that email, I say I'm withdrawing because of his online behavior.
Now, I don't have screenshots of the posts and comments I found disturbing, but my description is clear enough.
I wrote, Hi Mark, I hope you don't take this personally.
So notice the soft opening.
I have to withdraw from the thing because I've decided I can't support or collaborate with your political rhetoric.
Your, I don't buy into patriarchy post was the last straw for me.
I don't agree with your politics, but that's fine.
What I can't abide is the conflation of embodiment discourse with provocation tactics and how this becomes the spine of your marketing.
I understand the repressions you're attacking, but there's too much willingness to break taboos on behalf of supposedly victimized white men at the expense of the less privileged.
Also, with regard to the subject of my commissioned presentation, one key rule I'd be offering about the ethics of yoga marketing would be to resist ever speaking beyond scope of knowledge and being really careful about the conflation of private and public selves.
So this wouldn't jibe well with your strategy of opining on literally everything that strikes you and freely blending personal and professional identities.
So on that score, I think I'd be a liability to you.
Apologies that this is not a fit and best wishes.
Walsh argued with me in that exchange.
He suggested that my position was intolerant and that intolerance was killing the left and being exported from the U.S.
in a dominating way.
And in all of his argumentation, I had this growing resonance with alt-right discourse in my head, a mixture of misogynist tears, edgelord claims, outright falsehoods, and instant defensiveness over straightforward disagreements.
But at the same time, he was confessional, admitted to his prickly nature, and appealed to my friendship.
This was evident when we apparently, according to my DMs at least, clashed on Facebook later that year and he messaged me with a mixture of accusation and vulnerability.
He seemed to me like he was alone.
I empathized with him and tried to share personal stuff with him as well.
At one point he suggested that my feminism made me hate men and I replied by sending him a picture of my two sons.
And said basically, nope, you're wrong about that.
But here's where I enter into confusing territory.
At the risk of essentializing masculinity, I think it's important to note how difficult it is for many men to build and maintain friendships.
I'm generally pretty lonely, and that's not just because I'm a writer.
It's not just because I'm avoidantly attached in many ways.
I'm also lonely because good friendship was never really modeled for me as a man, nor available to me.
So when I encounter someone like Walsh, and there's a part of the dialogue that seems to be about wanting connection, or the feeling of sympathical, it's hard for me to be cold with that.
I'm very often in situations where I'm negotiating between warmth and connection and political or psychological disagreement.
It happens in the locker room all the time, or at least it did pre-COVID.
I'm in there with guys who are idiots in many ways, but I care for them.
Like, there's an older Greek guy who drives us all nuts with his pro-Trump garbage.
We're sometimes shouting at each other about it.
But when he disappeared from the sauna for a few weeks, we were all worried about his health.
And we were happy to see him come back.
There's this one guy who loves to sit in the sauna and hold court about everything.
He's a blowhard, but also super interesting.
He's from Trinidad and he's made, he has this great working class analysis of how Trinidad and Tobago were colonized and how fucked up that made things.
But he's also a huge misogynist, almost fatally wounded by his mom and aunt and however many relationship disasters he's been through according to his report.
And it's led him to basically always talk about women as being insane or predatory, untrustworthy.
And so I sit there and sweat and vacillate between loving this guy and empathizing with his relational issues and also wanting to tell him to shut the fuck up.
And so I try to carve out this middle path, interrupting the misogyny where I can with, I don't know about that or That's a little extreme, dude.
Or, well, I don't blame her given how much BS women have to deal with.
So, I'll test him on his wounded and violent attitudes, but I don't break contact.
And I know that that comes from a certain kind of privilege, from not feeling the poison and the danger of misogyny directly, so there's that.
And I also know that I measure out my conflict capital and I know that at times I'm taking the path of least resistance.
And, of course, if he was openly and publicly abusive with women, or anybody, I'd step in.
But with this guy and with so many others, my gut often says that often it's more important to maintain a friendly contact with him than to convey the impression, and in this case from a white guy no less, that he's backwards or ignorant.
The last thing this guy needs is more rejection.
Somebody else telling him he's stupid.
What's weird about my online communication with Walsh is that it felt at times like it was in the same context, that we knew each other in real life, that we're hanging out, and that our priority should be to backslap and encourage each other, to set politics aside and watch footy at the pub.
And he's good at creating that impression of closeness, or he was with me, but it was unearned.
Add to that the strange capacity of social media to make us believe we're closer than we are.
So, frankly, I'm confused because Walsh and I are not really connected, and yet, in our different ways, we long to be.
And then I realized that, intentionally or not, Walsh's style of mingling professional and personal streams has a kind of muzzling effect.
Because if, in 2017, I had made some kind of public statement about withdrawing from that gig, I felt that I would have been breaking a personal relationship framed incorrectly as friendship.
But on the other hand, not speaking up means that the personal communication has to be mingled with a kind of professional coldness.
And all of this is happening within a general vacuum of secure male friendship.
It sucks.
However, whatever it was I objected to back in 2017, it was a lot milder than some of Walsh's other online behavior.
I was objecting to the smoke rather than the fire.
In one of his most notorious posts, now deleted, Walsh let his men's group empowerment freak flag fly.
I don't have a date for this one, but I know I became aware of it after our communications trailed off.
Trigger warning here.
Fantasies of physical and sexual violence.
When we try and repress the dark parts of ourselves, they come out sideways with a vengeance.
Better to admit that sometimes a part of me would like to strangle that crying baby and her mother in Starbucks, punch that fat business fuck in first class in the face, and have my way with that teenager irrespective of it.
Breaks her heart.
And you know the really scary thing?
I'm far less dangerous knowing this than every smug pseudo-saint who feigns disgust reading this post and thinks they don't have any violence in them.
Hashtag, and this is the toned down version, hashtag still available for birthday parties, hashtag kittens.
When Walsh was reminded of this shitpost during the online fracas following the Hazumi open letter, Walsh disclaimed it in a DM that was shared with me.
He wrote, This was a post with a context maybe five years ago.
It's about our shadow.
It was a hasty post and I later removed it so it was not misunderstood.
We all have something on the internet we regret.
So, he disclaimed it via direct message.
Cool.
Is that enough?
As someone who grew up on a steady diet of provocative literature from the 1960s and 70s, often with a misogynist point of view that I didn't recognize because it was everywhere, and also as someone who briefly flirted with men's movement circles in the 1990s when Robert Bly's Iron John was all the rage, I have some distinct responses to this shitpost.
If it's not simply dismissed as violence, I understand what it's plausibly trying to do, and what it's connected with.
In a Freudian and Jungian sense, it's part of that late romantic, hippie, misogynist drive to examine and deconstruct the pieties of sexual repression.
Now if this ever had value, it was as art.
But that's questionable, given that as art, it often occupied a central, homosocial, normative space that squeezed out every other voice.
Secondly, regardless of how disgusting this is to the average reader, it's supremely manipulative when presented as a form of too-much-information self-therapy connected with marketing a business that offers embodiment for self-empowerment.
The impact here is to conflate embodiment with an erasure of repression and socialized values.
And that's plausible.
It plays upon the values of honesty and transparency that overlap with the popular idea in trauma-sensitive circles that the body never lies.
Walsh's argument seems to be, I can be nasty because I'm authentically nasty.
However, it all presents from a position of gendered power, which, of course, is a broader repression that impacts us all.
Third, the way Walsh uses social media drives right into the heart of something we've discussed only in passing on the podcast.
That the influencer on social media can often gain power by blurring personal and professional identities, and then, if trouble comes up, they can use one to excuse the other.
So in his walk back Facebook post he wrote, obviously the tone of the friends only cat hat post was a personal rant rather than an official statement.
Now remember that his critique is about repression.
That is, what you would get in an official statement.
So by calling his shitpost a personal rant, he can have his cake and eat it.
He can dismiss what he's saying as personal while also deploying his true feelings in order to lend Old Mark authenticity to contrast with his stiffer corporate image.
This logic plays up the boundary between personal and professional when the person is in hot water, but then melts the boundary down to sell the transgressive edginess of the content.
Now, in my opinion, Walsh's shitpost is a shitpost, dressed up as liberatory transgression in the style of somebody like William Burroughs.
Here's why this is so dangerous in the wellness and self-improvement space, in my opinion.
It's like where the pickup artist world meets Tony Robbins meets Jordan Peterson.
And maybe worse.
Because if you watched The Vow on HBO, or I would actually recommend more the much better documentary called Seduced on Starz, you will have heard NXIVM cult leader and peak sociopath Keith Raniere give a speech at a men's group meeting that does exactly this.
It frames criminal violence as a pathway to the release of limiting beliefs and sexual and spiritual freedom.
Again, all the trigger warnings.
I debated about whether to read this, and I will, but I'm going to read it like a robot to both neuter the disgusting aggression but also expose the insanity underneath Ranieri's charismatic delivery.
What does our male sex drive feel like?
It is urgent.
So there's a very basic part of us that just wants to fuck something to get that release.
For us, fucking sex has nothing to do with the other person per se.
It's what's going to feel good.
The primitive parts of us are hungry, fucky beasties.
I mean, that's what we want to do is.
I want to fuck it.
Fuck it?
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
I feel like fucking something today.
God, I'm pissed.
I want to fuck something.
You know, our basic nature is we earn things.
We are always testing.
If we're worthy to be accepted in any way, if we conquer a woman, if we grab the thing, we want to fuck whatever it is and fuck it.
That's a type of acceptance.
And you know what's a better acceptance?
That in our most angry thing, if they enjoy it and if we do whatever we want with our stuff and they like it, that's acceptance.
I want to be absolutely clear that I'm not comparing the person of Walsh to the person of Regnier, but rather showing the thematic and affect overlap.
And to point to what this discourse can normalize and potentially enable.
Because the thing is that the more male coaches and influencers there are out there pulling this shit off as reasonable, the more true sociopaths like Keith Raniere have a foothold, a place to a place to start from.
Next topic is structural racism.
This was the theme that Hazumi focused on.
So I'll refer you back to that letter, which very politely assumes Walsh will be receptive to an anti-racist point of view.
But Walsh has already made it clear how he's positioned with regard to discourse on structural racism.
He made it clear in a post about a photograph that went viral back in May of 2016.
The photograph shows Tess Asplund, a 42-year-old black woman, with her fist raised against three men of the Nordic Resistance movement during a march in Borlinge.
Walsh shared the image, but wrote, People have got this image back to front and its celebration is a symbol for a big problem.
She looks awesome, right?
But let me ask you, who's the Nazi?
The people peacefully expressing their politics in a legal rally, or the one giant ego trying to stop them?
This is the fascism of the left now.
No views other than theirs are allowed.
No listening except to them.
Sweden has been negatively affected by immigration.
It's a real issue there, and needs to be allowed to be discussed, as here.
By not allowing certain views, the left creates more extreme and violent versions of them.
See also Trump.
This woman isn't brave and automatically awesome because she's not a white man in a suit.
Note the implicit message and imagery.
She's a nuisance helping create what she hates.
She's the Neo-Left Nazi.
Walsh's appalling historical and political misreading of this photograph is clear.
What's astonishing, however, is his misreading of its somatic implications.
Because the picture clearly shows a brave woman, a dark-skinned individual, making an assertive gesture, somewhere between martial arts, dance, and theater.
She seems to be fully in her body, confronting a row of blank and hollowed-out political drones.
So what is Walsh's problem with this?
Is it that she's raising her fist in Sweden, where she doesn't belong, instead of Suriname or Kenya, where she does?
Do we know how she or her family got there?
Asplund is a common Swedish surname.
But even if she were displaced, even if she were an immigrant, isn't it amazing that she's brought her somatic courage with her?
That, as the picture suggests at least, she's at home in her body and her dignity in a moment of stress.
But with this post, Walsh proves one of the main points that Hazumi made in our interview, and in his open letter, that the bodies of the colonized have survived through a kind of somatic courage that now a whole industry of embodiment commodities are being inspired by.
Tess Asplund is actually an advertisement for the Embodiment Conference, if Walsh could get that.
She could be its spokesperson.
But what I read in this post is jealousy.
She's doing something amazing here.
And the photo of her action went viral not because it was a shitpost, but because it communicated something revolutionary and archetypal.
So, that's the end of my reporting.
It's not complete.
I didn't interview people formally for this because, given my personal exchanges with Walsh, I don't think that's my place to do.
I don't know how this will shake out.
On their Facebook page, Tada Hazumi has expanded the discussion to reach out to all Embodiment Conference presenters to ask them to consider or reconsider their involvement in the Embodiment Conference, given Walsh's apparent values.
So we'll see what happens.
In Walsh's formal bio, he lists a psychology degree and a globetrotting array of trainings in somatic subjects.
He claims an Aikido black belt, and oddly claims to have studied nonviolent communication with Marshall Rosenberg himself.
It seems clear that he doesn't practice that anymore.
He also says that he's a recovering alcoholic.
I reached out to Walsh while preparing this episode to request comments or clarifications.
He didn't respond.
I want to conclude with something humanizing, inspired by Clementine Morgan and her partner Jay of the podcast Fucking Cancelled, where they argue that the spiritual principles of Alcoholics Anonymous are really useful for moderating conflict.
The main thing they emphasize is that the person who acts out, for whatever reason, shouldn't be permitted to harm people.
But at the same time, they cannot be made disposable.
That doesn't work.
Humiliation doesn't work.
Nor does punishment.
So I want to read a section from Mark's 2020 book called Embodiment Moving Beyond Mindfulness.
It's in a concluding chapter which consists of personal reflections that are dated as if from a journal.
Coming to Love the Archetypal Father.
Cambridgeshire, May 2018.
A lot of my life has centered on first fighting, then coming to love the archetypal father.
In a feminized society where boys are largely raised by women and masculinity is mocked, repressed, and despised by Hollywood and advertisers, this is a hard journey.
The world now embodies the supposedly caring but tyrannical mother of both state and counterculture.
She will look after you and keep you oh-so-safe.
All she demands is your balls.
It has become fashionable too, with ingratitude, to blame the patriarchy, from the Greek for rule of the father, for many horrors.
But this is the most feminized time in recorded history.
Whatever percentage of politicians or CEOs are men, this is not the age of men.
My teen years extended far into adult life, as I tried to kill dad in many ways.
And look at the state of the world.
Who wouldn't want to reject the norms of a sick society?
This anti-father urge is at the heart of so many of my alternative friends too, and they suffer for it.
I came to love my father, but I was not well raised to be a man by him.
This sad fact is the norm, as is some alcoholism, on top of the usual lame, disempowered dad syndrome.
My adult life has also been about ways to re-father myself.
The severe discipline of Japanese martial arts was excellent for this.
I honor my many fathers there who initiated me, especially Don Levine, William Smith, and Paul Linden, senseis.
I had to go to war zones and test my edge.
My mother hated it, but to her credit, never tried to stop me.
Taking on the challenges and responsibility of running a business aided further.
I also wonder if this re-fathering urge is in all those yogis lining up to be told what to do.
And in all the lost hipsters dressing like lumberjacks and sporting beards and tattoos.
I see those looking to find meaning and ethics in the East.
We long for manhood.
We long for discipline, morals, and responsibility, though they are almost dirty words now.
Note, the arms of the far right and Islamic extremists also await our youth who are seeking these things.
I was lucky enough to heal my relationship with my actual father before he died, and also with society.
I see what is strong and beautiful about my nation and societal norms.
I am married.
My inner teen rebel is still strong, but the man behind him sits on the throne and smiles wryly.
Thank you to all my fathers for not making this journey easy.
The way of ease is the way of weakness.
My fathers have prepared me for the world.
Thank you again.
By closing with something that is not a Walsh shitpost, something that reveals a little bit more about him and the roots of his politics in his own words, I think we're presented with an opportunity to think deeply about where this is all coming from, and more importantly, why so many people have put up with the controversy for years, to the point of handing him the keys to a huge platform.
Now, there might be all kinds of ways in which he exerts managerial power that are part of the story I can't see.
But from the point of view of his reach and brand, the wellness space in general has to get clear on what it loves and supports and tolerates, what it sympathizes with and why.
There are two reasons I think this is really important.
There's an imminent danger reason, which is that we've seen how friendly yoga, wellness, and embodiment spaces are for misogynists, sexual abusers, body fascists, and cultic control.
