Embodiment means...

(it's not rocket-science)

Embodiment has become an industry! All sorts of coaches, influencers and therapists now use the term as a buzzword to promote a wide variety of techniques and courses. This is good. Or certainly I can’t consider it bad.

But there’s a danger in all this discussion about embodiment. That is, that we end up creating a vast repository of knowledge about embodiment in our minds. But actually don’t get any more embodied in our bodies - where it counts!

In fact, learning about embodiment can make us more prone to this possibility. We can become a walking therapy library, and somehow assume that now we’ve “got it,” when actually we have yet to start on a real journey. Our self-image has become that of being an embodied person, but we are not!

Back in the days when I was starting on my own journey, there was this kind of proverb around about a certain kind of person. They were described as walking around a swimming pool, reading a book about how water feels. They don’t jump in, or dip a toe in, they just carry on reading. Hopefully, you don’t wish to be this person.

So what does the word “embodied” really mean?

It means feeling our body more.

Embodiment is not a complicated thing. It is not some kind of academic or scientific pursuit. Eventually, people may start investigating the brain and tracking down areas that somehow mediate our level of embodiment. Maybe they’ll be looking at the insula, or wherever. But, even if that happens, embodiment will still mean the same thing.

It means feeling our body more.

Right now. I have a certain level of awareness of my body - the sense of my body. If I increase that, I will be more embodied. That’s it. It's really not rocket science. Some of the techniques that we use to get there may be a little complicated, but the core is very, very simple.

Feel your body more.

You even don’t need to focus on human emotions. Yes, we all have repressed emotions and it is good to become more conscious of them. But all these feelings are anyway embedded within our sense of the body. If we set upon expanding the degree to which we can feel our body, then all those repressed emotions will come out too. This will happen naturally as well, not in accordance with some idea you have of how emotional healing “should” take place.

Techniques like Bioenergetics or Reichian Breathwork are essentially “healing programs” that we run in our body. They heal us psychologically. But they don’t run in our mind. They run in our body. If you do the technique, it will heal you. If you don’t, or you stop, it won’t! It is as simple as that.

This can happen because all the blocks are held in our physical body. As the techniques naturally work these blockages out, so slowly we feel our body more and more. The sense of our body becomes greater and greater. As this happens, so repressed emotions become integrated. Similarly, we access more energy because we have a lot of it inside that we just don’t feel yet.

Embodiment means feeling our body more. That’s it.

Devaraj