Should you push past your fears?
If you've ever wondered if your fear is your intuition telling you that something is not right for you .... OR if it's actually holding you back from expanding past an edge into your greatest potential ... this episode is for you!
How do we know whether to listen to a fear or push past it? I'm sharing some embodied tips & actionable steps to take if you find yourself in this situation.
Grab a cup of tea and let's dive in!
Listen below, or on any of your favorite platforms including Spotify, Apple Podcasts and iHeart Radio . You can also subscribe to the RSS feed here.
Podcast Transcript:
Here's the transcript:
Perhaps you've wondered why you would want to become more sensitive to what's happening in your body in the first place. Maybe it feels uncomfortable or painful, or just downright chaotic in your body. And you're wondering why you would want more of that. I'm here today to share with you why anyone would want to take this journey to become more embodied?
Five practical reasons. Now becoming more embodied, doesn't promise you an easier life. It doesn't mean you'll reach a state of ongoing happiness or fulfillment. In fact, when you step onto this path, especially in the early days, You might even discover that inhabiting your body more fully can feel downright unpredictable, or even scary at times.
Before I learned about embodiment. My self care was all about trying to gain more control over myself and my body. Which of course was a losing battle for this rebel heart. A lot of my own early experiences of being in my body mostly felt out of control and unpredictable. It felt unsafe and even dangerous to be in my body.
Particularly being in a female body. Just for example, in my twenties, I was very fit. I really looked after myself. I ate, well, I went to the gym regularly. But then when I was 26, I found out that 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 own body.
On top of that, like most women, I also struggled with food and body image. I didn't ever 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 often felt unpredictable. My desires, the things that I wanted for myself felt dangerous and insatiable.
Really everything inside of me felt chaotic. When I started this work of embodiment, I didn't actually even know that's what I was doing. And honestly, I didn't really know what I was getting myself into. Yeah, feminine practice cultivates. Radiants. It 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 and joy, you open the aperture on your sensitivity and you also gotta be willing to let in more of everything. The truth is whatever's there to be felt. Sometimes it's not very comfortable, especially in the beginning when you're not used to feeling what's there on a regular basis.
It's like when you haven't had a shower in a while, there could be a lot of stuff to rinse out of the system. And it can be super uncomfortable as you learn how to hold yourself through these intense sensations.
So why do this? Why would anyone want to take the journey to embodiment? Gonna give you a spoiler alert. It is truly 100% worth it. But 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 and into your body to get there. That alone is reason enough to engage in this work. My friends. But if you need some more practical reasons to help get your rational mind on side, I can help with that too. So here are five of them. The first reason is having more pleasure and who doesn't want that.
Now my own gateway to embodiment work was through the erotic. I didn't even know I was doing embodiment at the time. I just wanted to have better sex and more pleasure. The work I was doing blew the lid off of what I thought was possible to experience in my body. So when I found out that it was called embodiment, I dove right in.
Most of us and habit, a dismally small area on the spectrum of pleasure. That's available. We are limited by what aspects of pleasure feels safe and approved, especially as women. We deny the truth of our desires because they feel too dangerous or out of reach. Red is a 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 in this area. 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.
So inhabiting the body more fully is the first step in expanding your pleasure capacity.
The second reason is. A richer experience of life. Most of us are scrolling on our phones all the time. I'm also guilty of this. Which is an activity that does not require our bodies to be online. It only requires us to be in our heads. So more and more, 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 experienced life. It is our means of interfacing with the world around us. Our concept of ourselves can't be separated or divorced from our bodies. All of our experiences are contextualized 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.
The third reason is to access more of your south. When you're numb to your body or you're holding on to denied experiences. Tension or trauma. Actual aspects of yourself can become frozen. These become walled off places inside you where your life force and creative energy gets stuck. The essence of who you are, your beingness and your wholeness can't be experienced fully. And it can't flow freely.
Embodiment is a means of dissolving this stuck and 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 in your will.
The fourth reason is more intuition.
Intuition is not just a super power 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 your nervous system are picking up from the environment all the time. Most of this gets filtered out because it would be way too overwhelming to constantly pay attention to all 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 can get a gut feeling about something or like a sense that someone is watching you. Those are senses your body is picking up from the environment. Connecting with your intuition means accessing more of the information that's outside your conscious awareness. When you turn down the volume on the external noise and turn up the volume on your internal felt sense.
You get a deeper connection to your intuitive knowing.
And finally number five. Better boundaries and greater clarity to navigate life. The more you develop the capacity and the 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're 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 and 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 just playing along with something, that's just not truth. Your body will make you sick or feel bad. We just spent 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 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're sensitive to the way your heart and soul speak through your body. There's 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's an integrity for you. And what's not.
So, those are just a few of the really tangible benefits of embodiment. Beyond this there's a whole other level of mysterious esoteric benefit to embodiment work. And I look forward to sharing that with you too, on future episodes.