When we ask the question, ‘what’s embodiment?’ it’s often useful to look at what it’s not!
Have you noticed how life incentivises you away from feeling yourself?
How it offers short-term ‘rewards’ that numb out the truth of your experience. Rewards that promise tempting dopamine hits, which are easier than having to face what you actually feel?
It’s not hard to find a ’10-day challenge’ to fix this problem or a particular brand of wine to soothe another. When you’re depleted by your own reality you can scroll through someone else’s. Or create an avatar that shields you from your internal disconnect.
Interestingly, you become so practised in these numbing mechanisms that they become default ways of responding to life. Micro-actions, words, and movements that you learn to make or say in order to protect you from hurt, rejection, vulnerability and any other uncomfortable experience.
Yet underneath this armour, your body’s telling you what’s true.
Think about a situation where you’re somewhere that you don’t want to be, but feel like you have to stay. Your head’s telling you why you ‘should’ stay whilst your body’s telling you (via your increased heart rate, inability to be still, changes in your body temperature) to get the hell out.
All this is important information about how you feel in that moment. But you struggle to hear or respond to it, because life conditions you to focus on what’s externally acceptable. Not what’s internally true.
It’s at this place of rupture – between the ‘shoulds’ and the truth – that the skill of embodiment come in. This can look like:
🌹Coming back to YOUR body. Being present with what you’re feeling and allowing yourself to be open and curious to the truth of that experience.
🌹Realigning who you are and how you behave with what you truly believe. Then practising this over and over.
🌹Finding safety and trust in your body so that you can be fully present in your experiences.
🌹Living in a relaxed body, which creates more choice, and the ease to trust those choices are right for you.
Embodiment is a remembering that there’s a place you can come back to that’s wise, knowing and true. A place where you can feel, be vulnerable, tender, reach for help and STILL BE POWERFUL.
As a Feminine Embodiment Coach who’s constantly being called to deepen into my own embodiment journey, I’m also here to support yours.
To help you re-learn embodied ways of being and support you to keep practicing them over and over until they become new default behaviours.
I’m here to place a hand on your shoulder and let you know that the power you seek is not outside of you but deep in the core of your being, and ready to guide you whenever you are.
