Coaching practices for Lakoff and Johnson Philosophy in the Flesh
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Lakoff and Johnson Philosophy in the Flesh, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- I’ve read the definition three times and the words just slide off
- I keep defaulting to whatever feels easiest in the moment and calling it "being true to myself," but I sense the comfortable choice and the right choice aren’t the same thing, and I want a way to tell them apart.
- I’m realizing how much of what I believe about myself and the world I just absorbed from somewhere and never actually checked against my own experience
- On paper I know exactly the kind of person I want to be and what I believe, but when I watch how I actually behaved this week there’s an embarrassing gap between the two, and the knowing clearly hasn’t closed it.
- This new subject feels completely foreign and I have no footing in it, even though I’m genuinely fluent and intuitive in something physical I’ve done for years
Practices that may help
- Embodied Cognition: How Your Body Shapes Your Thinking
Embodied cognition is the view that thinking is not confined to the brain but is shaped by the body’s sensorimotor systems, physical actions, and even posture. Lakoff and Johnson argued that abstract concepts are grounded in bodily metaphors. The research base is active and sometimes contested, but the core finding — that physical states influence cognition — has accumulated substantial experimental support. - Anchor abstract concepts to a physical metaphor
Map an unfamiliar idea onto a bodily experience to make it genuinely graspable.
Embodied Cognition: How Your Body Shapes Your Thinking - Live according to nature
Act in accord with your rational nature and with the nature of the whole — not by instinct alone.
Philosophy as a Way of Life - Prioritize direct experience over inherited belief
Test philosophical claims through personal practice rather than accepting them on authority.
The Perennial Philosophy, Made Practical - Live what you study
Make your practice your philosophy — not a separate reading life and a separate daily life.
Philosophy as a Way of Life - Map a new domain onto a familiar bodily one
When tackling an unfamiliar subject, find a physical domain you already know well and map the structure across.
Embodied Cognition: How Your Body Shapes Your Thinking - Philosophical dialogue as a practice
Use careful, good-faith conversation — not debate — to examine your assumptions together.
Philosophy as a Way of Life - Feeling the inner body
Sense the subtle aliveness inside the body as a stable anchor for presence.
The Power of Now, In Practice - Conduct a subject-object audit
Identify what is currently running you without your awareness versus what you can observe and question.
Kegan’s Subject-Object Theory, Made Practical - Develop a shared vocabulary for tacit distinctions
Name the subtle distinctions you can detect but not yet explain — giving a word to a perception accelerates its transfer.
Tacit Knowledge: The Skill You Can’t Fully Explain
Related concerns
- Hadot Living According To Logos
Act in accord with your rational nature and with the nature of the whole — not by instinct alone.
Live according to nature
- How To Live Philosophically
Pierre Hadot argued that ancient Greek and Roman philosophy — Stoic, Epicurean, Platonic — was not primarily a system of theories but a set of "spiritual exercises": repeated, structured practices for transforming how you perceive, judge, and live. The academic thesis is Hadot’s own and is well established in classical scholarship. The practices he describes overlap with studied mechanisms in mindfulness, CBT, and behavioral change — though that was not Hadot’s own claim.
- How To Use Philosophy In Daily Life
Make your practice your philosophy — not a separate reading life and a separate daily life.
Live what you study
- Perennial Philosophy Huxley
The perennial philosophy, synthesized by Aldous Huxley from mystic and contemplative traditions across cultures, identifies a common inner core: a divine or ultimate ground underlying all existence, knowable through direct experience; an inner nature in humans capable of that knowing; and an ethics of love and compassion as the natural expression of that realization. It is not a scientific theory but a philosophical synthesis — its practices draw on contemplative traditions whose psychological effects have increasing observational and some experimental support.
- Peripatetic Philosophy Walking
Use a regular physical practice (walking, exercise) as the occasion for philosophical reflection — as the ancients did.
Pair philosophical practice with physical exercise
- Philosophy As A Way Of Life After A Setback
Pierre Hadot argued that ancient Greek and Roman philosophy — Stoic, Epicurean, Platonic — was not primarily a system of theories but a set of "spiritual exercises": repeated, structured practices for transforming how you perceive, judge, and live. The academic thesis is Hadot’s own and is well established in classical scholarship. The practices he describes overlap with studied mechanisms in mindfulness, CBT, and behavioral change — though that was not Hadot’s own claim.
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