On Self-Knowledge: A Framework for Mapping Moving Meditations
Can data science help us understand and map contemplation at scale?
To answer this question, I realized I needed to systematically map my own practices. And that this internal work would help me map a research-backed framework that honors both embodied knowing and the rigor required for mapping at scale.
This post establishes that framework - one I'll apply across multiple moving meditations to build evidence about what contemplative mapping could capture.
Four Interwoven Lenses
1. Gibran's "On Self-Knowledge": The Inquiry Stance
I was introduced to Kahlil Gibran’s work in college. I keep coming back to Kahlil Gibran's words in The Prophet:
And a man said, "Speak to us of Self-Knowledge."
And he answered, saying:
Your hearts know in silence the secrets of the days and the nights.
But your ears thirst for the sound of your heart's knowledge.
You would know in words that which you have always know in thought.
You would touch with your fingers the naked body of your dreams.
And it is well you should.
The hidden well-spring of your soul must needs rise and run murmuring to the sea;
And the treasure of your infinite depths would be revealed to your eyes.
But let there be no scales to weigh your unknown treasure;
And seek not the depths of your knowledge with staff or sounding line.
For self is a sea boundless and measureless.
Say not, "I have found the truth," but rather, "I have found a truth."
Say not, "I have found the path of the soul." Say rather, "I have met the soul walking upon my path."
For the soul walks upon all paths.
The soul walks not upon a line, neither does it grow like a reed.
The soul unfolds itself, like a lotus of countless petals.
This passage grounds everything I'm doing here. Each practice I map reveals a truth, not the truth. The work is to articulate what the heart knows in silence into words - acknowledging that this translation is always partial, always unfolding.
2. Hegna & Ørbæk's Five Aspects of Embodied Experience: The Systematic Structure
Hegna and Ørbæk's systematic review of 247 studies on embodied teaching and learning revealed something striking: research primarily foregrounds cognitive and discursive dimensions, leaving sensory, bodily, and intersubjective dimensions in the background.
Drawing from phenomenologist Lanei Rodemeyer's work, they identify five interconnected aspects of embodied experience:
Sensory experience - the flow of bodily sensations that underlie perception: warmth, coldness, tension, relaxation, the rhythm of breath
Bodily experience - embodied habits, patterns of movement, sedimented practices: how the body knows without thinking, repetitions that become automatic
Cognitive experience - individual meaning-making and awareness: reflection, language-based construction of meaning, conscious understanding
Intersubjective experience - our relation with specific others in shared worlds: one-to-one relations, small groups, living in shared worlds with particular people
Discursive experience - cultural meanings and institutional attitudes about bodies: what forms of embodiment are valued, how bodies are perceived and regulated by communities and institutions
Here's what matters: lived embodiment is always a mixture of all five dimensions. What we sense affects what we think. Discourse about the body shapes what we experience. This framework gives me systematic structure for mapping each practice while revealing which aspects current research captures and which remain invisible.
3. Jurow, Mendoza & Cortes: Designing for Healing
Jurow, Mendoza and Cortes (2025) ask whether we can design for healing in the learning sciences. Their work emerged from recognizing wounds - institutional harms, systemic oppression, the fracturing that happens when minds are separated from bodies and spirits.
They identify five grounding ideas about healing:
Healing happens both individually and collectively - how we gather and relate to one another matters
Self-care is an act of self-preservation and resistance, not self-indulgence
Integration of mind, body, and spirit is essential for accessing creativity and wholeness
Artistic practices - writing, visual art, movement - provide pathways for processing and transformation
Healing involves returning to ourselves by unlearning colonized ways of being
These five ideas resonate deeply with my own journey. When I wrote my Lion's Roar article, I was "intentionally and carefully exposing wounds" - though I didn't have that language for it at the time. Writing became my art form, a way to tell my story back to myself, to reclaim my own name after institutional harm had fractured my sense of who I was.
The act of writing that piece required me to integrate what they call mind, body, and spirit. I couldn't write from cognitive understanding alone. I needed my contemplative practices to ground me in my body, to regulate the nervous system activation that came with revisiting institutional trauma, to notice when I was writing from fear versus from what they describe as "a place of alignment and wholeness."
Their framework gives me language for work I've been doing intuitively - and it shows me why the contemplative mapping methodology I'm developing must honor all five dimensions. This isn't just about documenting practices. It's about understanding how healing happens through practice, how we return to ourselves, how artistic and embodied forms of inquiry create knowledge that cognitive analysis alone cannot access.
Building from these grounding ideas, they offer three essential questions:
What is the wound? And what emotions does the wound carry?
Naming wounds illuminates how oppressive systems become internalized as self-talk, protecting institutional failures while placing blame on individuals. For contemplative practices, this means identifying what needs transformation.
What do we need to unlearn and learn to support healing?
Unlearning is a vulnerable and ongoing process - recognizing how we've absorbed harmful beliefs about ourselves and others, questioning what we've been taught to see as "just the way things are," and making conscious choices that reflect new understanding rather than old habits.
How can we embody healing?
Here's the critical insight: "Intentionally and carefully exposing wounds can support healing." They define healing as a journey back to ourselves, our intuition, and our sense of the divine - letting go of harmful ways of thinking we've learned to accept as normal, noticing the "shoulds" we carry that don't actually serve us, breaking away from systems of belief that diminish our humanity. Something I now have direct practice with.
4. McCaw: Teachers as Knowledge-Creators - The Action Step
McCaw (2025) studied seven beginning teachers with established contemplative practices, positioning them as co-researchers rather than research subjects. These teachers tracked how their own physical and emotional states, the atmosphere in their classrooms, and their students' engagement all influenced each other in continuous loops. They discovered what she describes as "nodes of stability" - anchor points that helped them stay grounded during the vulnerable, uncertain process of becoming a teacher.
This adds the critical action dimension: What is one practice teachers could try?
Each mapping I create will conclude with an invitation to experiment. This isn't about prescribing techniques or standardizing approaches. It's about empowerment - positioning practitioners, and teachers and teacher educators in particular, as careful observers and interpreters of their own lived experience, rather than passive recipients of what experts tell them they should be doing.
How These Four Lenses Work Together
Gibran provides philosophical humility - each practice reveals a truth, not the truth.
Hegna & Ørbæk provide systematic method - five aspects to map, revealing what typically gets captured and what remains invisible.
Jurow and colleagues provide healing purpose - understanding what needs transformation, how practices support or hinder wholeness.
McCaw provides empowerment action - positioning ourselves as investigators of our own becoming.
Together, they create a framework that is rigorous, humble, purposeful, embodied, relational, critical, and empowering.
Why This Work Matters Beyond My Own Practice
As I wrote previously: "I'm trying to rebuild the embodied infrastructure that once supported me - that buoyed me through challenges, through the everyday, through breathing, thinking, being, knowing. I'm making a case for practices I need to fully embrace - not prescriptively, but in a self-study, self-knowing way that's right for me - so that I can help others find contemplative practices that are right for them."
This framework is methodology development through self-study. I'm systematically mapping my own practices, not because my experiences are universal, but because:
The method itself can be applied by others. By documenting how I use these four lenses, I'm creating a replicable approach for investigating embodied experience.
Understanding my categorization process helps others develop theirs. When I work through whether a sensation belongs to "sensory" or "bodily" experience, I'm modeling the investigative process itself.
Rebuilding embodied infrastructure requires understanding how it works. Before I can help others find contemplative practices right for them, I need to understand how my own practices function. What do they actually do? How do different aspects work together?
This is groundwork for understanding what computational mapping would need to capture. If data science is meant to reveal patterns in contemplative development at scale, we first need to understand those patterns at the individual level - in granular, embodied detail.
So while the practices I map are mine, the framework is for anyone asking: How does contemplation work in my life? What needs healing? What supports my becoming?
The Practice Mappings Ahead
Each practice mapping will move through the four lenses - beginning with Gibran's humility, systematically examining through five aspects, weaving in questions of healing and transformation, and closing with an invitation to experiment.
I'll be applying this framework to various moving meditations in my own practice: yogasana and pranayama (the practices with the longest history in my life), writing, and artwork. Other practices - tap dancing, ice skating, and others I haven't yet imagined - may emerge as the work unfolds.
I'm not prescribing these practices for others. I'm documenting how the framework works across different modalities so you can see the method in action, understand how to apply it to your own practices, and we can build collective evidence about what contemplative mapping needs to capture. Each post will demonstrate in real time how I work through questions like: Is this sensation "sensory" or "bodily"? What intersubjective dimensions am I noticing? What discursive forces make this practice visible or invisible?
Why This Framework Matters for Contemplative Mapping
Gibran reminds us: "The soul walks not upon a line, neither does it grow like a reed."
Research shows that studies typically capture cognitive and discursive dimensions while leaving sensory, bodily, and intersubjective dimensions in the background. Healing requires integration of mind, body, and spirit. The most nuanced knowledge emerges when practitioners position themselves as knowledge-creators.
If contemplative mapping is meant to reveal what conventional analysis misses, I need to identify and make visible what those aspects are in my own practice. Data science approaches might help reveal patterns across thousands of practitioners, integrate findings across fragmented research, or trace development over timescales individual researchers cannot observe. But first, I need to understand what contemplative mapping can reveal—and where it might obscure or flatten nuance that qualitative inquiry could then illuminate.
Through mapping my own moving meditations, I'm discovering which dimensions are hardest to put into words - the sensory flow that grounds practice, the bodily patterns that develop slowly over time, the intersubjective relations that shift with context. I'm learning where language breaks down and where it opens up.
This work isn't about finding "right" categorizations. It's about understanding the complexity of categorization itself - what defies translation into language, what emerges only through sustained attention, what contemplative mapping at scale would need to honor.
Gibran: "Say not, 'I have found the truth,' but rather, 'I have found a truth.'"
This is my framework for finding truths - systematically, humbly, purposefully, actively. For understanding the sea that is boundless and measureless. For documenting the unfolding of petals. For becoming investigators of our own experience.
So that eventually, I might understand what mapping contemplation at scale would actually require.
References
Gibran, K. (1923). The Prophet. Knopf.
Gupta, S. S. (2025, November 11). Before I can study contemplation through data science: Rebuilding embodied infrastructure: Ecological Learning Partners LLC. https://ecologicallearningpartners.com/blog/before-i-can-study-contemplation-through-data-science-rebuilding-embodied-infrastructure
Gupta, S. S. (2025, November 6). The myna bird knows her name. Lion's Roar-Bodhi Leaves. https://www.lionsroar.com/the-myna-bird-knows-her-name/
Hegna, K. L., & Ørbæk, M. (2024). Embodied teaching and learning in higher education: A systematic review of literature. Teaching in Higher Education, 28(7), 1468-1487. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2021.1989582
Jurow, A. S., Mendoza, E., & Cortes, K. L. (2025). Can we design for healing in the learning sciences? Journal of the Learning Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1080/10508406.2025.2506346
McCaw, N. (2025). Contemplative practices and teacher professional becoming: An exploration with beginning teachers. British Journal of Educational Studies, 73(1), 53-72. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00131911.2023.2215467
Rodemeyer, L. (n.d.). Faculty profile. Duquesne University.https://www.duq.edu/faculty-and-staff/lanei-rodemeyer.php
Sarika S. Gupta, Ph.D., is the founder of Ecological Learning Partners LLC and is currently completing an MS in Data Science at CUNY SPS.
