Intro To Embodiment

The faint sound of a plane passing by miles overhead mixes with the sounds of workers speaking Spanish, birds chirping, and they all flow in through the window on a breeze too cool for it to be June. It’s not raining, but it’s the kind of day that encourages me to stay indoors just in case it decides to. The house is quiet, save for the occasional sound of Lucy chewing a bone in the other room. A train whistles nearby. In here, I’m wrapped in a blanket on the guest bed. I woke up at 5:45 this morning with my husband to see him off as he set out on a road trip with friends- our first time apart since we married a few months ago. My body is disoriented by the change in my sleep schedule and paired with the absence of my husband, today feels different than most days.

The train whistles again, or perhaps it’s a different train now. I notice my jaw is stiff and allow some ease on an inhale. I give a loving farewell to the tension on the exhale: Thank you for protecting me from nothing at all. I have a newfound sense that what is happening inside of me is just as real and important as what my body senses outside of me. I recognize my body as a detector of things, and a teller of truth about what it finds. What my body is experiencing is true. I may question it logically, may try to reason with my senses and emotions, may not like the truth of the moment and try to deny or ignore it, and may not even understand what I’m experiencing, but when my body speaks it is telling me something. I often find myself in an arrogant habit of assuming my first interpretation of the message is accurate. Right now, both in this moment and in this larger chapter of my life, my practice is one of listening closely to what my body is trying to tell me.

I examine my urge to write any of this to you, whoever you are. The first motivation I discovered stems from the fact that I lived 31 years of my life in need of information I didn’t know I needed and definitely didn’t know existed. I cannot go back in time and save myself from learning these things the hard way, but I can tell my story and perhaps it will be read by someone who can learn from my mistakes without having to make them, or keep making them for more years than necessary. The question arises within me, “Is this codependent of you, trying to save others?” I recognize this voice as Therapy Christen and feel gratitude for her. She cautions me from sharing my stories for the wrong reasons and to the wrong audiences. She ensures I don’t burn myself out in desperation to save everyone. She speaks from a place on high, advising from her bird’s eye view. But another feeling rises up from a deep place- a knowing not of the mind but of the body. It reminds me that writing is an essential part of learning. While it may appear that I am writing to you, that is secondary to the true intention; Writing for me.

“Writing to communicate—or what James Britton calls “transactional writing”—means writing to accomplish something, to inform, instruct, or persuade…. Writing to learn is different. We write to ourselves as well as talk with others to objectify our perceptions of reality; the primary function of this “expressive” language is not to communicate, but to order and re-present experience to our own understanding. In this sense language provides us with a unique way of knowing and becomes a tool for discovering, for shaping meaning, and for reaching understanding.”

Full article here. 

A few months ago, after a couple years together, my therapist informed me she’d be moving to a new practice. Details were exchanged for me to follow her to her new place if I wanted to and if they’d accept my insurance, but we ended the session with the understanding that it may be a while before we speak to each other again, if we ever do. She reminded me that I am a deeply self-inquiring person and that if I held myself accountable, I could keep making progress on my own in the meantime. During that session and the session prior, we had been discussing dissociation (which deserves its own entire discussion, so I won’t dive into it now) and how to break the habit of “checking out” or “spacing out” when overwhelmed. She left me with one word. The word puzzled me, not because of its complexity but rather because it sounded too simple to be the solution to a pervasive and lifelong habit.

EMBODIMENT

I briefly analyzed the word, understood it to be something regarding the body, then narrowed my knowledge of the body down to a summary: The body is a physical thing. After this seconds-long thought process, I landed on the assumption that “Embodiment Practices,” as my therapist had called them, were probably movement practices. The session ended and I sat puzzled: I’ve been a yoga teacher for 7 years, practicing yoga for even longer, I do Qi Gong, I walk, I do lots of things in my body. I sensed I must have been missing something or misinterpreting the concept of embodiment. Thus the journey began, into the body even deeper somehow, blindly, with not even so much as a road map.

I googled embodiment, and the first and most plentiful results were definitions regarding things like the embodiment of one’s values. Other definitions described it as the translation of an idea into physical form. These weren’t wrong, but I sensed that they weren’t what my therapist was referring to. And besides, I couldn’t seem to find much info on the “how-to” of embodiment. Feeling defeated before I’d even begun, I stepped away from my research. Not more than a week later, I opened Glennon Doyle’s Podcast We Can Do Hard Things to listen to the newest episode (It was ep. 206). In the intro Glennon welcomes the guest, Dr. Hillary McBride, and describes her as a leading thinker in the field of… EMBODIMENT.
For anyone still wondering why or how I believe in anything divine, it is because of the regularity of events like this in my life. I knew what I needed, I didn’t know how to find it, I had faith it would show itself to me, and it did in mere days.

Chapter one of my embodiment journey has been navigated by the road map provided by Dr. Hillary McBride in the form of her book The Wisdom of Your Body. Embodiment, as it turns out, IS simple. It’s simplicity is deceiving, however, because living embodied is incredibly challenging for those of us conditioned by a culture to ignore or subdue our bodies and prioritize the needs of others over our own. I also recognize embodiment as a concept that has been taught to me by other names through the spiritual path of yoga I’ve been on for the past 7 years. Even early in my embodiment research, it is clear to me that embodiment has a lot to do with being here now and staying here regardless of what is here now with us. After my last therapy session, I scribbled a to-do in my journal: Bridge gap between psychology and spirituality. I feel that embodiment is moving me into a place where the two dance together.

I intend to share this embodied research with you as I continue on the path, both so that it may serve you and so that by bringing the ideas down into physical form through writing, I might better be able to embody embodiment.