Why Would Anybody Want To Be Embodied? 5 Practical Reasons…
Becoming more embodied doesn’t promise you an easy life. It doesn’t mean you’ll reach a state of ongoing happiness and fulfillment. In fact, when you embark on this path - especially in the early days - you might discover that inhabiting your body more fully can feel unpredictable, or even downright scary at times.
Before I learned about embodiment, my “self-care” was all about trying to gain more control over myself & my body… a losing battle for this rebel heart haha.
A lot of my own early experiences of being in a body mostly felt out of control and unpredictable. It felt unsafe & even dangerous to be in a body, particularly a female body. For example, in my 20s, I was very fit and looked after myself, but then I found out I had cancer. It felt like my body betrayed me; like I didn’t actually have control over my health or what was happening inside my body.
On top of that, like most women, I struggled with food & body image. I didn't feel in control of my appetite. I couldn’t make my body look like the “ideal” no matter how many miles I ran. My emotions felt unpredictable. My desires felt dangerous and insatiable. Everything felt chaotic.
When I really started this work of embodiment, I didn’t know that’s what I was doing and honestly, I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into!
Yeah, sure, feminine practice cultivates radiance and makes you super magnetic.
But when you open yourself up to FEEL, you are going to feel what's there to be felt.
All. Of. It.
You can’t open to feel more of just the good stuff. If you want more pleasure & joy, and you open the aperture on your sensitivity, you gotta be willing to let in more of everything.
The truth is, what's there to be felt is sometimes not very comfortable. Especially in the beginning, when you’re not used to feeling what's there on a regular basis. It’s like you haven’t had a shower in a while - there can be a lot of stuff to rinse out of your body. It can be super uncomfortable as you learn how to hold yourself through intense sensations.
So why do it? Why would anyone want to take the journey to embodiment?
(Spoiler alert: It’s truly 100% worth it!).
Let’s just start by naming the truth that you know deep in your bones that you’re here for more. You know in your truest heart that you aren’t going to be satisfied with a life of skating on the surface. You know you need to come deeper down into life & the body to get there.
That ALONE is reason enough to engage in this work, my friends.
But if you need some practical reasons to help get your rational mind on side, I can help with that. Here are 5 of them…
1. More pleasure
My gateway to embodiment work was through the erotic. I didn’t even know I was doing embodiment at the time, I just wanted better sex and more pleasure. The work I was doing blew the lid off what I thought was possible to experience, so when I found out it was embodiment, I dove right in.
Most of us inhabit a dismally small area on the spectrum of pleasure that’s available. We are limited by what aspects of pleasure feel safe and approved. We deny the truth of our desires because they feel too dangerous or out of reach. Our ideas of pleasure are tied up with commodification of the feminine that feels icky. Many people have traumatic experiences related to pleasure. There’s a lot to unpack!
But the journey to greater pleasure is through what’s true in your body. You don’t get more pleasure by sitting and intellectualizing it. Pleasure isn’t felt through an academic discussion. Pleasure is experienced through the lens of the body! Inhabiting the body more fully is the first step in expanding your pleasure capacity.
2. Richer experience of life
Most of us are scrolling on our phones all the time, which doesn't require our bodies to be online, it only requires us to be in our heads. So we are out of the habit of, and unskilled with, feeling what's happening from the neck down.
And yet, this body is the only way that we experience life. It is our means of interfacing with the world around us. Our concept of ourselves cannot be separated or divorced from our bodies; all of our experiences are contextualised by what we can sense and feel in our bodies. Becoming more sensitive and opening up your body to be able to feel and sense more is a way of opening that door to what you’re able to experience in this life.
Feeling more allows you to be touched by life in a deeper way. It leads to more profound conversations, fuller relationships, and a more delicious experience of life in general. Who wouldn’t want that?!
3. Accessing more of your self
When you are numb to your body, or holding onto denied experiences, tension, or trauma, actual aspects of your Self can become frozen. These become walled-off places inside you, where your life force & creative energy gets stuck. The essence of who you are, and your wholeness can't be experienced fully and it can't flow freely. Embodiment is a means of dissolving stuck & frozen tension in your body so you can access more of yourself. When your full life force potential is available and fluid, you gain greater access to your power, your creativity, and your will.
4. More intuition
Intuition is not just a superpower gifted to a few tuned-in fairies. Everyone has access to the power of intuition. Your intuition comes from all the pieces of information that your body and nervous system are picking up from the environment all the time. Most of it gets filtered out because it would be way too overwhelming to constantly pay attention to all of that stuff, so your brain picks out what it thinks is most important and only raises that to the level of conscious awareness.
This is why you get a gut feeling about something, or a sense that someone is watching you. Those are senses your body is picking up from your environment. Connecting with your intuition means accessing more of the information that's outside your conscious awareness. When you turn down the volume on external noise and turn up the volume on your internal felt sense, you get a deeper connection to your intuitive knowing.
5. Better boundaries & greater clarity to navigate life
The more you develop the capacity and skill to feel what's happening in your body, the more clarity you have about how to navigate your life with integrity. People get confused about integrity. We are so programmed that integrity means “being good” or doing “the right thing,” but integrity actually means wholeness. It means all the parts (of you) are together. It’s not about being “good” or living up to some external standards. It’s about coming into greater alignment with capital-T “Truth” as it lives through you & in your body.
Your body will tell you when you’re out of integrity - when part of you is fractured off or denied; when you’re playing along with something that’s just not Truth. Your body will make you sick or feel bad. We just spend a lot of time distracting ourselves from those signals because it seems easier and more comfortable than actual truth-telling.
What would you have to change if you really told the truth? Yeah, I know, parts of you feel different ways… but when you get quiet, in the great temple of your sacred heart, what is the Highest Truth? What is the thing that brings you into the greatest wholeness? Most people do not want to get quiet long enough to hear those whispers because deep down they already know and they’re scared of what it means.
But when you are sensitive to the way your heart and soul speak through your body, there is a well of clarity about how to live, and what you want. There’s a greater sense of where your boundaries are, where your self stops and another person starts. Where your energetic boundaries are, and what is in integrity for you and what's not.
So those are just a few of the really tangible benefits of embodiment. Beyond this, there is a whole other level of mysterious, esoteric benefit to embodiment work and I look forward to sharing that with you.
If this resonates with you but you don’t feel ready to commit to a long-term transformation, why not sign up for one of my Soul Alchemy single sessions? I am currently offering 50% off my Soul Alchemy Session through the Winter Solstice. It is the perfect opportunity for us to focus on one aspect of your life that is sticking for you, and go deeper together to move through it.
