By opening to the consciousness of our bodies we can awaken our full intelligence and come home to our wholeness, bit by bit. (Shepherd, 2010, p.7)
Becoming more human, becoming more embodied is about integration of all multidimensional aspects of ourselves. Radically it is about integrating all aspects of existence. Even what we might not consider parts of us, get knitted into the fabric of a fully embodied human being: all parts of our body; head, heart, gut, limbs, all aspects of our being; cognitive, emotional, spiritual, moral, sexual, behavioural, all lines of development, all aspects of society, culture, all paradoxes of being human; embodiment and disembodiment, trust and anxiety, love and fear, and so much more. Embodiment is a process of integrating the multidimensionality of our whole being and bringing awareness into it. The breath is the thread that sews everything together, the breath is the energy flow, such a powerful life force that we are still realising and learning how to truly access its full potential for our alignment and the greater benefit of all.
And, as we have seen, the human heart is not personal: the more we fathom our own hearts, the more we find there the being of others and, beyond that, the very heart of the world itself (Ray, 2008, p.444).
When I stepped into the psychotherapy world I started realising that the emotional world has depths and levels I never knew about, but most importantly I became aware of the immense inherent intelligence of our emotional bodies. To discover the significance of emotions we cannot approach them only with our thinking mind but with our whole feeling being. It is like trying to think outside the box when thinking is the box. All the knowledge doesn’t mean much until it is embodied. By embodied I mean until we fully feel it and experience it through our every action, feeling, thought. Intellectual knowledge is like explaining to a child how a spaceship is made. She can understand it but she cannot build it. She does not have the experience, training and the means. But she can dream or intend to someday make it.
Becoming embodied means feeling everything, not controlling my experience but allowing it, reading my emotions, observing my thoughts. A shift from thinking my thoughts and observing my feelings, into observing my thoughts and feeling my feelings, letting them move me. Embodiment is the direct connection to our power – the power of our emotions, sensations, inspiration, and imagination. Rather than running away from our experience, from our predicament of an embodied being, instead owning it, honouring it. Whatever it is, it is an immensely powerful instrument.
However, the challenge is letting ourselves fall into the full experience of the body so that we can move through and become aware. Or stay aware while falling, while feeling? It is often difficult to stay aware through the uncomfortable feelings, we have got very good at shutting down our awareness and abandoning our bodies in order not to feel.
My own psychotherapy process allowed me to experience the emotional world on many levels but most importantly it also gave me an awareness of my own emotional landscapes. For me this was a new kind of awareness where I can be feeling a certain emotion but at the same time be aware of feeling it. This gave me enough distance from being completely overwhelmed by emotions to start developing an appreciation and understanding of their intelligence. Presently I understand emotions more as a trustworthy guiding system of my body, a compass, a signalling system of my deep inner truth, for when all other sensors of the body have been overlooked.
When I came to the embodied awareness of how life is perfectly designed as our own unique journey, I could let go of trying to help or teach people out of their journey. Everyone is on their own journey, and they cannot be told or shown or healed or taught how to get through it. This is because it is a journey of embodiment, of feeling it ourselves, figuring it out ourselves, helping ourselves, freeing ourselves. The whole point is in the journey.
At the same time I also began to be able to hold two opposing energies within me: holding myself or the client in discomfort, uncertainty, hurt, when things are not OK, and also holding the trust that things are OK as they are, trusting in myself and my client, our bodies, our souls, perfection of existence just as it is right now and here.
There is an emotional truth to everything; it is hidden out of sight and frequently out of awareness as well. Turning away from this truth was the high price of survival. That is why embodiment is such a vulnerable, challenging, painful work, because it touches the core of our being, of our survival and the feeling of safety to live. It is like a thorn that keeps itching and hurting, but we keep it safe from the world so it wouldn’t get moved and hurt even more. We mostly feel unsafe to be who we are because of this emotional wounding, and we are running away, covering it up and searching for something to make us feel better, to distract us. Tending to the thorn is not our desired first choice. It certainly wasn’t mine. However, I realised it was not a matter of choice. Embodiment is a process that is happening to all of us, just like breathing. Within that we have a choice of how much engagement and awareness we bring to it and how we allow it to unfold. Having the support of an embodied facilitator can be of immense help, as someone who is more embodied gives the client the possibility to be more embodied. Now I am allowing the process of embodiment into remembering more of who I am and with that I can be an embodied example for others – to remember to embody their souls back to living fully human beings.
These multidimensional embodiment sessions are usually a process of more than 8 sessions, depending on how deep you want to go.