How Embodiment Can Make You Feel More Alive (and 5 Ways to Do It)

“Embodiment is living within, stuff present within the internal space of the body.” ~Judith Blackstone

When I was a little boy, I would flit whenever I heard a tricky pop song on the radio. There are photos of me throwing lanugo flit moves, exuding joy and vitality. At some point, though, I lost my worthiness 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 enlightened of stuff someone with a body.

So a long and complicated relationship with my soul began. As a teenager, friends and family teased me for stuff unusually tall and gangly. As a young man struggling with my queer identity, I objectified my body; I felt red-faced of how ‘it’ strayed so far from the perceived masculine ideal. To make matters worse, one day my lungs spontaneously collapsed.

Over the undertow 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 soul as a source of unconfined emotional and physical pain.

Life presented other challenges. In time, I terminated that stuff in a soul in this world is inherently painful. I thought that in order to find peace, I had to wilt self-ruling of pain. To unzip this, my mind had to separate itself from bodily experience.

Seeking a Way Out

In my early twenties, I was once 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 throne in front of a screen, browsing the internet—there was little sense of having a body.

I moreover tried many things to minimize my exposure to pain and fear. Evading social interactions to evade the possibility of experiencing shame was a worldwide strategy of mine. I was deathly wrung of feeling difficult emotions. Stuff 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 rhadamanthine increasingly 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 shay anthropologist. Sure, I participated in the activities that society expected of me, but I unchangingly did so at a distance.

We all come into this world as typified consciousness. With our soul we wits ourselves and contact our environment: we move, communicate, relate, and create worlds. We wits the world’s colors, melodies, temperatures, pulsations, and textures. And it is through our soul that we finger joy, sadness, anger, fear, comfort, and love. Through tasting this smorgasbord of sensations, we moreover 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 then involved coming home to my body.

In a world that sometimes tries to erase or suppress our embodied, pure expression, coming home to ourselves requires valiance and a lot of support. By reclaiming our body, we can rediscover a sense of belonging in ourselves and in this world.

Five ways to uncork coming home to your body

There are many approaches that can help us come home to our soul and finger increasingly alive. If you’ve experienced deep trauma, please find a trained somatic practitioner who can work with you. Here, I’ll just share a few simple things you can try doing increasingly of to wilt a little increasingly embodied. Make sure to listen to your soul in order to discern whether these activities finger right for you.

1. Outbreathe deeply.

Proper zoetic is essential to rhadamanthine increasingly embodied.

I learned from a bodyworker that I wasn’t zoetic fully most of the time. My Zen practice taught me to outbreathe into my belly, but now, I wasn’t zoetic into my chest much.

To outbreathe increasingly fully, outbreathe in deeply, filling the space in your stomach as if you were pouring water into a jug. The air rises up to the chest as water rises up a jug. Zoetic out, the air releases from the chest and from the belly.

2. Touch the earth.

Recently, my painting teacher offered to teach me how to garden. There’s something very healing well-nigh touching the soil with my hands. When we touch the earth, we connect with our larger body, which helps us recognize our individual small body.

Today, so many of us, including myself, spend our days sitting in front of a computer. So I think it’s important to find activities where we can touch the earth. I remember the first time I walked on a waterfront with my yellowish feet, I thought to myself: “Wow! I can really finger my legs and feet… I finger so alive.”

3. Nourish with quality food.

One of the healers I worked with taught me that what we eat has enormous effects on our psychosomatic system on multiple levels. I’m not a specialist in this area, but from my experience, switching to a healthier nutrition was a game changer.

It’s not just what we eat, but how we eat, too. By expressing gratitude for what I am eating, and savoring the succulent sensations on my tongue, I gloat the wits of stuff embodied.

4. Move freely.

Through practice, I’m rhadamanthine increasingly enlightened of how I inhabit my soul based on the way I respond to my environment. I may prop myself up to proceeds respect or walk briskly to alimony up with the hustle. Giving ourselves space during our day to move increasingly freely, in an uncontrived manner, can help us discover an authenticity that seems to spritz with nature.

5. Make art.

When I reflect on the moments where I felt most alive, many of those moments involved expressing myself through art.

Whether through painting, sculpting, playing an instrument, or dancing, we engage the whole of our stuff in the artmaking process. It is not merely an intellectual exercise, but a visceral engagement of our soul with the physical world. In artmaking, we indulge our soul to express its wisdom, a wisdom that moves us by touching the eyeful that lies within.

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Learning to wilt increasingly typified is a trappy process of self-discovery. There never was any separation between mind and body—they are one. By reclaiming the space in my body, and reestablishing myself inside the temple of my soul, I’m learning to flit with life again.

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