Thanks for joining me today for a meditation on coming home to yourself.
Embodiment is your first person experience with and through the body in this world.
It's a subjective sense of wholeness,
A sense of being at home and at one with who you are.
Scanning the body is not just a matter of being aware or scanning the body.
Embodiment is actually living within your body,
Being present and being aware not just of the body but as the body.
The body is your instrument of experience including perception,
Thought,
Emotion,
Sensation and action.
It is your gateway to the here and now because your body is always in the present moment.
You use your body to do everything and it's the only way you can feel anything right now.
How you're constructed is in your body,
Your history,
Your DNA,
Everything you've done and everything you're capable of.
The mind and the body are mutually interactive and mutually influential.
When you engage the body you also engage psychological and emotional activities within yourself.
When you engage the mind,
For example,
When you do an intervention that is psychologically or emotionally oriented,
It will automatically engage the body.
This is good news because with the body-based approach you can often avoid some of the immediate ego-based psychological defenses and start to discover,
Uncover,
Input new information.
The body gives form to the mind's story.
That's what bodies do.
They give structure to our emotions and experiences.
If there is a mismatch,
Like holding a different attitude in the mind versus the body,
This is not only uncomfortable and even distressing,
But it's also unsustainable.
For example,
While sitting in a chair,
Come into physical flexion.
Punch forward,
Roll your shoulders in,
Look up and say,
I am empowered to accomplish what I want in my life.
It doesn't fit or feel right because there's a lack of congruence between mind and body.
The following is a simple way to begin practicing embodiment.
First,
We start by grounding ourselves and by coming back to the earth.
Take a comfortable seat and close your eyes.
To take a pause from that overused sense of sight,
Feel for a moment what it is like to simply close your eyes.
Feel the seat beneath you,
Maybe the ground under your feet or legs or your seat on a chair.
If you're lying down,
Feel the earth supporting you,
Cradling you.
And just breathe here for a moment.
Second we reconnect with our breath,
The gateway to deeper states of awareness.
As you take a breath,
Feel the experience of breathing in your body.
Can you notice where the breath starts in your body?
Can you feel where the breath ends?
See if you can tune into the exact location of your breath in the body,
The rising and falling of your abdomen,
Sensations on your upper lip or on the tip of your nose.
See if you can ride the waves of your breath like you're surfing.
And the third step in our embodiment practice is dropping back into the body with our mind more present and perhaps even more quiet than it was before we began.
Simply allow your attention to now scan the body,
Letting it rest on any bodily experience that you notice.
This could be muscle tension or contractions.
This could be rhythms or pulsations,
Pain,
Warmth,
Cold.
You could start from head to toe or vice versa.
And when you get to the center of your being,
See if you can hear your heart beating.
Can you feel the beating of your heart?
If it helps,
You could place a hand on your heart.
And fourth,
Let's go even deeper and explore our emotional body.
When you get distracted by something with an emotional aspect,
Like a memory or fantasy or worry,
Feel free to sit with that for a moment,
Getting curious about what you're experiencing without wandering too far from the here and now.
And after investigating with curiosity for a moment,
Simply guide your attention back to the bodily experience of the feelings.
Where is this in your body?
What is it like?
How is your energy level?
Can you evaluate in this moment what your energy feels like?
Are you tired?
Are you energized?
Does your body feel strong?
Where does it feel strong?
And remember that with any of these experiences,
You have a choice.
Anytime you can let it go or you can investigate it more in a curious way.
If at any time this exploration of emotions becomes too overwhelming,
Simply come back to the breath and move on.
Your body can be your greatest teacher if you allow it to be.
So see if you can trust in your body's wisdom to inform you.
Embodiment work is about changing the story from which we operate.
We can do this by either accessing or changing the beliefs we operate from or by changing the form and structure,
Aka the body mind,
That will then automatically change our beliefs.
If you want to test this,
Just walk around hunched over,
Inflection for a while,
Making yourself small,
And you're going to start feeling down or depressed because you're taking the form of a depressed state.
If you take the form of something,
You start to feel that something.
And this is profound because you can bypass so many of the labyrinths of the mind by going directly to the form or structure of your being.
So try the opposite.
Stand up tall and imagine yourself stepping into a superhero suit with your cape blowing in the wind.
Try it.
What happens to your physiology when stepping into a superhero suit,
When embodying this position of strength?
Mind and the awareness that comes along with it gives you a choice.
It's hard to change what you're not aware of.
Rather than always using habitual patterns you've picked up along the way,
You can now use options that are more appropriate for the situation,
Becoming more flexible,
Perhaps,
Adaptable,
Resourceful.
When grounded through embodiment,
Even when triggered and reactive,
You have the capacity to observe your own thoughts and behaviors and start to reshape them.
Once you've developed a strong sense of wholeness and comfort within the body,
You can start to experience a deep and meaningful connection with the world around you while still inhabiting your body.
The body is your greatest sense organ and once tuned into these senses,
You can start to feel your body and the surroundings at the same time.
You can start to feel as though you're made of space and that everything around you is made of space as well.
You begin to experience your own presence and aliveness while simultaneously experiencing the aliveness in everyone and everything around you.
So as you go throughout your day,
See if you can remember what it's like to drop back into the body and open the door to embodied mindfulness using the simple techniques we just practiced.
Number one,
Grounding,
Number two,
Breathing,
Number three,
Body sensations,
And number four,
Emotions.
So as we close,
Let's remember the words of Merleau-Ponty who said,
By thus remaking contact with the body and with the world,
We shall rediscover oneself.
Namaste.
