The body is our general medium for having a world ~ Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Everyone’s relationship with their own body is unique. We may experience the body as something we must manage, negotiate with, or contend with.  For others, it can feel like we are deeply in tune with our wants and needs, or we may feel a sense that “I” am the place from which all experiences are born and/or received. There is no objectively right or wrong way to experience our own bodies, which is sort of the point.

Embodiment offers us a tool to accurately attune to our own needs physiologically and psychologically. Physiologically, our bodies are engineered toward homeostasis, a process of regulation and balance in various variables such as temperature, blood pressure, blood sugar levels, and more. Your body achieves homeostasis through monitoring changes in internal conditions, attending to feedback, and responding to restore balance. Our bodies already know they must pay attention to the feedback mechanisms in our internal systems.

Creating space to attend to your body’s messages (embodiment) can offer a way toward psychological homeostasis also. When we start paying attention to the messages our bodies send us, we can begin the work of engaging with underlying issues, instead of the symptoms or masks they wear. For example, when your body sends you a message of fear, recognising that this is an appropriate and acceptable thing to feel is important. The work that follows is not to dispel or manage the fear, not to numb it or avoid it, but to learn how to be in relationship with it. This is the work of nonattachment. That is, noticing and believing the message your own body gives you and learning how to exist with it. Taking the next breath, homing in on where the message is coming from, holding it, maybe even placing a hand on it, or sending a deep breath toward it, creates a way to be present with what is, without having to dissociate or check out.

Learning how to be with what is creates trust between our minds and bodies. When you can start to teach your body that you will listen to what it has to tell you, what feels right or wrong, or what feels like a yes or a no, you may start to notice how much it has to say. No one can possibly know you as well as you do, and so when we dissociate, numb, or ignore, we take the wisdom of our bodies, the source with the most information about us, and quiet it. While dissociation can be a protective mechanism, keeping us safe at the worst of times, when the crisis has passed, maintaining dissociation involves existing anywhere but now, and so we cannot ever fully experience anything, and we can end up missing our own lives.

Mindfully occupying your own body can foster awareness that we all exist inside our bodies in the same way, and this is one of the ways we can learn to appreciate how deeply interconnected we are to one another, and to the universe itself.