The importance of Embodiment
I’ve recently been reading about embodiment, and it has me reflecting on how our connection between body and mind shapes our everyday experiences. I’d love to share with you a wonderful excerpt from a massage therapy blog on “Embodiment and Bodywork:”
"Embodiment is a form of connectedness — the awareness of how our bodies are related to the rest of our state of being.
Thoughts are only a part of the sense of embodiment if they are perceived as felt physical sensations. Most of us are engaged primarily in disembodied thought. We convince ourselves that we feel what we are thinking, but what is actually happening is a merging of the meanings of thinking, sensing, and feeling into each other. We need to distinguish the experience of these processes separately. A big part of the healing process requires us to delve into the silent, felt world of sensation and perception."
This wonderful excerpt from Massage Therapy Palo Alto’s online blog eloquently describes the state in which the mind and body are perfectly interconnected. I see how important embodiment is in my practice when I sense my clients holding patterns when I try to stretch a limb and without skipping a beat I hear, "I'm trying to relax, but I can't." So many of my clients suffer from a sense of dis-embodiment. Of course, this is a normal part of being human, and due to our life experiences, it would be impossible not to retain the behaviors and traumas that have greatly impacted us. The problem is, we are married to the bodies we live in and governed by our nervous system. When we exercise, we consciously make the decision to work in building muscle memory, actively training muscular patterns in pursuit of a goal. What most of us don't realize is that even if we're not exercising, we are still actively yet unconsciously participating in reinforcing old movement patterns and learning new ones. Over time, the things that happen to us and the way in which we react to our environment set the course for how the body will move and assimilate that information, thus leading to states of disassociation and disembodiment.
So how do we unlearn what we have learned? We connect with ourselves; our bodies. We carve out a bit of time to simply check in with ourselves. We hold space for activities that cultivate the mind/body connection such as yoga, or receiving a massage from someone who is skilled in helping us unwind our soft tissue. We read books that educate us about somatics and embodiment. We familiarize ourselves with our traumas and cultivate a loving relationship with our bodies and self-perception. We breathe into our bodies and have a conversation: "Hi body. How are you feeling right now?" "Thank you body, thank you so much for helping me stay grounded." "Body, I know you are heavy with grief, and I will sit with you and feel with you." Ultimately, little steps in understanding our relationships to our own bodies is what leads to embodiment and to better self regulation.
For those interested in learning more on embodiment, I highly recommend this excellent podcast episode from 'Trauma Rewired: Embodiment is Scary AF'.
