Introduction

The world, like our physical body, is always present to us. It is regaining ‘this naïve contact with the world’ that is the fundamental task of phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty, 2002: i, vi). In a similar way, phenomenology also allows us to regain contact with the medium through which we experience the world: the body. This ‘naïve’ contact with the world around us, experienced through the body, blurs the dichotomies with which we organise experience. Phenomenology invites us to merge the subject with the object and presents us with a world of experience in which the separate elements of consciousness, material objects and ethical relationships are fully ‘intertwined’ (Sallis, 2019: 12).

As a Pilates and Somatic practitioner working with survivors of modern slavery and human trafficking (MSHT), this phenomenological approach has been a particularly helpful methodology for me to employ in my work. Often the women that we work with have undergone experiences that cause significant psychological and physical trauma. The interrelational traumas experienced in sex trafficking, in particular, can cause complex experiences of woundedness that extend far after individuals are removed from the experience. Allowing a phenomenological reading of trauma enables me to engage in the interconnectivity of the world that situates the individual in a ‘whole’, where the body and the world around it are not separated. Whereas often trauma discourse can focus on siloed methods for healing trauma, situated in the symptoms of the body, I would argue that a phenomenological engagement with bodily movement, through Pilates and dance in particular, enables the survivor to heal through seeing her story unfold as a living creature. The survivor experiences herself as a conscious being, moving as a particular body. This connection to her own body, expressed through the movement of musculature and skeletal structure, through an awareness of breath and heartbeat, enables a bodied connection to others who, likewise, move their own bodies, respond to sensation, and are capable of experiencing pleasure and pain.

In this chapter, I will use phenomenology to assess how the arts can be used as a phenomenological instance of healing the wounds experienced from MSHT. First, I will explore how philosophy can give us language to reconceptualise healing as an interconnected experience of embodiment in relationships.