Hi friends
How are you doing? Our world is really, very bananas. I hope you’re finding ways to feel grounded, to restore perspective, to receive what you need.
This full moon’s In My Experience… is about embodiment and learning to be more present in the body. Lately, whenever I describe the immense amount of physical trauma I’ve experienced in the past year (including the complete fracture of my femur ball while on vacation in Costa Rica), people comment that I must have a high tolerance for physical pain. Well, we continued that trip for another week and I managed to have a really good time, so, yes, I probably do have a high tolerance. I believe that I also have what Sherri Mitchell (in her magnificent book, Sacred Instructions*) calls “the courage to feel pain.”
Feel is the operative word here – processing pain through words has been an important aspect of my healing, but for many years I talked about my pain incessantly while avoiding actually feeling it. Mitchell acknowledges that it makes sense we don't know how to feel our pain because this courage is something most of us are never taught. I certainly wasn’t. And I’ve developed it. By developing this courage I’ve learned that, while it's not necessarily easy, I can feel pain and also feel joy…. and this is freedom.
The thing I’ve discovered about true embodiment is that it requires me to open up fully to my experiences. This means welcoming both pleasure and pain… fully. Because avoiding, numbing, or (temporarily) transcending pain (through dissociation, intoxication, or altered states) means I close myself off – to everything. When I can’t fully feel pain, I also cannot fully feel pleasure.
And, as you may know (or will soon figure out), that’s what I’m really all about these days: MORE PLEASURE!! Of course, not as an avoidance or bypass of pain (um, see above), but as a reclamation of this necessary and natural capacity for enjoyment which, because of personal and collective conditioning, has been greatly diminished throughout my life. Pleasure can absolutely only be felt through my body (which includes my mind). It’s not over there or anywhere else. It’s not dependent on external stimulus or more stuff. Even if it’s sparked by something outside of me or by something immaterial – I still only experience it right here, in my blessed body.
Today's question is below.
With love and many blessings to your body,
Sebene
* A very big thank you to my friend Jocelyn for introducing me to this amazing author and book through her excellent interview. I HIGHLY recommend giving this a listen.
How do you live an embodied life? I feel like I get stuck in my head and sometimes I forget if I’ve done a physical thing because I was lost in my head while doing it. I want to be more present in my body so I’d love to know how you stay present in yours.
Dear Bodily Alive,
Thank you for this simple, profound question. I talk about embodiment in You Belong a LOT, including modernity’s rejection of the body and how this is connected to the denigration of indigenous ways of knowing, of the feminine, of the erotic. I’ve also written about the body here, here, here, here... In all honesty, it took a long while for me to learn how to be more embodied. First, it required me to feel my body – this has not been easy, and is an ongoing process. Learning to live an embodied life has been a huge focus and extremely challenging for me. In summary, 😭😭😭. And, embodiment is probably the most meaningful capacity I’ve gained in all my years of study & practice.
In my experience, learning to be more present in my body involves unweaving deep personal & collective patterning – in doing so, I am able to sense the magnificent power & mystery of what it is to be alive.
There is nothing wrong with thinking, but like you, I can get stuck in my head and even disconnect from my physical experience. I am definitely not a talented athlete or dancer – not being in my body didn’t have many negative ramifications for me. In fact, society rewarded me for mostly being in my head – with good grades, easy employment, praise for being smart. Also, staying in my head meant not feeling the discomfort of difficult emotions which felt like protection, except those emotional disturbances remained lodged inside – until I learned to feel and to release them. I did learn. I am learning. I probably became a mindfulness teacher because I needed it myself. And as I wrote last time, mindfulness is a misleading term for someone like me who naturally makes everything about the mind. I prefer the term embodied awareness.
How do I stay present in my body? Whatever term I use… practice.
Meditations that center the body were key for me. Simple instructions like “feel your feet on the floor” or “sense your thighs on the chair” are not a challenge for some people. I am not some people. This was a huge difficulty for me. I had to practice feeling the body in formal meditation – over and over and over again. Then (and this was key), I had to learn to do this in my daily life. I used (and still use) touch points throughout the day – usually my feet (because they’re farthest from my head 😜), but also my hands, my butt, my belly. While standing doing the dishes, sitting talking to someone, walking outside, or whenever and wherever, I feel these touch points. I pay intimate attention to the sensations present – vibrations, temperature, dampness/dryness, texture, movement... The hardest part? To remember to do this.
My pattern is immediately to go into thoughts, to tell myself a story, even to start writing things in my head. Again, thoughts are not the problem! The fact that I have a strong habit pattern of almost always only being in thoughts and not in my body. The fact that, even though I long to be more embodied, I sometimes cannot for the life of me remember to just do it or sometimes even how to do it... That’s my problem.
It helps me to know and remember (lol) that sati, the Pali word translated as mindfulness, also has the connotation of “remembering.” To me this means there's an assumption built into the practice that I will forget! I specifically cultivate the skill of embodied awareness within formal mindfulness practice, so that I can more easily remember to do it in daily life. What I’m ineloquently describing with that term embodied awareness is what Eugene Gendlin elegantly called the “felt sense.” He developed a method called “Focusing” (see below👇🏾) to teach people how to do this. This method has helped me a lot, including through years of psychotherapy with focusing oriented therapists.
Because the body is the place where my whole entire life has happened, patterns of trauma also get stored there (where else would they be?). Over the years, as I became more embodied, these patterns became more apparent and it became clear they needed tending. I am not a trauma expert, and I have trained in trauma work using an approach called IFOT👇🏾. Expanding on Gendlin’s approach, IFOT uses Focusing to identify and release personal and ancestral trauma by integrating Indigenous methods into the process.
My body holds not only my individual traumas. It holds the pain and also the prayers of all who came before me. It contains billions of microscopic beings and the remnants & resonances of aeons. As someone who has experienced life threatening illness as well as near-miraculous healing multiple times in one incarnation, I know that my body is filled with incredible potential and power.
Gendlin said this:
When I use the word “body,” I mean more than the physical machine. Not only do you physically live the circumstances around you but also those you only think of in your mind. Your physically felt body is in fact part of a gigantic system of here and other places, now and other times, you and other people—in fact, the whole universe. This sense of being bodily alive in a vast system is the body as it is felt from inside.
In this productivity obsessed culture where I am pushed to optimize my body for output and consumption, where I am expected to spend most of my days and hours toiling in order to keep the extractive capitalist machine churning – I can forget that my body is an incredible miracle, elegantly and exquisitely designed. Being present in my body reminds me that I am much more than an instrument for work. My body is my true home, my entry point to all experiences of love & beauty & joy, it is my means of finding meaning and feeling laughter and touching others, my body is literally made of stardust, it is connected to all beings seen and unseen throughout time, it is my personal portal into magic & mystery. When I don’t fully feel my body, I miss out on a universe of possibilities. I miss out on awe and wonder.
My body physically includes my head. Embodiment is not about rejecting my brain and its amazing capacities. I love thoughts, ideas, words. That’s why I write this newsletter! Being more present in my body has only increased my enjoyment of my mind. In some (rare) moments, when I am fully present to it all, the false separation I create between mind & body, even between me and not-me, falls away.
Right now, simply noticing this present moment is enough: the pressure of my fingers on the keys as I type this, the sound of cars on the street, the warmth of my feet touching each other, my breath in my lungs, my wish for your well being…
May we honor our fullest felt sense.
Embodiment (an intro…)
Eugene Gendlin discovered that therapy clients who had a capacity to move beyond a merely verbal or conceptual understanding of their problems and connect to a bodily experience of what was happening made more and lasting change in their treatment. Even by listening only to the first session, he could predict a client’s success. Clients who paused more often (listening to or sensing some totality of their inner experience) and referred to this nonverbal (felt) sense, were much more likely to have successful outcomes. What was happening within was often vague and difficult to describe, but they attuned to their bodies. Learn more about Focusing here.
I have been deeply influenced and transformed by Indigenous Focusing Oriented Therapy - IFOT, a form of focusing developed by Shirley Turcotte to address complex and intergenerational trauma primarily in the Aboriginal Canadian context. I learned IFOT from Shirley and my primary teachers DaRa Williams and Isabel Adon who have expanded its scope and methods into POC communities in the NYC area.
Centering relationship, curiosity and courage, The Embodiment Institute is cultivating programs and processes for bringing embodiment into movement spaces and change work to build liberatory culture. As they articulate, “it is not enough for us to envision new ways of being, but we need support to practice, to feel, and to stay the course of transformation.”
Ten Percent Happier (my favorite meditation app!) has many meditations centering the body (also, I lead some of them 😉).