The Path Towards Embodiment

Healing from trauma and working towards our mental health and growth is such hard work and there are so many paths to get there.  I’ve been working with most of my clients lately on something I feel so passionate about and that is our relationship with our bodies.  Embodiment simply means being present in our full bodies.  When we separate our mind and awareness away from our present moment experience, we dissociate.  And all human beings dissociate, especially in our current culture.  It is quite easy and in fact normal and expected to spend large amounts of time scrolling our phones looking at our social media feeds, maybe while we also have the television on in the background.  We spend most of our time in a fast-paced culture which demands our attention with the 24-hour news cycle and bombards us with advertisements with all the latest stuff.  The consequence is that most of us, regardless of our trauma histories, end up pretty checked out from our own bodies and far more attuned to our external experience.

So how do we start to build a relationship with our bodies and why do it?  A somatic therapy approach, meaning of the body, means beginning to turn our attention inward and beginning to trust what we observe.  It means recognizing that our bodies speak to us in sensations, and in turn, our sensations lead us to impulses and our own innate pathways to healing.  We often think of our brains as the main and only source of intelligence in our bodies, but in fact our very cells and systems also have wisdom we so very often tune out and ignore in favor of our thoughts.  When we focus so heavily on our thoughts and external stimuli, we can get trapped in cycles of endless negative reinforcing beliefs.  We get analysis paralysis and start to recognize something doesn’t feel right but we’ve spent so long disconnecting from our bodies that we aren’t even quite sure what doesn’t feel right.

And so the task is that we must pay attention inside of ourselves.  The path towards embodiment sounds so simple, but in fact in a culture that conditions us to do the opposite and when so many of us tune out of our bodies because they do not feel safe to inhabit, it might be the most challenging therapy ask you’ve ever received.  I invite you today to start slow.  Begin a habit of spending a few minutes each day just noticing and scanning.  Begin by checking in with the sensations of your body.  Wherever your attention goes, feel the sensations there.  Give that sensation permission to breathe, and move, and sound.  Bring your awareness to the energy in your body, start to notice areas that flow and areas that seem constricted or congested.  And as you start to notice and tune in, you’ll start to begin that journey back to yourself.  It’s hard work to be human.

Peace to you wherever you find yourself on your journey,

Cassie