Embodiment connects you to your aliveness, to the ground of being, to all bodies, and all life.

When you slow down to the pace of your body’s (embodied) experience—the taste of orange, the touch of stone, the smell of rain, the sound of breath—you open yourself to a vitality of feeling and being. In this state of exquisite feeling and being, you come into an awareness of self that is expansive and generative. Every breath you take is an act of exchange and reciprocity with life around us. Every step you take is a dance with gravity. We are always in relationship to our living earth, how we decide to honor (or deny) that relationship has everything to do with how we are living in our body. Reclaiming the primacy of our embodied experience illuminates a path to healing our relationships with one another and the earth. The body helps us remember that we are nature. The body helps us remember that we belong.

When you are aware of your direct, lived experience— your breath, your senses, your intuition— you can see more clearly what is helpful and healing.

Your felt experience brings you into presence, calling you back from past (regrets) and future (worries), and focusing your attention on the reality of circumstance as it unfolds. Simple techniques like bringing awareness to the quality of your breath or body sensations are portals into your present reality that illuminate how physical feeling relates to your emotional wellbeing. How might the sudden experience of nausea, pain, or tightness in your chest be understood as a message from your body to seek pause or safety? As you become more skilled at feeling and identifying your inner states of being, you can more keenly assess what might be needed to gather and ground yourself so that you may discern what is most helpful and healing.

Embodied sensation and awareness is the language of your nervous system; when you listen to your body you directly engage your nervous system, opening pathways to soothe, stabilize, and engender a felt sense of safety and resilience.

By getting to know how your nervous system responds to stress (fight, flight, freeze, fawn) you gain the skills to settle and support yourself even in circumstances that trigger fear, anxiety, and overwhelm. When you engage in embodied self-soothing and self-regulating practices— intentional breathing, humming, self-contact, or grounding— you restore connection with the “rest and digest” (parasympathetic) branch of your nervous system and the part of your brain responsible for complex cognitive functions (reasoning, impulse control, and managing emotions). From a regulated state, you (and your nervous system) can more accurately assess threat and discern a greater range of ways you might respond to a stressful or overwhelming situation.

Feel, heal, and become free in your body.

Your body doesn’t just hold memory; it is memory. The posture and patterns of your mind and body reflect the story of your life; sometimes these stories (especially those conditioned by dominant narratives of oppression) no longer serve your wellbeing. health, well-being, and agency are powerful access routes to core wounds and beliefs. Through embodied experience and inquiry, you can become more discerning about which of your stories are empowering and which are diminishing. When you can make conscious choices about limiting self stories and beliefs (inherited and conditioned) you can change how you live in your body and in relationship to your world. This is a radically creative and liberating act.

Above photo by Robbie Sweeney