Embodiment & Culture Making

Hi friend,

Thanks so much for taking the time to open this newsletter.

We always aim to share inspiring, soulful, and useful content with you. For the next several weeks, I’ll be sharing writings and reflections as I lead up to the start of my once-a-year Women Embodied group. If you’d like to stay on our mailing list but don’t want to hear about this upcoming offering, no problem. Just click here. 

Decades ago, I took a college class called “At Home in Your Body.”

We began the semester by pulling our uncomfortable folding chairs into a large circle. The instructors asked us to introduce ourselves by responding to this question: “How at home are you in your body?”

I was in my early 20s, a few years older than many of the 18 and 19-year-olds in my class, as I had taken a few years off school to travel to Nepal, to deepen my studies of Tibetan Buddhism, yoga, tai chi, and healing.

I believe my jaw must have been hanging open that evening as I heard the responses that emerged from those lovely young people. All around the circle, one by one, these beautiful and vibrant human beings listed the many reasons they were not and could not be at home in their body.

Their this was too big, their that was too small, they never liked their body because this, and thus they did not feel at home in themselves or in the world.

I sat there dumbstruck. I don’t remember how I answered that question. But I do remember feeling as if I was witnessing a great tragedy, like watching an oil spill in a pristine Alaskan bay, or a fire in a great forest.

What a profound waste of life-force! Of youth and energy and intelligence! Of potential for beauty-making and life-enjoying and creativity!

I still wonder who, and how, and what might those people be if their life force were not so profoundly drained by the toxic conditioning from the overculture that encouraged them to hate their bodies. It’s invisible until we see it. Then perhaps, we see it everywhere.

 We are encouraged to spend most of our time, attention, money, and energy trying to fix ourselves and become the impossible-to-arrive-at version of perfection. Lives are spent in this tragic and empty pursuit every single day.

Without this internalized self-rejection, what might you have been delighted by? What art might you have made? What books or letters might you have written? What experiences might you have dared and fully enjoyed? The conditioning from the overculture goes deep, and so do its harms. Trying to get out of it often keeps us on the treadmill of self-fixing. As Zen teacher Cheri Huber wrote, “Self-hatred uses self-improvement as self-maintenance.” Oof. Thus goes a life…  Unless we do something radically different.

When we liberate ourselves from the harmful and life-sucking conditioning so many of us have been raised with toward this amazing gift of being embodied, we begin to shift not only our own lives, but the culture as well. As a friend wrote during the pandemic, “We are all vectors of contagion. Be mindful of what you spread.” Are we silently spreading the message that we and those around us get to be at home in these precious, temporary bodies, and that this life is a miracle? Are we spreading the vibes of connection, presence, and at-homeness?  Or are we spreading “there is something wrong with me” and of course that implies “there is something wrong with you too.” That might be the shape of your eyebrows, or how you wear your pants, or… fill in the blank. The consumer overculture never stops filling in the blank.

Here is a quote I’ve long loved from Clarissa Pinkola Estès:

Taking back our body, not forsaking the joy of our natural body, not ignoring the messages, resonances, and dissonances always being transmitted by our wise body – this is important personal and culture-changing work. I hope more of us become contagious with that kind of freedom and dignity, at home in our own skin.

I wish the reclamation of inner authority, the deep knowing of one’s inner guidance, and the profound sense of being at home in oneself, not only for every young person who sat in that circle with me years ago, and not only for every woman in the circle of Women Embodied, but every person, everywhere.

I always say that we do this work not only for ourselves, but with the aspiration that our practices may ripple benefits far beyond ourselves.

Investing in deepening our intimacy and grounded sensitivity to the world of knowing in our sentient bodies and thus the world, reclaiming the wild self (not wild as in out of control, but wild as in the beauty, sanity, and lack of contrivance that we find in nature), helps create ripples of possibility in this world where the toxic patriarchy is running amok. (Perhaps you have noticed?) It’s a quiet and radical kind of activism.  The ripples that radiate from our reclamation and remembering, in our own lives, in our families and communities, and the future generations, cannot be underestimated.

They are beautiful. They are also lamps of longing we can lift to light our way on this path of reclamation.

These are capacities we specifically grow during our time together in Women Embodied. They are seeds we plant that will keep sprouting and growing possibilities over many years throughout our lives.

In Women Embodied, we approach these cultivations somatically.

This is not about the body as an object – a thing that we do things to – though many people slap the word somatic on anything having to do with the body. That’s not it. Many body-based practices are profoundly objectifying. I know – I used to teach and practice them.

Somatic practice is about returning again and again with curiosity, reverence, respect, and wonder to the intelligence that reveals itself when we are present through our living experience of aliveness, as felt from the inside.

Just as you can’t step in the same river twice, you don’t ever return to the same body twice either. We are alive, changing, evolving, aging, and we are so much more verb than noun.

The practices we engage in regularly in Women Embodied are so much more potent than having the information or the books on the shelf.

 We return again and again to drink from the life-giving waters of our unique somatic experience. And while this group is trauma-informed, it does not center our trauma. We are so much more than that.

 It is a homecoming. A rooting into our deep selves and deep connections. This kind of homecoming takes repeated practice in a world that encourages us to be ever more speedy, in our heads, distracted and distressed, or chasing happiness in all the least helpful directions. We get good at what we practice.

Join me in practicing coming home to ourselves, reclaiming our lives, and shifting the culture in a liberatory and life-giving direction.

Join us!

We start in just over 5 weeks.

Making this investment of time in your own well-being and in shifting the culture is a gift that keeps on giving.

I could say so much about the profound importance of this kind of somatic learning.

Below is a simple list of just some of the fruits of this kind of embodied cultivation:

Here are a few more seeds of inspiration from Clarissa Pinkola Estès that I’ll scatter, hoping they find fertile soil in which to grow:

“If you have yet to be called an incorrigible, defiant woman,

don’t worry, there is still time.”

“The things that women reclaim are often their own voice, their own values, their imagination, their clairvoyance, their stories, their ancient memories. If we go for the deeper, and the darker, and the less known, we will touch the bones.”

“Home is a sustained mood or sense that allows us to experience feelings not necessarily sustained in the mundane world: wonder, vision, peace, freedom from worry, freedom from demands, freedom from constant clacking. All these treasures from home are meant to be cached in the psyche for later use in the topside world.”

“The doors to the world of the Wild Self are few but precious. If you have a deep scar, that is a door, if you have an old, old story, that is a door. If you love the sky and the water so much you almost cannot bear it, that is a door. If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane life, that is a door.”

“It makes utter sense to stay healthy and strong, to be as nourishing to the body as possible. Yet I would have to agree, there is in many women a ‘hungry’ one inside. But rather than hungry to be a certain size, shape, or height, rather than hungry to fit the stereotype; women are hungry for basic regard from the culture surrounding them. The ‘hungry’ one inside is longing to be treated respectfully, to be accepted, and in the very least, to be met without stereotyping.”

Please join me for 9 months in a nourishing weekly circle where you’ll always be treated respectfully and accepted just as you are. We’ll dive into gentle movement, quiet inquiry, embodied listening, and sharing (because wow – the wisdom in the group is profound!) We’ll ask deep questions, revel in beautiful poetry, and step through many doorways to the wild self, the natural unconditioned self, as we keep slipping out of the tight constraints of hyperindividualism, judgment, competition, and the kind of self-hatred and endless striving so often encouraged by the overculture.

From my heart,

Erin