The word “embodiment” has become quite a buzz word of late. I hear it everywhere, and I sense this wonder-full word losing its potency and meaning. I care a lot about embodiment, explore it in different ways for a good bit of my days, and want to try to bring some meaning back to the word…. or, really, take what is becoming just a word and bring some life to it.
I view embodiment pretty simply: to be embodied is to inhabit our body. To inhabit our body is to be conscious and present within the internal space of our body, as distinct from being aware of our body. Because words are limited here, and trying to make sense of this may not help, I want to invite you into a brief experience:
Take a few moments to become aware of your hands. As you do this, you may experience the temperature of your hands, or how relaxed or tense they are.
Now, enter into your hands. Inhabit them. Feel that you are the internal space of your hands. Feel that you are living and present within your hands.
As we get used to this shift from being aware of our body to inhabiting our body, we can then explore ways to more deeply, subtly and fully inhabit our bodies.
So you may have noticed that being aware of ourselves feels very different from inhabiting ourselves. Being aware of our body can include being aware of feelings and sensations in our body. Both of these are wonderful: body awareness and feeling sensations in our body. But neither are embodiment (as I speak of it). When embodiment is spoken of or taught only as body awareness, it misses the true beauty of having a body. It can also keep people in a mentally-oriented experience, relating to their body through concepts and images rather than through direct experience.
Take being aware of a strawberry. To be aware of a strawberry is, needless to say, very different from actually eating a strawberry. With awareness, we don’t get to actually taste the thing that we value. We don’t get to feel it and sense it directly. Inhabiting our body is like eating the strawberry in that we allow ourselves to have a direct experience of our body, without experiencing it through the filter of our thinking mind (through concept or image). When consciousness pervades our body, we truly taste it. This metaphor of course breaks down after a bit. But I think it offers something….
As we begin to explore embodiment – as we practice inhabiting our body – we inevitably notice that certain parts of our body are more difficult to inhabit than others. Some parts we may not be able to inhibit at all. This is totally natural. And equally natural is the yearning that comes to more fully inhabit ourselves. We yearn to move toward fuller embodiment.
Needless to say, this is not at all about competition… with ourselves or with others. It’s not about determining how much of our body we inhabit, judging that, and then trying to improve on that. The sincere, heartfelt longing to grow, to live in truth, to become more embodied, etc. is important… essential even. But that mysterious longing can very easily and very subtly change shape and become an agenda if we are not vigilant as to our attitude toward our practice… our attitude toward our efforts to integrate, deepen, heal, etc. We can easily turn our lives into a project, something that I am personally very familiar with… and now very wary of.
Am I patiently and curiously following the delicate, elusive thread of this heartfelt longing? Or am I coming up with a goal in my mind (an image of how I could be better) and trying to accomplish that goal via a plan? This, to me, is the starting point. Before the actual practice, what’s my attitude toward the practice. Why am I practicing? Perhaps a longer story for another newsletter.
I hope this doesn’t sound harsh. If there is any intensity in my words, it comes from the intensity of my own lived experience. I’ll digress for a personal story:
When I first encountered the Realization Process in 2019, it was very difficult for me to be in my body. The truth is, I had no clue that I wasn’t in my body. All I knew was awareness from my conceptual mind, in the same way that all a fish knows is water. Like many (most) of us, I effectively dissociated from my body at a young age and lived the first 27 years of my life without conscious connection to this instrument of my experience, without true self-possession. I grew up an athlete and dove somewhat deeply into yoga in my early twenties. Thanks to sports and lots of asana practice, I developed very good body awareness.
The question I never considered was, “who is aware of this body?” In hindsight I can see that this who was (often still is) actually a part of me that related to my body as a separate object. Or really, many different parts of me interchangeably take over the “seat of the self.” I was separate from my body and aware of it from the vantage point of a part of me. Often it was a rather insecure, anxious “manager” part up in my thinking mind who did his very best to keep track of all that was going on in my body, and then manage and control those happenings to keep me feeling safe and secure. I might feel discomfort in my gut or tension in my throat, determine it was a problem and then make a plan to fix it. This could be useful if my goal is to manage symptoms, but not at all useful if my goal is simply be-with the sensations, perhaps uncover the causal root of the discomfort and integrate the emotional learning that lives there.
So the question of who is relating becomes essential. The intention to integrate physical and emotional discomfort is very different from the intention to manage the discomfort. While management can be important, I am personally most interested in root causes and integration. To get to the causal root of a symptom requires that we shift out of awareness and into direct, felt-sense experience. We can gently and subtly feel-into / open-to the emotions and sensations within the discomfort, and then learn to allow and include those emotions and sensations from a disentangled, spacious presence. Like the ocean knowing and including the wave, not as something separate from itself, but as itself.
How do we “do” this? That’s a question I’ll spend the rest of my life exploring. And one that I’ll certainly expand on in future writings. In my experience there are very effective tools and modes of guidance that can support this, but ultimately each person learns for themselves how they listen to and follow that mysterious allowing presence.
What’s clear is that the capacity to relate to our parts and our discomfort in this way depends on our ability to inhabit our body. We need to be very sensitive to our internal experience and to how life is moving through us. Subtle sensitivity is a capacity of the amazingly sensitive and refined instrument of our human body, and one that we can cultivate with practice. We learn to shift from an awareness of ourselves from a part of ourselves to a direct experience of ourselves as the consciousness that we are most essentially. In the Realization Process we call this dimension of consciousness fundamental consciousness. This may sound like a distant, lofty ideal, but it is actually very accessible with supportive guidance and practice. When we inhabit our body – when we come into direct experience of ourselves in our body – we are uncovering this very subtle dimension of our being. This is the dimension of our being that has the capacity to truly allow and include all these parts of us without agenda… unconditionally.
When I first heard Judith Blackstone speak about the Realization Process, I was captivated. I knew deeply that it was something that I needed. It just made sense. When I stopped my car to stand in a park in New Jersey to go through a practice that Judith was guiding on the podcast, I was further amazed. Her words (and the energy / presence behind them) inspired and moved me, but the practice itself revealed something entirely new.
Of course not everyone has a big “aha” moment like this. For some it’s just a mild inspiration, or a tickle of curiosity, or a subtle sense that this is something that could support them. All of it is great.
As I committed to regular practice, I found it quite uncomfortable. My body was full of tension, and within those tensions were emotions that I really did not want to feel. When asked to inhabit my body, most of it felt inaccessible… off-line, not really alive. I began straining to try to force myself into my body (which simply isn’t possible), and practice was largely a discipline. Though the strain was actually harming me, committing to the practice of inhabiting my body was benefiting me on some level. When I recognized the strain and began to let go of it, my practice started to develop. Areas of my body started to open up and I found greater ease in my practice. I would at times enjoy practice and was able to relish nourishing sensations in parts of my body that had previously been inaccessible or full of tension. Really, I simply began to feel myself more. Keys for me were both commitment and letting go of strain. Discipline and ease. An apparent paradox, unsurprisingly…
When we over-effort in our practice, our holding patterns and the scared, tender young ones within us are naturally going to respond by saying something to the effect of, “This is not the attention I am looking for. Heck no, I’m not going to soften and open if you are coming at me with this agenda and force.” These young ones (these inner-children) make up, in a sense, many of our protective holding patterns. The presence of holding patterns – whether experienced as tension, density or numbness – are what make inhabiting our body so difficult. So to support this process – to relate to these scared young-ones in a way that feels good to them – many of us need to bring evermore gentleness to our internal experience. Evermore patience.
….
Now, leaping back to this question of embodiment, some people will wonder, “Where else could we inhabit if not our own body? Where am I if not in my body? This question can be an important trailhead!
For one, we can inhabit our body, but only a fraction of ourselves. That is, we can live in only a part of our being, which, for many of us in the western world, is our thinking, conceptual mind. Our attention is glued to thoughts and our consciousness is limited to this narrow region behind our eyes. This is totally understandable and even expected given our conditioning and the world(s) most of us grow up in. Take, for example, what often happens when we engage with a computer screen. Without being aware of it, we habitually come forward in our body, as though the screen is sucking us toward it like a vacuum. Though I make it sound dramatic, it can be quite subtle. And if we are sensitive to our internal experience, it can be very uncomfortable to notice this contraction. We are drawn forward in ourselves, pressed toward the front of our body. This is very different from letting our attention pervade our whole body… from actually being in our whole body and directly knowing, feeling and sensing the alive, conscious space that pervades us.
Secondly, we can indeed leave our body. Who is this “I” that could leave my body? I don’t know…. though I certainly enjoy contemplating the question. For the sake of this exploration, it can be helpful to think of this “I” as our “local awareness,” as meditation teacher Loch Kelly calls it. I think many of us know the feeling of living a bit in front of ourselves, for instance. This might happen when we are feeling particularly nervous to start a performance and are going out toward the audience so much that we can barely feel ourselves in our own body. And then in particularly intense experiences, many people will report actually vacating their body entirely and, for instance, seeing themselves from above. When either these relational experiences or these more intense experiences are frequent enough, they become chronic holding patterns and we find ourselves habitually organized in this way, living pressed forward almost all the time, for instance.
When we inhabit a part of our body, it feels like it is on-line, as though the consciousness that animates life is in fact animating that part of us. Most would agree that this fundamental dimension of consciousness is always there. It never leaves a part of our body. But our attention (our local awareness) can be drawn away from it, and that is when we lose conscious connection with ourselves in that part of our body. Fundamental consciousness (experienced as a pervasive space) remains… waiting, so to speak, for us to uncover it… to uncover it from beneath/within the layers of pain and confusion that veil it.
We can name many reasons why we draw our attention away from a part of our body. To me, it boils down to avoiding the discomfort of the repressed memory and/or emotion that we carry in that part of our body. As we turn our attention back toward these parts of ourselves, we can also digest the uncomfortable emotional charge that lives with them, which we did not have the capacity to digest in the past. We also may uncover memories that are stored within these holding patterns, leading to insight about why we originally needed to go into constriction (its intelligent purpose).
Through this process of working with holding patterns and inhabiting our body more deeply, we are opening to and uncovering this primary dimension of our being – this consciousness that feels like who we are – that has always been there, again, simply veiled. Sometimes, simply practicing inhabiting a part of our body over and over is enough to reclaim it as part of our being. For parts of us that are more chronically constricted and where we carry more undigested emotion, more focused psycho-somatic work is likely required in order to open and reclaim this part of our being.
So this matter of embodiment is of course a matter of degree and depth. It’s not as though we either are or aren’t embodied. We each inhabit some parts of our body more easily than others, and with more or less subtlety and depth. To be in contact with ourselves – present and conscious – everywhere in our body at once is to experience our internal wholeness.
This is not a wholeness that we construct, as though putting together the pieces of a puzzle to form a whole. We experience our internal wholeness as innate… as an undivided quality of self that is not an idea, but a feeling… an experience of ourselves that has nothing to do with thought or image, but emerges from direct contact with ourselves everywhere in our body at once. This does not by any means mean that we have integrated all of our trauma and have perfect access to every inch of our being. Often with a bit of practice, we can glimpse and feel supported by our innate wholeness as a dimension of our being that we uncover through subtle attunement. Contacting our innate wholeness, the journey of embodiment takes on new meaning. That sincere, heartfelt longing is revealed, at least in part, as a sincere, heart longing for wholeness… to know and sense all of ourselves. And then to meet life directly, with our whole being.
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