We live in a world where disembodiment is normal. We are conditioned to leave ourselves in many small ways and often don’t even realize we are doing this. In a culture that glorifies optimization at all costs, our bodies become inconvenient logistical problems to manage, fight against, or drag around on our never-ending quest for efficiency. We don’t notice we’re thirsty until we get a headache. We refuse to stop working long enough to go pee. We say yes when our body is screaming no. We push through exhaustion. Our bodies are always sending us signals, the problem is they get coded as interference. The override is so automatic it often doesn’t even register. Yet, at the same time, people wonder why they feel so anxious or can’t sleep. They don’t understand why they overthink so much and don’t know what they want. They can’t trust themselves. Or reliably relax. We don’t even see this as the chronic self-abandonment it is. We see it as responsibility, productivity, discipline, being good, or being easy to be around. We are not doing this on purpose, we do it out of habit, out of necessity, or out of conditioning. Rev angel Kyodo williams has a fascinating talk called, Belonging: From Fear to Freedom on the Path to True Community, where she shares a lot of insight around why this happens. She differentiates between true belonging and conditional belonging, which she also refers to as “membership in a club.” To maintain our membership, we learn early on that things like approval, goodness, performance, and pleasing were safer than authenticity. We learn to enter every room scanning for what must be left behind until we don’t even recognize ourselves anymore. We implicitly know what gets us approval, what makes us “good,” and what keeps us connected. And very often, maintaining our membership means losing ourselves in the process. Yet, there are also spaces where we can get glimpses of a return. Even if you spend your whole life relating to yourself one way, you can still enter a room that’s organized completely differently and feel something shift. A room where there is no urgency, no anticipation, no performance, and no cognitive load communicates that you don’t have to fight yourself there. And this allows you to experience a totally different way of being. At first, this experience will be fleeting. You’ll only be able to feel it when someone else facilitates it for you. In this intentional room, on retreat, or with a particular teacher. Sometimes we need to experience these conditions in relationship first before we can reliably recreate them for ourselves. This allows us to tap into someone else’s regulation or embodiment and borrow it for awhile. This is powerful because it gives us a glimpse of what embodiment feels like. Over time and with practice, we can begin building this for ourselves. Reclaiming our embodiment goes against the grain of culture. Culture conditions us to passively consume and mindlessly seek relief. The drive for efficiency and instant gratification can be a b***h to break. Yet, we can learn to loosen our grip, to relate differently, and to slowly create more sustainable conditions for ourselves over time. What we first borrow from someone else can gradually become our own. But that doesn’t happen automatically. Returning to ourselves requires significant fortitude. We are used to being in spaces where belonging is conditional: be agreeable, be loyal, be useful, don’t rock the boat, don’t need too much, don’t feel too much, don’t tell the truth if it makes the group uncomfortable. Belonging to ourselves is something completely different. It is the increasingly embodied experience of not having to self-abandon in order to remain connected. You can feel something without immediately overriding it. You can stay firm in what you know without needing anyone else to agree. You can stay with yourself in the presence of disappointment, conflict, shame, or fear. You no longer enter every room unconsciously scanning: What part of me has to be left outside in order to belong here? You don’t need to belong to anyone else because you belong to yourself. As rev Angel says, “Once we become committed to the ultimate practice of intimacy that is self-belonging, we become philosophers, every single one of us. And when we pull back the veil and step into that love of wisdom, we automatically become atopos, or out of place, in so many places in our lives. There’s something really seductive about that solo hero’s journey, just as it’s seductive to imagine oneself clawing your way through and then over the masses of humans bogged down in their misery, treachery, and violence, on behalf of everything from God to country to football teams, aka belonging. Swimming against the stream of society, social media, and cultural norms is a tall order and it’s commendable.” It is a tall order indeed because the body isn’t only a place of intuition, personal power, and wisdom. Being in the body also means encountering difficult feelings like grief, loneliness, shame, desire, fear, and all the truths you’ve been avoiding your whole life. That is not comfortable. And that is why leaving makes perfect sense. We were taught to leave. Leaving was how we survived. We didn’t notice we were leaving. We never built the capacity to stay, The work is not to become someone who never leaves. It’s to become someone who notices when they leave and builds the capacity to stay. It is remaining in contact with yourself even when there is friction between you and the world around you. It is feeling safe enough within yourself to be able to handle all of it. As rev Angel teaches, if you’re not in your body, there’s nowhere to stay. And you cannot stay with yourself while living outside your body. Embodiment is learning to inhabit your body and yourself more fully. When you can stay in your body, you increase your awareness of your own experience while it is happening. This allows you to lean into curiosity and to listen instead of being in a constant fight against yourself. Over time, your body becomes a source of wisdom rather than something your mind constantly overrides. Your body is sending signals, pings, constriction, yeses and nos all the time. The question is whether consciousness is receiving those signals or whether habituated override is interfering. Embodiment is what closes this gap. When the gap narrows, we return to ourselves. This continual homecoming increases sensitivity which means we can feel more and notice earlier. Our body no longer has to scream at us because we can now hear its whispers. We gain more body literacy, more emotional granularity, we have more choice, more self-trust, we understand what we are feeling in real time, we recover more quickly, and we stop asking, “Why did I just do that?” An embodied person has more capacity to stay. They have access to more information about themselves while there is still time to choose intentionally. As Rev Angel teaches, “The purpose of a body practice is to increase one’s sensitivity to your own experiences, emotions, and to learn in the process what it is that you tend to keep out, what it is that you’ve been taught to ignore or look over or bypass…. A body practice helps us not only to learn to tolerate more discomfort, but also to be able to be more and more sensitive so that we can recognize when we’re resisting our practice, when we’re resisting becoming more intimate with ourselves.” Here’s how this translates into ordinary life. Perhaps someone asks something of you and instead of automatically accommodating you pause long enough to feel a contraction. You create space and feel your body saying no. Now, you can respond without abandoning yourself. Maybe you are having a challenging conversation and something triggers you. You feel your body brace and your temperature rise. You are aware of the urge to defend yourself, but you notice it in time to pause before immediately reacting. Sometimes grief arrives. The impulse to distract or escape is strong, b… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nicolegriffin.substack.com
