An earlier version of this appeared on my personal blog. This version reshapes the opening for Dispatches, where I’m tracing how attention, embodiment, and AI keep folding into one another.

It was –40°C outside. I was in my Nunavut living room, following a Tai Chi class over Zoom with a scientist in Boston. The instructor was Dr. Peter Wayne, founder of the Tree of Life Tai Chi Center and director of Harvard’s Osher Center for Integrative Health. That was six years ago.

It is –40°C outside; inside I am practicing Tai Chi in my Nunavut living room over Zoom with a Boston scientist.My instructor is Dr. Peter Wayne, founder of Boston’s Tree of Life Tai Chi Center and director of Harvard’s Osher Center for Integrative Health. That was six years ago.

His work suggests that an embodied life, as realized through Tai Chi, expands our capacity for connection, health, and wisdom.

Decades earlier, long before I met Dr. Wayne, my therapist and spiritual counsellor was a trained philosopher, a PhD from Oxford and lecturer at the University of Toronto. Yet he freely admitted he did not give “a whit” about the razor-sharp distinctions philosophers make. He spoke often of “embodiment,” but despite years of work together, the idea remained abstract. Only now, practicing Tai Chi in my Nunavut living room, did I begin to develop a felt sense of what he meant.

Living in our bodies takes us beyond the logical, calculating life of the brain.

“Arrive where we started
and know the place for the first time.”
— T. S. Eliot
Will AI, as our invention to end all inventions, bring us back to our bodies, where we can learn again, as if for the first time, what it means to “know”?

Still, AI remains a hollow man. It can generate sentences and approximate movements, but it cannot feel weight shift across the feet or a subtle release in the spine. It is not changed by an exhalation that softens held tension. It does not even hold tension in the first place. This hollow man, yet a genius of wordsmithery, forces a central question: what kinds of knowledge remain unautomatable?

Embodiment is, and has always been, our deepest human capacity. The rise of AI is pushing us back toward it.

As AI takes over tasks of the rational mind, an opportunity emerges to return to embodied life. There we find that mind is not simply a product of the brain but of the whole self. And there we also find meaning.

“Push and withdraw”, a Tai Chi movement we play with,  is one example of how embodiment is learned through practice. At first it looks like simple rocking with arm movements. Years later, I can say there is far more: layers of subtlety, skill, balance, and an unexpected increase in enjoyment.

Embodiment can sound esoteric. For me, the learning came through earlier mindfulness work such as MBSR, reading Dr. Wayne’s book, and then actually doing Tai Chi with Tree of Life. After the first class, I felt unusually good, and I asked myself why. I found two answers. One was the relief of not feeling locked inside my thinking mind. The other was the basic fact that being in the body feels good. Our bodies are a refuge, a source of confidence, a place of containment and courage.

There is also a philosophy to Tai Chi. It stands alone, yet sits alongside other belief systems. I find balance in my body, and from there in my life. We work with yin-yang, the interplay between doing and non-doing, and how each depends on the other. Put all your weight into one leg and you feel effort and strain; the other leg rests. As one leg is not-doing, the other is doing. Tai Chi tunes us to this interplay, the effort and the relief, and how each feels in the body.

Embodied living does not replace the miracle of our minds; it brings the two into balance. As AI takes on more of our thinking, embodied living offers a renewed sense of purpose. We will not be solving the same problems or working faster than AI. We will be moving through life differently. This opens a path toward meaning in the age of AI, though I cannot say what shape that meaning will take.

On a personal level, Tai Chi became an unexpected form of self-care that made it possible to adjust to life in Canada’s Arctic. I cannot imagine how I would have done so without it. There were many adjustments: climate, culture, witnessing colonisation’s legacy, and at times a deep sense of isolation.

It may be –40°C outside, but I’m warming up.