I want to share a couple of different scenarios to help you imagine what your life could be like with an active embodiment practice that incorporates breath work, movement, stretching, and energy healing. Starting July 8th, I am going to be offering a 10-week series focusing on inspired embodiment. Details to follow but for now, let’s talk about what life would be like with a strong bridge between your mind and the unknown you.
In all of the imaginings below, the possibility for embodied change comes from an active embodiment practice. Practice creates the possibility for a different experience.
When you know yourself well enough to be able to feel your own historical way of being and try something new, life moves differently and you engage in your life with perspective.
When you can access different states of being, actively feel who you are within situations as a complex being, and allow yourself to have embodied desire; life becomes an awakening instead of a duty.
Today I ask you to spend a bit of time with me imagining what it would be like to live your life whole, complete, and empowered.
Healing Repetitive Patterns
Imagine: You have once again experienced something happening in your life that you really think you have done everything you have needed to do to make sure it never happens again. You talked it out with friends, a therapist, AI. You let your emotions flow. You really thought this time you were “healed.” And yet…it has come back again. What do you do? Well duh. You do what you know.
You think more. You reach out to your friends, watch instagram feeds for answers, do all the things to fix you. To know. To tell you how to make sure this pattern goes away once and for all. You feel more, have a good cry, go to a rage room and break stuff. You follow advice, diagnose yourself, and believe other people’s five part solutions. You try to make it all go away again.
Or you decide to try something new.
You engage with the unknown inside your body to learn how to break the pattern. You begin with interest and an open mind. You know you don’t know everything there is about this pattern. You trust the pattern is trying to wake you up to a deeper aspect of your being. You understand your body has answers but don’t know how to listen or don’t let your listening go deep enough to find the mystery of self that is wanting to awaken.
It starts with breathing into the sensations arising in the body as a result of the situation. It gets stronger through an embodiment awareness that can only come from practice, not just desire. A desire to connect deepens the possibilities and allows for engaged interest. You converse with your body, aware that it is going to talk to you through pain, numbness, sensation, emotion, and pleasure.
You let something new emerge that softens you into yourself, that brings you into a wash of relief, that tells you this is how I can live in my body without push, without having to perform or do, but simply through resonance of self in the world.
You feel more secure, more able to handle what comes to you in life.
You trust your body as a sensory being and this trust enables you to break patterns in unknown ways and weather the patterns when they come back.
The pattern itself is no longer about fixing yourself or becoming healed. It is a process of self discovery based in curiosity and trust.
Conflict and Fights
Imagine: You have a conflict with a partner, best friend, family member that turns into a fight. You are in the thick of it, holding your own, ready to take out your cell phones and compare what you said by text to what he or she said by text to PROVE that you are justified in how you feel. The old resentments and grievances are now front and center and seem completely connected to this new conflict in your mind. Words like “everything,” “nothing,” “every time,” “always,” and never become the currency of communication.
Your transferential wounds emerge in the fight. No one sees you, listens to you, wants you to express yourself. Here is where you get lost in the old and cannot see into the future without the projection of the past getting in the way. The fight deteriorates and you walk away feeling defeated. These patterns are never going to be changed. This is just the way your life is.
Instead…you feel the presence of the past in your fight and you stop for a moment. The charge of the fight feels old, known, and hurtful. You have done this enough times to know how this ends and how you will feel later after the fight. You think something along the lines of “Hmmm. I might be able to break this pattern if I search for something different here.”
You facilitate yourself into breath and movement because thanks to your embodiment practice, it is a reflexive way of being. You find the place inside yourself that is stuck and you breathe into it, move into it, release something stagnant. Suddenly you find a relational hurt, an old need, something softer and unexpressed. Instead of fighting you drop into a more vulnerable expression. You let your true self be expressed. Intimacy develops as you share this deeper aspect of yourself with someone you love. Instead of coming out of the fight mad, detached, feeling defeated; you feel whole, met, seen and loved.
Two Choices
Imagine: You are vacillating between two choices - to embrace something new or stay with the known. The known way of being feels safe in that you know everything about it but also has this flavor of not being right for you, a place where you are dying inside, or a situation that is consistently showing itself to be stressful but it is known and in that you have a sort of security.
The new feels unknown but has a certain allure. You have some sort of fantasy attached to it. A part of you wants to explore this fantasy but the safe known of the other situation has you doubting yourself.You imagine all you can be, how every problem could be solved if only you can make this choice and not carry your old self into it. In this new there is possibility but with that possibility comes insecurity.
You rationalize, make lists, think about your future between one choice and the other. At the same time you convince yourself that either the old way of being is for the best or you create a case against the old choice and demonize it to make sure that you will never need it again. The fantasy in the midst of the old never goes away. Perhaps you do research, make sure you can function in the new choice. Ultimately you either jump into the new way of being with no acknowledgement of the negative or you collapse into the comfort of the known and choose to stay where you have been.
Funny how this whole time the body has been talking to you and you either missed it completely or ignored it as being irrational. Perhaps you feel anxiety, stress, collapse, depression, or tension every time you walk into the reality of your known life. Perhaps you feel scared or even terrified towards what you want. Either way you dismiss any negative feeling that feels new and favor the uncomfortable negative feelings that you have lived with your whole life.
An embodiment practice means you don’t deny this sense of self but dive into it, feeling into all of who you are in both scenarios. You make a choice with your whole being instead of enslaving yourself to the known past or jumping disembodied into an unknown future.
Thanks for sharing, I feel this journey of embodiment is perhaps the most important and valuable journey we can take!