If your experience is anything like mine, pleasure is definitely not at the front of your mind. If you’re like me, you’ve been busy digesting the news, keeping your family safe, and trying to stay sane amidst juggling different work schedules and environments, kids and partner, homeschooling, and whether there will be toilet paper available next week.

Maybe you’ve lost the plot on pleasure during this time. Or maybe you’re having plenty of it (and maybe even feeling guilty about it). I’ve certainly been in both those places at points during this lockdown!

Either way, let’s talk about why you might want to focus on pleasure right now and how you can dance with it in the midst of chaos and uncertainty.

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We’re all embodied, of course… we all inhabit a body. It’s not possible to be completely disembodied, just like it’s not possible to be perfectly embodied all of the time. We’re all moving in and out of embodied states as we go through life.

But our modern life predisposes us to disembodiment as a default.

We’re taught that logic and the mind are supreme.

Especially as women, we are taught that our bodies are dangerous, chaotic, and not to be trusted, so why would we go deeper into them?

If you’re wondering if you might be living disembodied, here are 5 common signs, as well as what embodied living looks like!

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I’ve spoken with several people recently about what to do with all the heavy emotions that are coming up so regularly for many of us during this global lockdown. Often we don’t want to feel that way and we might avoid the feelings by stuffing them down or ignoring them. One friend shared such a simple and beautiful insight.

She said, “when I try to avoid feeling it, that just seems to prolong it.”

This is such a powerful understanding based on her own experience. And it’s also quite true from a somatic point of view: the body’s sensate experience doesn’t just go away if we turn our attention away from it. It stays frozen in the body, trapped in the tissues.

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By the time the afternoon rolled around, I was all over the place. Inside me felt chaotic. I had pulled out the laundry, but didn’t start it. The bin sat there in the hallway reminding me that I did not have it together. I walked past it again on the way to the cabinet for another handful of m&m’s, because that was totally helping things.

The children felt incessant, and they weren’t even misbehaving. Their hugs and their knock knock jokes and their messes felt like nails on a chalkboard. I started at my laptop on the counter, knowing I should try to be productive. It just wasn’t happening. Maybe you can relate?

There is no right or wrong way to feel right now.

You might be feeling the bliss of extra time with your children, or irritation with their relentless needs.

You might be feeling gratitude that you still have a job, and intense frustration …

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One of the foundational tools I teach is how to connect to your own inner wisdom, and how to use that inner guidance to go forward into action. Trust me, it’s not always easy for me to embody this either! I am really being challenged right now to truly walk my talk + practice what I preach.

Connecting to your intuition sounds so much easier than it is in reality! It’s especially challenging during times of intense chaos and uncertainty. What I am realizing is the lesson in this for me right now is really hearing the messages from my body, and the devotion to prioritizing my own intuition.

To first hear, and then to honor, and then to act from that place of deep wisdom and knowing.

I’m sharing this now because maybe you can relate. I know from many of the conversations I’ve been having with women in my circle lately, that so many of us are feeling challenged to hear and act on our own intuition in the face of the enormous pressures coming from the outside. Most of us deeply want to do the right thing for ourselves, for our families, our communities, and the world, and there are so many voices online trying to tell us their version of what the right thing is. 

Personally, I’m seeing a lot of posts on my social media feeds about…

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Early on in my embodiment journey, one of my teachers asked a group of us, “How do you know you are safe?” As we paused to consider, I looked around my apartment and thought, “well, the door is closed and locked, the windows are locked. I know the building porter is downstairs monitoring the cameras. I know I’m alone here. The oven is off.”

Then it came time to share our answers. Others talked about how they could feel their bodies resting on the solid ground; they could feel their heart’s measured, calm beating; and their breath flowing in and out naturally and consistently.

I was a bit shaken because it hadn’t occurred to me that safety was something I could feel and source INSIDE of myself. In fact, when I tuned in to my body, it didn’t actually feel all that safe!

At that time, I had a lot of big emotions I didn’t know what to do with. I had a lot of grief in my body. I had a lot of digestive problems probably as a result of my “frozen” emotional state.

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When something is coming to us, such as:

Praise

Compliments

Pleasure

Opportunities

Or even our own creative impulses…

our first reaction is to CONTRACT + DEFLECT rather than opening + allowing it to land deeply and be received fully.

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