Becoming Embodied -Simple Somatic Intentions

Our focus today is learning to listen to our bodies. Our body speaks to us through the language of sensation. Our first practice is learning to track these sensations and understand our body cues. Paying kind attention to our body cues can help us come into greater regulation and balance - both physiologically as well as mentally and emotionally. When we turn our attention to our internal environment, we use a tracking skill called interoception which is our 6th sense of being able to feel sensation inside our body - in our muscles, ligaments, organs and tissues. This ability to track our inner body experience helps us know when we are hungry, tired, energetic, in pain or need to shift our posture and so on. The insight we gain from listening to our sensations will help us become more embodied.

Our somatic intention today is to ‘nourish’. When you hear this word, what pops into your head? Most likely, thoughts around food and whether or not we are caring for our body properly. In today’s practice we will widen our lens around what is nourishment and ask our bodies what will be fulfilling.

Our bodies are designed to move! Movement begins in utero as we stretch and push in our mothers’ wombs and continues throughout our life span. And as we grow and age, our movement changes as well. Today’s intention will encourage a mindful awareness of movement whether it’s large or small or even imagined.

We all feel stuck sometimes. In our modern society we often override our body’s attempts to modulate and make demands on our body that lead to dys-regulation and upset. Today’s intention is to modulate or learn how to come back into a sense of flow and balance. Our bodies are intricately designed to return again and again to homeostasis or balance.

In our western culture, we think of emotions as separate from our body and our mind. Yet our bodies deeply feel our emotions through sensation and can offer us much wisdom about what is happening inside us. The key is to drop out of the storyline of what has happened, and into the sensory experience of our emotions. We each have unique, individual expressions of various emotions. Discovering these personal signatures enables you to have a deeper relationship with yourself.

When I get involved in work, a project or am focused externally, it is as if my body has literally disappeared! Do you have that same experience? Our intention today is ‘grounding’, a common practice for feeling more present and embodied and getting out of our heads. We will work with pendulation, moving back and forth between our body and our mind, to strengthen the neural pathways for embodiment.

On this last day of our course, our somatic intention is ‘flow’. We all tend to force our bodies into a time schedule, push past physical limits to get things accomplished or ignore our body cues. Our flow practice will be an integration of the past 6 days of somatic intentions where you listen and follow your body’s wishes for movement, nourishment, grounding and feeling. Allowing open ended space for our bodies to ‘just be’ is a challenging, yet powerful practice in growing our capacity to be embodied. Enjoy!