Choosing Embodiment To Thrive

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We have been given the gift of body — a body that senses, feels, emotes, acts, moves, and communicates. To have a vital and alive life, we need to learn how to access the body, to let the body communicate through us and as us. When we question how to have a more fulfilling life, embodiment needs to be part of the equation.

What Is Embodiment?

Embodiment is a felt sense of body and heart — “I am” — that does not need to be fought for, defended over, or masked. It is a flow, connection, and self-awareness we have of our physical being as a whole, and an understanding that the body itself has value in body as teacher.

When we are in relationship with other people, our sense of what our body feels like is constantly changing. This is true not just when we are physically with other people, but also when we are thinking of them, feeling emotions about them, and doing anything in relation to other people. Most of us are unaware of these constant changes, as it takes more than just awareness of thought or emotion to be aware of what happens to our body in relation to others.

Just like cultivating a relationship to our baseline with breath, we also need to get to know our baselines around embodiment. A daily awareness of how the body is inhabited without the stimulation of another person’s energy field has to be cultivated. We need to be interested in who we are without the input of others. This is the essence of self-care: knowing self, so when something changes, we have a baseline to seek. With a baseline, it becomes easier to feel how the input of just one other person affects our embodiment.

Relating is complicated. It involves layering. Each person we interact with, and each situation we encounter also changes our embodiment. We may have a default embodiment that gets triggered by just being around any other person besides self or we may have different ways of embodying around others. Knowing how to interact with people with an interest in our greater embodiment — more “I am” — brings us into a life of fulfillment and value.

Acceptance Of Reality 

Parts of our bodies are uncomfortable to be with. Obviously, it is natural to resist pain, numbness, tension, disease, or any other physical discomfort. Emotionally we resist certain feelings. It is rare that someone wants to face fear and terror with embodied curiosity. There is a natural resistance to any uncomfortable flavors of emotion — anger, grief, loneliness, resentment, suffering — as well as plateaus that shut off happiness, joy, grace, and fun.

Avoidance is part of being alive. Being curious about what we avoid is an important part of becoming embodied and aware of how the body speaks to us. An embodied person becomes more comfortable with all range of emotion that naturally flows through life. We can’t curate our lives to only feel happiness; sadness, too, exists all over the world, so we trust our bodies to feel everything. This puts us in the flow of life, instead demanding life be this one eddy, but no other.

How often does the world or our own internal dialog tell us the goal of life is to feel happiness, be in love, embrace success, be physically abundant? This puts us in a dilemma when we actually do not feel happy, loved, successful, or abundant.

We disembody in an attempt to falsely create this supposed perfect reality. We push to make it real even when it isn’t. When true reality becomes too difficult to fight, we collapse. Embodiment understands shut down, disconnect, and disassociation as a defense, and not true self. This endless cycle of fake, push, collapse, push, fake, try harder, push, collapse is not fulfilling. It’s demoralizing. We deserve better but we need to embody and embrace life in all its aspects to achieve better.

Embodiment Requires Awareness

A regular mindfulness practice increases the ability to embody by creating a familiar relationship between the body and the experience of physical sensation. Embodiment is a fluid connection to self from the top of the head to the tip of the toes, so a regular check in allows us to know when something is right, wrong, or neutral to our energetic system. No matter how much meditation, therapy, embodied connection, or emotional release work we’ve done, our relationship to our own embodiment is a constant work in progress. Embodiment requires attention, curiosity, and listening.

Life changes our baseline. So do other people getting closer or further away. Choosing embodiment means breathing differently, being more aware of self, and inviting physical shifts into our body with trust. When we remain stuck in making negative choices in life over and over again without changing them, often those choices align with our disembodiment. To choose to escape, quit, burn bridges, end relationships, or create repeating patterns are ways of habitually saying “no” to life. Utilizing our ability to choose again means we have the choice to become unstuck by saying “yes” in places we habitually or normally say “no.”

Make Use Of The Breath

Of course, we have to want to be in our bodies to create authentic embodiment. Our bodies need to be our friends, our companions, our deepest loves. Regular embodiment awareness forges a relationship that eventually establishes a trusted toolbox ready for use during moments of disembodiment.

In order to enter the space of embodiment, we can use the portal of breath. Places where we disassociate, separate from ourselves, or do not allow energy to flow are places in need of deep charging breaths. Apply a slow, deep calming breath to places you tense, stagnate, and block into entangled knots of stress and anxiety. When we bring not just awareness but also breath to our bodies, we are telling it that we are interested in it. When we bring breath to a specific part of our body, we are inviting it to join us in life. We are saying “yes!”

When we start to change our energy with breath, awareness, and inviting shifts in embodiment, we will have more of an understanding of what changes and what stays the same when we are with other people. We may, for example, notice that a person we think we like creates a disassociation in us, or that we get tense around someone we think we trust.

Our bodies are a miracle of continuous motion. We may feel dense but everything in our body is moving, changing, functioning, communicating, and creating to be fully alive in this moment. Here is a physical reality where all that is unknown and taken for granted meet in a miracle in which an incarnate human being has the ability to thrive.

Our aliveness comes from breathing and inhabiting the reality of who we are. The body is not trying to punish us. It is not evil. It is a container to embody the light we have inside us, expressed through our ability to love our deepest self.

Four years ago, Nessa Emrys shifted her personal paradigm and became a digital nomad. Nowadays she works as a multidimensional therapist and writer, using travel to embody compassion and challenge personal perspectives. You can read more of her work at https://nessaemrys.substack.com/s/personal-transformation.

Find holistic Meditation Practitioners in the Spirit of Change online Alternative Health Directory.

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