What is embodiment?
Lately, I have been asked by others, what exactly is embodiment. What is interesting is that even though I have devoted myself to this path, I often find it difficult to put embodiment into a simple definition. How do I define something with words that is composed of sensation, lived experience, and bodily wisdom and feeling?
One important truth that has helped me is to understand that we are born embodied. Embodiment is our natural setting. I’ve spent countless hours with young children through nannying and teaching work and most children live in an embodied state. They don’t have to try to be embodied or practice it like we do as adults. Rather, they are living, breathing, playing, and expressing in and through the body.
But for many of us, at a certain point, a disconnection starts to happen. In my experience, this shift occurred when I was a pre-teen. At this time in life, I began to view my body as an object, as something I wanted to change and alter in order to fit into a form of beauty that I saw being celebrated by society.
My body, then, started to become a burden and a source of deep suffering. I believed that if only my body would look and perform as I wanted, then I would be happy. This spiraled into years of disordered eating and self-harm, of disconnection and self-hatred for my physical form.
Even years later, as I began to embark upon a spiritual path, I noticed similar language around the body being a cause for suffering, as the body being something we must transcend in order to connect deeper to the spiritual plane.
It wasn’t until many years later that I started to wonder if perhaps my path was not up and out of the body, but in and through. That perhaps this body was more than just a vessel to be shaped or sculpted, transcended or disregarded. That perhaps the pain I was feeling inside this body was actually a portal into loving and living more fully. Now, I know that inside this body of mine is deep wisdom, aliveness, and information that is beckoning me into deeper connection not only with myself but with something greater.
I started practicing embodiment by spending intimate and intentional time with my body each day, without changing nor asking anything in return. I started to practice something called Primal Feminine Flow, taught to me by my teacher Jenna Ward. In this movement practice, I would spend 20-40 minutes on my mat with eyes closed as I let my body move me. During this sacred time, I breathed and felt and wept and howled and danced.
Though this practice has certainly changed my relationship to my body, the truth is that embodiment is more than just how we relate to our bodies. Embodiment is about being in our bodies and inhabiting ourselves more fully, which includes honoring and experiencing all the many shades and colors of our being.
Now, I experience embodiment as a continual process of returning home to the body in any moment—not just on my mat. Of course, we are always in a body but for many of us, we are living from the head up. We are like a person in a grand house who only sits in the attic. Meanwhile, there are many rooms full of feeling, sensation and wisdom asking for us to enter.
To be in the body is to enter into the present moment. It is to be one with your breath. One with your reality. One with life. It is the ultimate act of connection. For when we are seated within our body, we seat ourselves in the heart. We remember who we are. And we hold the paradox that we are both of this body and beyond this body, both human and divine.
If your heart and body are ready to experience more, I offer 1:1 embodiment coaching sessions where we delve deeper into the wisdom of your body. And if you are curious but not quite ready, I offer a free call where we can chat and feel into the possibility of working together.
And wherever you are in this moment I invite you to breathe and feel your body in this moment, to express gratitude for all the many shades of your being and to remember your presence is a precious gift to this world.
Loving you dearly ♥️