Understanding How Organisms Create Meaning Through Embodied Participation
Introduction
For much of the history of psychology and cognitive science, perception was understood as the passive reception of information from an external world. The mind was thought to construct internal representations of reality, which were then used to guide behaviour.
Enactivism offers a fundamentally different perspective.
Rather than viewing cognition as the internal processing of information, enactivism proposes that living organisms actively bring forth meaningful worlds through their ongoing interaction with the environment. Perception, action, emotion, bodily organization, and relationship are inseparable aspects of one continuous process of embodied participation.
From this perspective, organisms do not first perceive a complete world and then decide how to act within it.
They perceive through acting.
Meaning emerges through participation.
This insight has become one of the most influential developments in contemporary cognitive science, phenomenology, developmental psychology, neuroscience, and embodied psychotherapy.
Key Points
- Enactivism views cognition as an active process rather than internal computation.
- Perception and action continuously shape one another.
- Organisms create meaning through embodied interaction.
- Cognition emerges through the whole living organism.
- Relationship is central to human understanding.
- Development transforms how organisms participate in the world.
- Enactivism provides an important foundation for embodied cognition and body psychotherapy.
Beyond Representation
Traditional cognitive theories often describe the brain as constructing internal representations of an objective external reality.
Enactivism challenges this assumption.
Although organisms certainly respond to physical reality, they do not simply build detached mental copies of the world. Instead, they continuously generate meaningful engagement through movement, perception, emotion, action, and relationship.
The world that matters to an organism is therefore not merely the world that exists objectively but the world that becomes significant through living.
A tree is not simply an arrangement of matter.
For a bird, it becomes shelter.
For a child, it becomes something to climb.
For a therapist and client sitting beneath it, it may become a place of safety and conversation.
Meaning arises through participation rather than detached observation.
The Origins of Enactivism
Enactivism emerged during the late twentieth century through the work of the Chilean biologists Humberto Maturanaand Francisco Varela, whose research explored the fundamental characteristics of living systems. Rather than asking how organisms process information, they asked a more basic question:
What distinguishes living systems from non-living ones?
Their answer transformed not only biology but also philosophy, cognitive science, and psychology.
They proposed that living organisms are autonomous systems. Rather than being passively shaped by the environment, organisms actively maintain and continuously recreate themselves through ongoing processes of self-organisation. Life is not simply something an organism possesses; it is something it continuously does.
Building upon these ideas, Francisco Varela, together with Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch, introduced enactivism to cognitive science in their influential book The Embodied Mind (1991). They argued that cognition should not be understood as the manipulation of internal representations but as an embodied activity through which organisms continually bring forth meaningful worlds.
Since then, enactivism has been further developed by researchers including Ezequiel Di Paolo, Hanne De Jaegher, Thomas Fuchs, Shaun Gallagher, and others. Although their perspectives differ in emphasis, they share a common understanding: cognition emerges through the ongoing interaction of living organisms with their environments rather than through isolated processes occurring solely within the brain.
Today, enactivism has become one of the most influential approaches within embodied cognitive science, shaping research in neuroscience, developmental psychology, education, social cognition, artificial intelligence, phenomenology, and psychotherapy.
Sense-Making: Creating a Meaningful World
One of the central concepts of enactivism is sense-making.
Living organisms do not simply detect information. They continuously interpret the world in terms of what matters for their continued existence. Every organism selectively responds to aspects of its environment according to its own needs, capacities, and way of life.
For a flower, sunlight carries one kind of significance. For a bee, the same flower becomes a source of nectar. For a human being, it may evoke beauty, memory, scientific curiosity, or the desire to offer it as a gift. The physical object remains the same, yet its meaning differs because each organism participates in the world differently.
Sense-making therefore refers to the ongoing process through which organisms create significance through their embodied activity. Meaning is not simply discovered in the environment, nor is it constructed entirely inside the mind. It emerges through the continuous interaction between organism and world.
For human beings, this process becomes increasingly complex. Biological needs intertwine with emotional experience, language, culture, imagination, personal history, and relationship. Yet even our most abstract forms of understanding remain rooted in embodied participation.
Enactivism therefore shifts our understanding of meaning. Rather than asking how the brain represents reality, it asks how living organisms actively bring forth meaningful worlds through perception, movement, emotion, and relationship.
Figure 1. Enactivism: Meaning Through Embodied Participation
Perception and Action
Traditional theories often describe perception as occurring before action. We first observe the world, then decide how to respond.
Enactivism proposes that perception and action are inseparable.
We perceive through acting, and we act through perceiving.
A child learns what a staircase is by climbing it. A musician understands an instrument by playing it. A therapist develops clinical sensitivity not only through study but through years of embodied interaction with clients. Understanding grows through participation rather than detached observation.
This continuous reciprocity means that perception is never passive. Every movement changes what can be perceived, while every new perception influences subsequent action. Organism and environment therefore co-create one another in an ongoing cycle of mutual adaptation.
Human cognition is not the observation of a finished world.
It is an active process of participating in a world that is continually unfolding.
Autonomy and Living Systems
Another defining principle of enactivism is autonomy.
Living organisms are not controlled entirely by external forces. They actively organise themselves, maintain their own integrity, and regulate their interactions with the environment. Every cell, every organ, and every person continuously works to preserve the conditions that support life.
This autonomy does not imply isolation. Quite the opposite. Living systems depend upon constant exchange with their surroundings. They breathe, eat, move, communicate, form relationships, and adapt continuously. Their independence exists precisely through their ongoing participation in the world.
Enactivism therefore understands life as a dynamic balance between self-organisation and openness. Organisms maintain their own identity while remaining continuously transformed through interaction with their environment.
This perspective has profound implications for psychology. Rather than viewing individuals as passive recipients of external influences, it recognises them as active participants who continually shape—and are shaped by—the worlds they inhabit.
Participatory Sense-Making
Although every organism actively creates meaning through its interaction with the environment, human beings rarely make sense of the world in isolation. Much of what we understand emerges through our relationships with other people.
This insight led enactive researchers Hanne De Jaegher and Ezequiel Di Paolo to introduce the concept of participatory sense-making.
Participatory sense-making describes the process through which meaning arises within interaction itself. Rather than viewing communication as the exchange of information between two separate minds, it proposes that understanding often emerges through the dynamic process of relating. Conversation, gesture, facial expression, posture, movement, touch, silence, and emotional attunement continuously influence one another, creating meanings that neither individual could generate alone.
Consider two people engaged in a meaningful conversation. Neither person simply transmits fixed ideas to the other. As they listen, respond, pause, question, and reflect together, new insights often emerge that were not present at the beginning of the dialogue. Understanding develops through the interaction itself.
This process extends far beyond language. Infants learn through reciprocal interaction with caregivers long before they acquire words. Musicians create performances through mutual responsiveness. Dancers coordinate movement through shared rhythm. Therapists and clients gradually develop new ways of understanding experience through their ongoing relational process.
From an enactive perspective, relationships are therefore not merely contexts within which cognition occurs. They are among the very processes through which cognition develops.
Meaning is not only individual.
It is relational.
Figure 2.
Enactivism and Human Development
Enactivism offers a profoundly developmental understanding of human life.
Rather than viewing development as the gradual accumulation of information, it understands development as the continuous expansion of an organism’s capacity to participate meaningfully in the world.
From the earliest moments of life, infants learn through embodied interaction. Before language appears, they explore through movement, touch, gaze, rhythm, emotional attunement, and playful engagement with caregivers. Their understanding of themselves and others emerges through participation rather than detached observation.
As children mature, their capacity for sense-making becomes increasingly complex. They learn not only to perceive objects and actions but also to recognise emotions, intentions, social relationships, symbolic meanings, cultural practices, and personal identity. Every new developmental achievement expands the ways in which they can participate in the world.
Development therefore involves far more than acquiring knowledge. It is the progressive transformation of how the organism relates to itself, to others, and to its environment.
This perspective closely aligns with contemporary developmental psychology, attachment theory, and embodied approaches to learning. Human beings develop by actively engaging with the world, not by passively receiving information about it.
Figure 3.
Enactivism and Embodied Cognition
Enactivism and embodied cognition are closely related, yet they are not identical.
Embodied cognition demonstrates that thinking is deeply influenced by bodily processes. Perception, movement, posture, emotion, and action all contribute to cognition, challenging traditional views that locate thinking solely within the brain.
Enactivism extends this perspective further.
Rather than asking only how the body shapes cognition, enactivism asks how cognition itself emerges through the ongoing interaction between organism and environment. Thinking is not simply embodied; it is enacted. It arises through active participation in the world.
From this perspective, cognition cannot be separated from perception, movement, emotion, relationship, or meaningful action. These processes do not merely influence cognition—they constitute it.
Embodied cognition therefore provides an important scientific foundation for understanding the role of the body in thinking, while enactivism offers a broader philosophical framework for understanding how living organisms create meaningful worlds through embodied participation.
Together, these perspectives have transformed contemporary cognitive science by replacing static models of information processing with dynamic models of living interaction.
Enactivism and Consciousness
Enactivism also offers a distinctive understanding of consciousness.
Traditional theories often describe consciousness as a process generated entirely within the brain. Enactivism proposes instead that conscious experience emerges through the ongoing activity of the whole living organism.
We do not become conscious by observing the world from a detached position. We become conscious through participating in it. Every movement, perception, emotional response, and relationship contributes to the unfolding of conscious experience.
This does not deny the importance of the brain. Rather, it places neural activity within the larger organisation of embodied life. Consciousness becomes one expression of the organism’s continuous interaction with its environment rather than an isolated product of neural computation alone.
From this perspective, consciousness is neither purely internal nor purely external.
It emerges through the living relationship between organism and world.
Enactivism and Body Psychotherapy
Enactivism has profound implications for body psychotherapy because it fundamentally changes how psychological life is understood.
Rather than viewing thoughts, emotions, and behaviour as processes that originate inside the mind and are merely expressed through the body, enactivism understands the whole person as an active participant in the ongoing creation of experience. Perception, movement, emotion, bodily organisation, and relationship continuously shape one another within a dynamic process of living participation.
Body psychotherapy has worked from a similar understanding for many decades. Long before the emergence of enactive cognitive science, body psychotherapists observed that breathing, posture, movement, muscular organisation, emotional expression, and therapeutic relationship are not simply consequences of psychological life but integral aspects of it.
From an enactive perspective, therapeutic change therefore involves more than replacing dysfunctional beliefs or increasing insight. It involves expanding the individual’s capacity to participate differently in experience. As breathing becomes freer, movement more spontaneous, emotional regulation more flexible, and relationships more secure, new ways of perceiving oneself and the world naturally emerge.
Psychological transformation is not simply something we think about.
It is something we enact.
Enactivism and Somatic Psychotherapy
Somatic psychotherapy extends many of these principles by integrating developmental psychology, attachment theory, affective neuroscience, trauma research, interpersonal neurobiology, and embodied therapeutic practice.
Within these approaches, healing is understood as a gradual reorganisation of the person’s embodied way of participating in life. Rather than focusing exclusively on cognition or behaviour, therapy attends to the continuous interaction of breathing, posture, movement, sensation, physiology, emotional regulation, relational experience, and conscious awareness.
From an enactive perspective, these dimensions cannot be separated. Every change in bodily organisation influences perception. Every new relational experience reshapes emotional regulation. Every shift in movement creates new possibilities for meaning and action.
Therapeutic transformation therefore emerges through lived experience rather than through explanation alone. As individuals encounter themselves and others in new ways, they gradually develop greater flexibility, resilience, coherence, and freedom in how they participate in life.
Enactivism thus provides an important philosophical and scientific framework for understanding why embodied therapeutic approaches can support deep and lasting psychological change.
Core Strokes® and Enactivism
The Core Strokes® framework shares many of the central insights of enactivism while extending them into a comprehensive developmental model of embodied transformation.
Within Core Strokes®, human beings are understood as living, self-organising, relational organisms whose experience continuously emerges through the interaction of breathing, fascia, movement, emotional process, developmental history, nervous system regulation, relationship, and consciousness.
Like enactivism, Core Strokes® views perception and meaning as arising through participation rather than detached observation. Therapeutic change therefore does not occur simply by acquiring new knowledge. It develops as individuals begin to participate differently in themselves, in their relationships, and in the world around them.
Core Strokes® places particular emphasis on the developmental organisation of this participation. Early relational experiences influence how breathing unfolds, how fascial patterns organise themselves, how emotional regulation develops, and how defensive organisations shape later perception and behaviour. Therapy supports the gradual reorganisation of these embodied patterns, allowing increasingly flexible forms of participation to emerge.
For this reason, the concept of Embodied Participation occupies a central place within the Core Strokes® framework. Participation is understood not merely as engagement with the external world but as the organism’s ongoing capacity to inhabit itself, regulate experience, relate authentically, create meaning, and respond creatively to life.
In this sense, Core Strokes® complements enactivism by offering a clinically grounded framework for understanding how embodied participation develops, becomes restricted, and can gradually be transformed through psychotherapy.
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Conclusion
Enactivism offers a fundamentally different understanding of mind, body, and human experience.
Rather than viewing cognition as the internal processing of information, it understands thinking, perception, emotion, and meaning as emerging through the active participation of living organisms in their worlds. Organisms do not simply receive information from the environment; they continuously create meaningful relationships with it through their embodied activity.
This perspective has transformed contemporary cognitive science, neuroscience, developmental psychology, philosophy, education, artificial intelligence, and psychotherapy. Across these diverse fields, a common insight has emerged: understanding human beings requires understanding how they participate in life.
For body psychotherapy and somatic psychotherapy, enactivism provides a powerful conceptual foundation for appreciating why therapeutic change extends beyond cognition alone. As breathing, movement, emotional regulation, relationship, and embodied awareness become more integrated, individuals do not merely think differently—they begin to participate differently in themselves and in the world.
Ultimately, enactivism reminds us that human beings are not detached observers of reality.
We are living participants whose worlds are continually brought forth through embodied action, relationship, and meaning-making.
To understand the mind, therefore, is to understand the living process through which the whole organism engages with life.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is enactivism?
Enactivism is an approach within cognitive science and philosophy that understands cognition as emerging through the active interaction between living organisms and their environments. Rather than viewing the mind as processing information inside the brain alone, enactivism proposes that perception, action, emotion, and meaning arise through embodied participation in the world.
How is enactivism different from embodied cognition?
Embodied cognition shows that thinking is deeply influenced by the body, including movement, perception, emotion, and physiological processes.
Enactivism builds upon this insight by proposing that cognition itself emerges through the organism’s active engagement with its environment. Rather than simply asking how the body influences thought, enactivism asks how meaning is continually brought forth through embodied action and relationship.
What does “enactive” mean?
The word enactive refers to the process of bringing forth or enacting a meaningful world through activity. Human beings do not simply observe reality from a distance; they actively participate in creating meaning through perception, movement, emotion, relationship, and interaction with their environment.
What is sense-making?
Sense-making is the process through which living organisms create meaning by interacting with their surroundings.
Rather than passively receiving information, organisms continually interpret their environments according to their own needs, capacities, goals, and relationships. Meaning therefore emerges through ongoing participation rather than detached observation.
What is participatory sense-making?
Participatory sense-making refers to the creation of meaning through interaction between people.
Conversations, emotional attunement, gestures, movement, facial expression, touch, and shared activity all contribute to forms of understanding that emerge within relationships rather than solely within individual minds.
Is enactivism supported by scientific research?
Yes.
Enactivism has become an influential framework within cognitive science, phenomenology, developmental psychology, neuroscience, education, social cognition, artificial intelligence, and psychotherapy. Although researchers continue to debate particular theories and mechanisms, there is broad recognition that cognition cannot be fully understood without considering the body’s active engagement with the environment.
How does enactivism relate to psychotherapy?
Enactivism suggests that psychological change involves more than acquiring new ideas or insights. Therapy creates opportunities for individuals to participate differently in themselves, in their relationships, and in the world. New meanings emerge through lived experience rather than through intellectual understanding alone.
How does enactivism relate to body psychotherapy?
Body psychotherapy has long recognised that breathing, movement, posture, emotional expression, and relationship actively shape psychological experience. Enactivism provides a contemporary theoretical framework for understanding why these embodied processes play such an important role in therapeutic transformation.
Is enactivism the same as phenomenology?
No.
Phenomenology explores the structure of lived experience from the first-person perspective.
Enactivism builds upon phenomenology while integrating biology, cognitive science, neuroscience, and systems theory to explain how embodied experience emerges through active interaction between organism and environment.
How does Core Strokes® relate to enactivism?
Core Strokes® shares the enactive understanding that human beings create meaning through embodied participation rather than detached observation. It extends these ideas into a comprehensive clinical framework that integrates breathing, fascia, developmental psychology, nervous system regulation, relationship, and therapeutic transformation to support greater coherence, vitality, and participation in life.
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