Navigating the Terrain of Movement and Meaning: A Conversation with John Vervaeke and Rafe Kelley

Dr. John Vervaeke engages with Rafe Kelley, a visionary movement coach, in a nuanced discussion that meanders from the philosophy of human movement to the meaning of life. Kelley imparts his unique approach to personal growth, advocating for a harmonious blend of physicality and philosophical depth. He delves into the significance of sensory-motor learning, ethical action, and the role of movement in understanding both self and world. The pair traverse an array of complex topics such as the connection between cognition and emotion, the profound philosophy behind parkour, and even venture into existential crises among athletes. Kelley compellingly argues that modern humans have lost touch with their natural environment, a point underscored by Vervaeke's reflections on serious play and rituals. Drawing on literature from Maps of Meaning to predictive processing, the dialogue is layered with insights into the integration of body and mind.
Rafe Kelley (@RafeKelley) is a pioneering movement coach and founder of Evolve Move Play, an organization devoted to helping individuals reconnect with the natural world and their own innate capacity for movement. With a background spanning disciplines from parkour and martial arts to gymnastics, Kelley advocates for a holistic approach to physical training that emphasizes the mind-body connection, ethical development, and personal growth. Through workshops, podcasts, and seminars, Rafe Kelley is redefining the landscape of what it means to move, think, and live harmoniously.
Resources:
Rafe Kelley
Website: www.evolvemoveplay.com/
KZbin: / rafekelley
X: / rafekelley
Dr. John Vervaeke
Website: johnvervaeke.com/
KZbin: / @johnvervaeke
Patreon: / johnvervaeke
X: / vervaeke_john
The Vervaeke Foundation: vervaekefoundation.org/
Workshops | Evolve Move Play: www.evolvemoveplay.com/workshops
Volunteer Park Trust: volunteerparktrust.org/
Wilderness Awareness School: wildernessawareness.org/about/
Voices with Vervaeke - KZbin
The deep return to nature in order to cultivate wisdom and meaning w/ Kyle Koch: • The deep return to nat...
Rafe Kelley - KZbin
John Vervaeke & Lex Friedman on Return to the Source: • John Vervaeke & Lex Fr...
Nest Robbers: Return to the Source 2021: • Nest Robbers: Return t...
The Dr. Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - KZbin
Parkour and Rough Play: Combatting Infantilization | Rafe Kelley | EP 343: • Parkour and Rough Play...
Andrew Huberman - KZbin
Ido Portal: The Science & Practice of Movement | Huberman Lab Podcast #77: • Ido Portal: The Scienc...
Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief - Jordan Peterson
The Ego and the Dynamic Ground: A Transpersonal Theory of Human Development - Michael Washburn
Four Quartets: A Poem “Little Gidding” - T. S. Eliot
Laches, or Courage by Plato - The Internet Classics Archive
The View from Above: A Transformation of Perspectival and Participatory Knowing by John Vervaeke - Modern Stoicism
James-Lange theory - Oxford Reference
Parkour | Description, History, & Facts - Britannica
Eightfold Path | Summary & Eight Elements of the Path - Britannica
Moving like a kid again : an analysis of Parkour as free-form adult play - Margaret E. Kelley
People:
Aaron Cantor
Kyle Koch
Ben Medder
Paul Bloom
Todd Hargrove
Jonathan Pageau
Stuart Brown
Timecodes:
[00:00:00] Introduction: Dr. Vervaeke introduces Rafe Kelley, a movement coach.
[00:08:20] Emotions and Action Potentials: Kelley explains emotions' link to action potentials.
[00:15:30] Physiological Awareness and Emotions: Vervaeke discusses their relationship.
[00:19:40] Complexity of Sensory Motor and Cognitive Relationship: Vervaeke suggests a top-down approach.
[00:23:16] Relationship with 'Being': Kelley on its role in life's meaning.
[00:32:53] Transformative Power of Parkour: Parkour's impact on perceptions.
[00:38:23] Disconnect from Nature: Kelley on modern Westerners' disconnection from nature.
[00:43:44] Collective Intelligence in Group Activities: Kelley on group activities' intelligence.
[00:46:14] Cognitive and Sensory Motor Movements: Vervaeke discusses their relationship.
[00:50:14] Role of Beauty in Wisdom: Vervaeke on beauty's role in wisdom.
[00:57:26] Expanding Notion of Cognition: Vervaeke questions traditional ideas.
[01:00:20] Unique Human Abilities: Kelley highlights human uniqueness.
[01:02:40] Martial Arts and Embodied Cognition: Vervaeke on martial arts and philosophy.
[01:12:00] Meaning Crisis and Perspectives: Kelley and Vervaeke on addressing the meaning crisis.
[01:18:20] Embodiment and Archetypal Hero: Kelley mentions Jordan Peterson's model.
[01:19:20] Conclusion and Future Discussion: Proposing a future talk on embodiment and AI.

[@BenMedder]

Great stuff guys. Looking forward to bringing some 2 day Evolve Move Play workshops to Europe soon.

[@RafeKelley]

Excited to have you sharing EMP regularly

[@Right_in2]

Australia anytime soon?

[@janthonycologero9206]

Dr. Vervaeke, I've heard you say you like anthologies. The Enlightened Heart edited by Stephen Mitchell is really great. I would love something in the same vein from you. An anthology of all your favorite sacred poetry or sacred oriented scientific work that you've found profound or particularly helpful. As always, thanks for everything you've been up to. Changing lives by remembering the good and reorienting toward it. Toward the flow of inward and outward good. 👌🏼🙏🏼🍄💙✌🏼

[@BalazsKegl]

I love that we are going towards movement, I think that talk therapy and cognitive frameworks are great but they have intrinsic limits as tools for personal growth. So this will not be a criticism, rather a "yes, and" comment. The type of movement therapy that has helped me a lot is when we move and connect to others. I practice two: contact dance (or Gabor Goda's weight-flow contact), and movement medicine. Both give a loose frame to free expression through movement, and both are based on relating to other dancers. Deep deep stuff came up for me, those early childhood pre-language patterns that get somatized by the body. John if you want I can connect you the teachers, it'd be great to see them on your show.

[@henrylovespies]

John I'd love to see a conversation between you and Brian Muraresku! So much insight to be gleamed about ancient Greek spirituality and wisdom

[@trottingsparrow]

Love these guys ❤❤ lets go!!

[@Right_in2]

Does anyone remember how using finger skateboards completely changed the way you saw your environment? I had the same thing happen to me when I first learnt to ride a mountain bike and a scooter. I was so drawn to "finding" cool new ways to traverse my street.

[@projectmalus]

The martial arts without ritual is like thieves asserting a philosophy of right to ownership - instead of giving up that right - by stealing, where self is objectified in both cases because the power is attractive yet confining. Robin Hood apparently avoided this by moving into the trees, forming small bands and re-proportioning wealth.

[@abejar99]

So... I'm thinking that the fact that you can have emotion independent of a physiological event doesn't necessarily mean that it wasn't somehow "made" from it, what I propose is that these more complex emotions are a result of the brain playing with the internalized versions of the physical emotions

[@abejar99]

Same way in which you've exemplified in awakening from the meaning crisis, how the mind's grasping of realness is an exaptation of the physical sense of touch

[@RafeKelley]

@@abejar99 yes this my model as well

[@KalebPeters99]

​@@RafeKelleyI think this thesis would be well supported by work like that of Michael Levin, who talks about different spaces of Exaptation from metabolic through to sensory-motor. I think you're continuing his work up into higher spaces ✨

[@DaemonLlama]

My hunch is that you and Rafe are right. Like John says, the emotional part may have been 'exapted' from the earlier motor basis. In pre-social organisms the motor response is primary, but that shifts towards the empathic/emotional as social complexity rises and the connection to others becomes more important than pure self-reliance.

[@ferreirap.]

The gymnasium, the academia, and the shrine.

[@Lizarus.un-sane]

It’s the cerebellum it’s not just regulating motor rhythm , cadence ,gradient force but our senses and half of the senses are so we can move but it’s like a switchboard to thalamus frontal cortex as well There can be an ataxia in any function .. Rhythm seems to exercise or distract the cerebellum While dancing keeps you in the now When you let your body go You can relax your mind

[@Lizarus.un-sane]

Dysmetria of thought Ppl disregard the cerebellum

[@MDSaunders]

“Bad, bad - what? Is he not going back? Yes, but you understand him badly if you complain about it. He’s going back as every man does who wants to make a huge jump.” Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

[@RafeKelley]

great quote

[@antkcuck]

One of the conversations where you mentioned martial arts over correcting from woo to only combat was with Dr Rodney King

[@MattWilkinsonwilkoteq]

Amazing. 🎉

[@Wrath669]

I've always felt the embodiment of guilt is weight. It's a heavy feeling that pushes us down.

[@danaharden6283]

Who is the Washburn you mention? Is it the black 43:22 woman psychologist who died in 1939 after a stroke? It seems like it was somebody after her that developed her work into developmental psychology. Say more about her and Wilbur's Monopoly in this area. It's such an important area.

[@vitasprezzatura]

Michael Washburn in his 1995 book The Ego and the Dynamic Ground: A Transpersonal Theory of Development.

[@levicmwangi]

great for loving kindness

[@dsuleyma]

What does Raffe say at 1:09:18? The microphone cut out.

[@RafeKelley]

I can’t tell sorry I think it was just it needs to be grounded

[@Aaron-xb4rq]

Ironic that the four relationships that Rafe mentions are all based in duality - the false notion of separation- when what he seems to be longing for is the recognition of man’s inherent non-duality. No practices, programs, philosophies based in duality will ever bring about this non-dual recognition, but only reify false separation and promote further seeking for that which was never lost.

[@projectmalus]

isn't irony based on information though? Which is realized thru engagement. So I'm not sure if this is right but say there's a ball that is one, and at the center has an origin with a perimeter further out. Antagonistic information reveal as splitting into radians or pieces of pie as efficient and moving from spiraling around the origin to spiraling around at the perimeter as efficient also, speeding up angle addition to radian multiplication just to keep up. Grouping of radians as rhetorical irony and the difference in trust of one efficiency and the trust in another, both together as truth perhaps, and when not as existential irony. The extension of vectors allowing information as lines to triangles to parallelograms as infill of quadrants, as efficiency of brachistochrone curves webbing which allows a third irony of "repair irony" that moves forward in affording a way to move back again.

[@Right_in2]

How can you transcend duality if you don't know what duality is? How can you practice NON-duality, without a conception of duality? The concept of Non-duality has implicit assumptions regarding duality built into the conception.

[@Aaron-xb4rq]

@@Right_in2 Non-duality is not a concept, philosophy, or something to understand. It is beyond all understanding and simply is all that is. Non-duality cannot be practiced. It simply is. It’d be like “practicing” breathing or pumping blood through your veins. Non-duality points to the reality that there is no separation between the immanent and transcendent. Therefore, duality cannot be transcended. There’s nowhere to go. This is all there is - no-thing appearing as everything.

[@ferreirap.]

I like to think of the capacity for imaginal thought as an exaptation of the capacity to imagine movement through space without actually moving. Like when a cat imagines how it is going to catch the mouse, calculating the speed and the distances, before deciding whether to go for the jump or not. Abstract thought - even philosophy - is not, seems to me, very different from that, in a sense. It still is a form of imaginary object manipulation. Like, whenever I understand something, it is impossible to me to differentiate the act of understanding from the object (or the relation) that is understood and from the form of my imagination in the very moment of understanding. It feels as if I was an octopus, and my understanding of the inside shape of a jar consisted in my actual taking the shape with my imaginal body. I hope that makes sense :-)

[@RafeKelley]

Yes this the argument I am advancing, We move through the landscape of through and manipulate what we find there in using neurology that was built for navigating the physical landscape. The implication here is that the physical is the foundation.

[@projectmalus]

The tree of knowledge of good and evil must have been a very small tree to be in a clearing. Premier Doug Ford in John's province wanted to take away the green space and give it to his developer friends. Now he's contrite and gone to the other extreme instead of allowing natural forms to dictate purposeful forms, like inserting a Platonic structure (instead of a grid stamped on the land) which solves multiple problems and allows Rafe, Zack Stein etc to embed these practices closer to home, and providing the homes as per Ford's initial good intent. A multifaceted allowing thru a food forest heart and a monastic extension from there, plus the inclusion of wildlife as pets. 2^5 is thirty two interaction sets as hyper object, talk about swinging thru the trees. I was lucky enough to live near a beach years ago and did a flatter version of Rafe's tree swinging where I ran arms out balancing down beach logs jumping into the sand and zig zagging with the help of half buried giant jackstraws laying about, to go further. Easy on the joints....

[@projectmalus]

The sensory-motor to abstractive via squalene? Since the nose seems most truthful of the senses, in a sea of molecules, the ability of sharks to use space filling curves to navigate fully the ocean with the only other place squalene is found besides shark cartilage is in the oil exapted from the side of one's nose? Like the brain reaching towards the nose then the skull enlarging to accommodate the larger brain.

[@manuserodio]

What's the book he's talking about at 07:35 ??

[@RafeKelley]

Maps of meaning Jordan Peterson’s magnum opus

[@manuserodio]

Thank you very much Rafe. On a side note, I would love to go to one of the EMP retreats but i'm in Argentina. Are there any plans to come to South America in the future? Or is there a coach in your team from this part of the world to contact?

[@RafeKelley]

Hey@@manuserodio no plans currently but something in Brazil has been on our horizon for awhile we will see if we can make it happen next year.

[@joshuaprivett3552]

Running through the woods off of a trail is one of the most exhilarating experiences- doing so while on MDMA is sublime ecstasy. If given the choice between sex with the most beautiful woman in the world, or to run in the woods once more, I would choose the latter every time. (Though this may be because my member works fine while my legs don't lol) While you are doing it, you enter a flow state but it's different than the timeless kind of flow state- it makes you feel like you're a kid pretending, or acting out, some sort of agile beast, and this beast is in the flow state.

[@Right_in2]

Are dreams some form of play that affords this cognitive flexibility ?

[@_ARCATEC_]

🏃🏻🪁