If all that made you who you are are your thoughts, you would only be a head or a brain. Yet you have a body. It is important understand that the body itself has value. You need your body for more than just movement. To be vital and alive, you need to learn how to access your body and live in it. Surrendering to the self is a matter of letting the body communicate through you and as you. The body wants you to awaken to it. Your body needs you to let it talk to you. When you question how to have a more fulfilling life, learning how to embody more needs to be a central aspect of the equation.
You need to be in your body to know what your body is doing, feeling, saying, and teaching. You need more than your mind. You need the body as a sensate organ and a medium for information unique to you.
Embodiment is the felt sense of you residing within you. You have parts of your self that are easier to embody than others. Many of you embody easily into your thoughts and use them to define yourself. That’s not embodiment. Embodiment is a felt sense of body, self, soul, and heart that does not need to be fought for, defended, or masked. Embodiment has roots that grow deeper as you get more comfortable with yourself. Embodiment bridges the body and the mind into a sensate whole.
Embodiment has flow, connection, and self awareness all intertwined together as sensation.
Why Practice Embodiment?
Embodiment is more than your capacity to think, feel, or act. Embodiment is a fluid connection to self from the top of your head to the tip of your toes and into the unseen. To cultivate an awareness of embodiment, some sort of regular check in has to happen so that you know when something is right, wrong, or neutral to your energetic system. You need to know when your sense of self and your flow is being affected in order to embody.
Embodiment practices create a relationship between sensation and the body. They provides flow and awareness. They give you more awareness of your own level of embodiment throughout your day. It is too easy to get lost in thought and even in emotion as all of who you are.
Your body is SENSATIONAL! Being able to be with your body as sensation helps you get curious about what is held in shadow or being consciously repressed.
Embodiment feels the effect of shutting down, disconnection, and disassociation as defense. These are versions of you that reflect an inability to embody. These versions of you are not your true self. With embodiment eros and connection for life grow. Awareness of how much embodiment is occurring in every moment connects you to your body as a road map to a vitalized life.
Imagine walking around as an energetic, breathing being who understands that shift and flow is possible through the internal awareness of self.
Embodiment is a form of being alive that changes who and how you are in all aspects of life. An embodiment practice is a method of self healing that leads naturally into dynamic relational healing. Embodiment seeks a way to move into being in relationship as body and self. Self awareness arises along with a sense of choice towards deeper emotional expression, more connected communication, and vitality. Life is about choosing to be alive, not embracing dying (that death current that is so endemic in culture).
All aspects of your body talk uniquely to you. Accessing embodiment invites you to use discomfort, pain, emotions, numbness, or disconnect as an invitation to process these withheld aspects of self and bring them into connection. The connection goes two ways. We need to be in connection with our self but we also need others to fully embody.
The practice of embodiment is not just a one off. It’s a lifestyle. By calling the self into embodiment and being able to withstand a deeper sense of embodiment with another person, we are forming a relationship to a life of transformation. The body speaks through defense and shut down.
An embodiment practice nurtures attention, curiosity, and listening.
No matter how much meditation, therapy, embodied connection, or emotional release work you’ve done, your relationship to your own embodiment is a work in progress. This is why having a living understanding of your baseline embodiment is so important. As you transform aspects of yourself, your baseline embodiment changes as well. Life changes your baseline too. Other people getting closer or further away changes your baseline. Being aware of this complex response system promotes a sense of choice in difficult relationships and life situations. All of these reasons point to an embodiment practice being necessary to cultivate living comfortably as your true self.
It is inevitable that a choice to shift into embodiment interacts with the unknown. If you knew how to embody to avoid something negative happening to yourself, you’d have done it already. Embodiment practices as a methodology invite coming unstuck and embraces the unknown as a factor of inevitability. Utilizing embodiment and the unknown side by side means you can find an impulse towards a different way of acting or responding to situations that are difficult to experience.
Of course you have to want to be in your body to create embodiment. Regular embodiment practices forge a relationship that eventually establishes a trusted toolbox ready for your use during moments of disembodiment.
Your body needs to be your friend, your companion, your deepest love.
Your body is this miracle of continuous motion. You may feel dense but everything in your body is moving, changing, functioning, communicating, and creating to be alive in the moment. Consider the ever present processing and processes of the body within the Daoist concept of the ten thousand things:
The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao;
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth.
The named is the mother of ten thousand things.
TAO TE CHING, 1
Here is a physical reality where all the unknown and taken for granted meet in a miracle in which an alive human being has the ability to thrive. Why do you take this for granted? Why do you not devote attention and love to this body that is literally more complex than your processing being can grasp all at once?
Whether you see the body as divine or a compilation of scientific processes and mysteries does not change the fact that interest in being in your body is a pretty important reason to be alive.
Your aliveness comes from breathing and inhabiting the reality of who you are. Your body is not trying to punish you. It is not evil. If it is sick or hurt, that is it trying to get you to listen to it, to hear it. Your body is a container that holds your deepest spiritual self. The light you have inside you is meant to be expressed through your ability to embody and perhaps even fall in love your self.
Immediate knowledge of being “off” or not in a healthy self dynamic occurs when you can sense you are lacking embodiment. Imagine then also having the ability to choose, to shift into being “on” or in a healthy self dynamic. To do this, requires practice. Practice has to happen throughout normal life, not only when life is difficult or the practice itself is easy. This is why I recommend considering adopting embodiment practices as lifestyle. With regular embodiment practices inherent in your way of being, everything (and I do mean everything) transforms.
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