Why Does Embodiment Matter?

In under a month, I’ll be beginning a 9-month journey with some wonderful beings in Women Embodied. I still have room for a handful more folks to join me. I believe this work is deeply important and needed in the world as well as in our personal lives and I’d like to share a bit more about it. My hope is that whether or not you’re drawn to join this class, you might find some soul-shine insight and inspiration that nourishes your life.

We were not meant to live on the superficial skin of our days, but rather to be nourished by the deep well of richly embodied lives. As my friend Francis Weller often says, “Your soul came here for full participation!” Full participation is impossible without full embodiment.

When we live disembodied lives, we miss the richness of intimacy with this one precious life. We miss beautiful layers of our human inheritance: Our wonder muscles atrophy as we have only thread-bare connection with our underground intuitions, our emergent dreams, and our vivid imaginations, our sensory aliveness, our connection with the vast, shimmering moment. Disembodied living, spent chasing satisfactions in the most unsatisfying superficial streams of what is sold to us as “success,” full of busyness, and the never-ending pursuit of material gain that is consuming our planet,

we miss out on a vivid and nourishing connection with circling hawks, quiet trees, the wisdom in our soft-animal bodies, and a felt belonging to the soul of the world.

That vague sense of something missing, or that feeling of there being a veil between us and our lives, can cause us to keep seeking either endless distractions or the never-ending treadmill of self-improvement. Embodiment practices invite us to drop the striving and come home. To be home, to have fully arrived in this body, in this moment, in this place, is what Thich Nhat Hanh called the cream of his lifetime of Zen practice.

As the Buddha famously said, the thinking mind makes a great servant and a terrible master. Many of us who are so identified with our thoughts can’t even imagine something else is possible. If thinking and the surface pursuits we’re encouraged to chase are not the master of our lives, what else could be? Your heart’s wisdom? Your deepest intentions? Your soul’s guidance? Your fully embodied presence woven with the knowing deep in your bones?

Living without practiced access to the intelligence in our gut, our heart, our skin and bones, our felt senses, all of which connect us with the intelligence of the living Earth, including ancestors, future ones, and our more-than-human kin – when that is not right here on tap because we’ve not practiced cultivating this skill, it can leave our lives so tragically diminished. It also diminishes the culture and possibilites for a wiser future. To quote John O’Donohue, So much of what troubles and disturbs you is happening on a surface you take for ground. Why not root ourselves in the actual ground?

We were conditioned by the overculture and by most of our education to be exactly this way.

We’re trained to be headist thinkers living hurried drive-by lives fraught with anxiety and endless seeking outside ourselves for some kind of peace and satisfaction. No wonder we struggle.

It’s a funny thing to talk about embodiment. It’s nothing new – not the latest trendy thing. It’s fresh and ancient and already present.

 Why might you want to commit to spending time bringing this innate embodied intelligence forth?

Slowing down to practice become more embodied is such a worthy investment. I can’t think of any facet of life that is not improved by nurturing this intelligence and presence.

I often hear how much these practices help people to feel better in their day to day lives. How they inhabit their moments with more presence, how rich their days become, and how they befriend themselves and can welcome their many parts and even contradictions. I hear how it helps therapists and healers be more skillful with their clients, helps parents be more attuned to their kids of whatever ages, helps people become more present and connected in their relationships of all kinds, helps artists feel more free and creative, helps movement teachers become less objectifying of the body and more sensitive and skilled. I hear how people kindle their courage, and to riff on something John O’Donohue wrote, to do at last what they came here for and waste their heart on fear no more.

The fruits that come of this embodied cultivation are abundant and nourishing and I wish them for everyone.

Women Embodied is an experiential practice-based class more than an informational class. Why?  Because we get good at what we practice. In my class, we practice embodied homecoming in stillness through meditation. We practice embodied homecoming in movement through gentle and potent feldy lessons, qi gong, and more. We practice integrated embodied presence in relationship to our inner lives and in conversation with each other.

We get good at what we practice.

I’ve been following this thread of embodied learning and teaching for 30 years. I’m bringing the best of what I’ve found to be helpful for me and for the thousands of people I’ve worked with – all woven into this 9-month practice and learning/unlearning journey.

Knowing the information doesn’t help so much. Having a chance to keep immersing ourselves in experiential practice DOES.

It’s why I still practice meditation daily even after 30 years. It’s why I’m still immersing myself deeply in somatic practices – Feldenkrais, Qi Gong, Body Mind Centering, Embodied Inquiry, restorative yoga and more. Even though I already know this stuff inside and out, I still need to practice. The freshness of practice is what I  love to hold space for. The world is always changing, our bodies and inner lives are always changing, so the practice is always fresh. Practice is what brings this to life, again and again, right in the midst of our busy lives where it’s all too easy to live distracted.

I invite you to join me in entering the stream of our embodied life with expert and kind guidance. Women Embodied offers us a weekly drumbeat of practice which fortifies our lives in ways that are profound. Practicing embodied presence through multiple channels can lead you to the river under the river of your truest life.

This is not self improvement. It is homecoming. Homecoming requires practice in a world that encourages us to be ever more speedy, ever more lost in our heads and on our screens, ever more distracted and distressed, or chasing happiness in so many unhelpful directions.

What a gift it is to have a structure to support you to practice intentionally.

This work helps us personally, helps shift the collective, and helps us communally – to build healing relationships between ourselves and with our beautiful Earth. I hope you’ll consider joining me.

Whether you are experienced or brand new to this realm, whether you are fit or fat or flexible or stiff, young or old, feeling vibrant or exhausted or in pain or delighted or frustrated, if your inner divining rod is zinging as you read about this, I hope you’ll join me and a wonderful group of people for this year’s practice journey. You are warmly welcome.

As always, thanks for making the world a more kind and embodied place. I’m so grateful to be connected. Thanks for reading.

From my heart,

Erin