How embodiment can make you feel more alive
Photo by Quan Nguyen on Unsplash
“Embodiment is living within, being present within the internal space of the body.” ~Judith Blackstone
When I was a little boy, I would dance whenever I heard a catchy pop song on the radio. There are photos of me throwing down dance moves, exuding joy and vitality. At some point, though, I lost my ability to dance.
If I were to guess what happened, I would say that I stopped dancing when I became self-conscious. I was no longer just being; suddenly, I became aware of being someone with a body.
So a long and complicated relationship with my body began. As a teenager, friends and family teased me for being unusually tall and gangly. As a young man struggling with my queer identity, I objectified my body; I felt ashamed of how ‘it’ strayed so far from the perceived masculine ideal. To make matters worse, one day my lungs spontaneously collapsed.
Over the course of two years or so, I was in and out of hospitals as doctors struggled to fix my leaky lungs. Undergoing multiple painful surgical procedures, I experienced my body as a source of great emotional and physical pain.
Life presented other challenges. In time, I concluded that being in a body in this world is inherently painful. I thought that in order to find peace, I had to become free of pain. To achieve this, my mind had to separate itself from bodily experience.
Seeking a Way Out
In my early twenties, I was already weary of life. Feeling alienated, I retreated into my inner world of ideas and concepts where I could indulge in fantasy and philosophy through reading. Most of the time, I was just a head in front of a screen, browsing the internet—there was little sense of having a body.
I also tried many things to minimize my exposure to pain and fear. Evading social interactions to evade the possibility of experiencing shame was a common strategy of mine. I was deathly afraid of feeling difficult emotions. Being a highly sensitive person, powerful emotions like shame would shut me down, leaving me incapacitated.
Later, I embarked on a spiritual journey and became drawn to teachings that promised an end to suffering. I poured myself into meditation and became somewhat relieved by a growing sense of detachment. I thought it was a mark of progress, but actually, I was becoming more apathetic. Increasingly, I had difficulty engaging with life and other people.
Recovering Authenticity and Aliveness
Living inside my head, I became an observer of life—like an armchair anthropologist. Sure, I participated in the activities that society expected of me, but I always did so at a distance.
We all come into this world as embodied consciousness. With our body we experience ourselves and contact our environment: we move, communicate, relate, and create worlds. We experience the world’s colors, melodies, temperatures, pulsations, and textures. And it is through our body that we feel joy, sadness, anger, fear, comfort, and love. Through tasting this smorgasbord of sensations, we also discover and bring out our unique expression into the world.
Life with limited sensation and feeling is like experiencing the world in one-dimension only. So, the work I had to do to find myself again involved coming home to my body.
In a world that sometimes tries to erase or suppress our embodied, authentic expression, coming home to ourselves requires courage and a lot of support. By reclaiming our body, we can rediscover a sense of belonging in ourselves and in this world.