While studying, practicing and teaching the Argentine Tango dance, I also started a genuine conversation with the philosophical tradition of phenomenology in search for a method of inquiry based on the lived experience of the body. In particular, I engaged the work of German philosopher Edmund Husserl (on consciousness), and of French philosophers Emmanuel Levinas (on otherness) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (on embodied perception). I was confronted with the frustrating realisation that cognitive thinking and analytical language are not enough to relate with and participate in the complex unfolding of reality. I was led to look critically at the dualism between subject and object, mind and body and culture and nature that haunts the phenomenological discourse - and modern colonial-capitalist culture more in general - and that is the cause of much pain and misunderstanding. I was convinced, and now I can also articulate this position more critically, that a first-person, movement-based somatic method of inquiry can help us address the cognitive-linguistic bias of phenomenology while still drawing on its strengths. I found a possible trajectory of research in the growing field of so-called practice-as-research, artistic research, arts-based research or practice-led research - according to the different geographical and cultural academic contexts in which one works. This field of research, often emerging out of the neoliberal incorporation of arts academies into universities, promotes and sustains the combination and integration of artistic practice and academic scholarship.