27/08/2025
Metaphors—whether visual or verbal—are among the most powerful ways to shift perception and bring an abstract idea into an embodied experience.
It’s argued that all language is metaphorical, woven into our speech like an invisible thread, blinding us to the fact that we only ever understand something ‘as’ something else. In this sense, metaphor is quite unremarkable and ordinary, and hardly registers in our awareness.
However…metaphors that deepen our sense of embodiment have a distinct power. Moving us toward a greater feeling of depth and connection.
How is that?
Perhaps it’s because metaphor, along with emotional and social intelligence, bodily attunement, and an openness to novelty, is valued and strongly associated with the right hemisphere (unlike the left, which tends toward literalism, abstraction and stasis), and it is THAT which underwrites the ‘a-ha’ moments that alter our perception, change our perspective and deepen our consciousness; the fact that we are experiencing the part of our brain that permits a richer, unified, embodied reality.
Guess what the visual metaphor in this photo represents…
