Words are full of aspects no dictionary can capture.

For example, words, beyond definitions or meanings, also have textures and taste. These influence the experience of the reader. The same applies to a phrase. Phrases can be brief. Reducing redundancy. But notice what I just did? I made it redundant to add rhythm and melody.

Why would I do that? It’s unnecessary.

Yes, but writing it that way felt pleasurable in my body.

It’s the same reason that you love saying “flabbergasted”.

Let’s be honest, you could say “very surprised” and call it a day.

But something about the texture of “flabbergasted” just hits your tongue in the right place. While “very surprised” tastes a bit dry and stale.

What makes a person get this isn’t a mental thing. It’s making your reading more embodied.

— Wait, what does that mean “more embodied”? —

I’ll do you one better: Let’s talk about what it is, what’s it’s useful for, and how to bring it into your life.

What Is Embodiment?

The word “embodiment” can refer to 2 different things (though they are closely related).

The first one is embodiment as a verb.

Such as when saying “that person embodies what they teach” (they walk the talk) or “they embody confidence” (you just look at them and confidence is the first thing you notice).

Meaning: The way the body acts, moves and hold itself is an expression of (embodiment of) a certai nquality.

The second one is embodiment as a quality itself.

Such as when saying “that person is deeply embodied“.

Meaning: They inhabit their body with their entire being. Their presence—both with themselves and within the room—is a somatic experience. It’s a felt presence.

“Embodiment” in this sense, is similar to “mindfulness”. But instead of the mind being the locus of awareness, it is the body.

A helpful distinction I learned from Margo Fisher was this:

“Embodiment is awareness from the body, rather than of the body.”

So, where a typical YouTube-esque body-scan meditation would tell you to “shine the light of awareness on your belly” (which you do with your mind), when practicing embodiment, the belly would be what’s shining the light instead.

When you walk into a space embodied, the environment isn’t just interpreted by your mind. You are picking up signals somatically in your heart, gut, hips, etc. And using those to orient yourself too.

While I’ve never explicitly written about embodiment, it’s the roots of a lot of my writing. Sometimes people will say “wow, that piece was full of deep thinking”, and I’ll chuckle inside because I wasn’t thinking at all. It was something I learned through the body.

It’s also at the root of Authentic Relating. In many ways, when people come to a workshop and experience feeling like they’re “dropping into a deeper connection”, what’s happening is both people sinking deeper into their body while interacting, and connecting on that level.

(This is obviously not the only aspect, but it’s at the core of it. Authentic Relating, while being a set of social skills, is to some degree an embodiment practice.)

The Loss of Bodily Intelligence

Before getting into use cases and how to start practicing embodiment, let’s take a tiny detour to mention something important:

Embodiment can feel like a strange thing to spend time on. And the reason for this is that, historically, we never had to.

It’s not that everyone was embodied at all the time (trauma, for example, can often lead to disembodiment). It’s just that the environment we lived in was more conducive to it.

The conditions of modern life, in a large part of the world, drive us towards increasing identification with the mind, and increased disconnection from the body:

• Screen-dominant life (reinforces using only the mind as the locus of awareness)
• Chronic low-grade stress (incentivizes dissociating from the body, where stress is experience)
• Sedentary knowledge work (no bodily awareness necessary + sitting limits the range of motion)

…and a lot more. Now, my point here is not to vilify the modern world. We are living in pretty awesome times, if you ask me. It’s just to mention that most people are severely disembodied. They live “from the neck up”.

And this is just a downside of our societal conditions at present.

The problem with this is that we lose ​bodily intelligence​. We experience emotional blunting, reduced interroceptive accuracy, and are more prone to make decisions from cognitignitive noise rather than ​genuine understanding​.

You see this in many ways. ​AI psychosis​ is a great example: It’s when the intelligence of the mind gets hijacked because the bodily intelligence isn’t there to calibrate it.

The fact that we cling to influencers for health advice instead of learning to track our health through our body’s own vitality is another one.

Interesting cultural observation here is that it seems to me like collectively, we do know the body wants to be integrated in the way we navigate life. But since we are unaware of it, it’s pushed into our cultural shadows:

• High emphasis on gym culture / health advice, etc.
• Generally higher emphasis on sexuality & dating in modern culture
• High emphasis on visual images of bodies (especially sexual) in advertising

These are all ways our culture intuitively tries to integrate back what we accidentally cut off. But they’re not necessarily successful.

You can do yoga or go to the gym in an embodied or disembodied way — it entirely depends on how actively you are feeling through your body. (The origins of embodiment practice, besides trauma therapy, are actually in martial arts, dancing and theater. They figured this ​distinction​ out long before wellness culture did.)

Attraction works the same way. Embodied attraction tends to be primal or spiritual. For example, how you respond to someone’s smell, behavior or energy. Mental attraction is more often based on obsession, fantasy, or how someone’s looks and personality tick the boxes of what you think you’re looking for.

And sex. You can have sex in an embodied or disembodied way. But you can’t genuinely connect through it while disembodied.

Which is why, for many people, sex is one of the main ways they accidentally stumble into embodiment. (E.g. In the past, I have often thought that I felt a need for sex, but in reality I was just feeling disembodied, and the body knew it could get my attention through arousal.) That’s one of the many reasons it’s such a focus point in the shadow of our society, but the ways we try to access it are often disembodied.

This is because, as we mentioned above, embodiment is a quality of presence you can bring to a moment. It’s not inherent in a specific activity.

What Is It Useful For?

We already went over 1 benefit: The reincorporation (I couldn’t think of a better word!) of bodily intelligence.

The impact of this is huge. Just to give a simple example: The mind looks at expiry dates of food. The body has a look and a smell, and it knows what to reject or consume. It can also track when you’re steering towards burnout vs. going the extra mile (outwardly they may look the same).

Another major benefit is increasing your sense of aliveness and pleasure. The more embodied we are, the more alive we feel. The less embodied we are, the more numb. (In fact, numbness is what disembodiment feels like when we have just enough connection to the body to perceive it.)

This is part of the premise of ​fight club​. The narrator is deeply dissociated and the fight club is literally a way to beat each other into increased embodiment and feel alive again.

(That would be a flawed approach btw: What the fighting does is temporarily produce somatic experience that is so strong they pass beyond the treshold of numbness. But they don’t reduce it.)

A third benefit is reducing mental strain and overactivity. When the mind is our only way of navigating the world, it becomes overstimulated and strains under excessive demands. It has to compensate for the other 80% of our body we are not using. And this is overwhelming. Embodiment sets the mind free, and while this leads to using it less, it leads to using it much more effectively.

A fourth one, which I can’t understate, is increased intuition, self-awareness and emotional intelligence. When you are embodied, social interactions become an entirely different thing. You know immediately who to avoid, you can feel when there’s a hidden agenda in yourself or others, you can track when there’s tension in the room that wants to be resolved. But most importantly, you don’t have to think about it.

Social skills as we know them in the mainstream are often attempts to copy this attunement through heuristics and logic, but that’s just not how we operate socially. When we interact, we impact each other emotionally, and emotions are experienced through the body. So the heart of social skills is bodily intelligence, not mental analysis. The mind is still useful for calibration, but the body is where we pick up on relevant social information.

There are also many practical and therapeutic applications, which warrant their own articles, but I can list some here:

• Increasing athletic and artistic performance
• Connection skills (most of what I teach is based on embodiment)
• Accidental mindreading (I’m not joking, once you understand the language of the body, ​you’ll realize there’s nothing to hide​)
• Coaching (Mark Walsh has a tremendous body of work—pun intended—on how to use embodiment for personal growth)
• Leadership and decision-making (many succesful CEOs, for accimple, honey their gut feeling without discarding data)
• Trauma recovery (there’s a wide range of modalities that successfully use embodiment to heal trauma, but be careful to pick the right practitioner, trauma isn’t a thing to let just anyone toy with—and this is a common niche for influencer quackery)

Risks of Embodiment Practice & How to Mitigate Them

Before we get into how to start practicing embodiment, here are some things to watch out for:

Overwhelm

Since practicing embodiment increase bodily awareness, it also increases the amount of sensations we become aware of.

Disembodiment is often a direct response to emotional or sensual overwhelm. This is one of the main reasons why embodiment can be a useful tool for trauma healing.

But feeling too much too fast (especially when working with stored trauma) can have the opposite effect, your body doubling down on feeling less.

So when practicing embodiment, go slow. Work in small doses so that the nervous system can get used to the increased sensual awareness (gradually increasing your ​window of resilience​).

As with mindfulness, better to practice 5 minutes a day and work your way up, then start with a 3 hour practice round.

Physical Bypassing

In psychology, there’s a concept called “​spiritual bypassing​“, which is when people use spiritual ideas as a way to stunt their own psychological development and still feell good.

(For example: Using the idea of “ego-transcendence” to avoid having to do the work of building a strong ego with healthy self-esteem.)

There’s a risk like that with embodiment as well, so I’ll call it physical bypassing:

Embodiment practice can induce intensely pleasurable states. While you can’t use it to run from your feelings, you could use it to run from your cognitive/psychological challenges.

And I suspect that this is highly common, even among people who teach embodiment.

For example: I regularly see embodiment practicitiner say things like “ignore your brain, the body knows what’s good for you” or positioning “headiness” as a quality opposite to embodiment.

But this is no different then a person overintellectualizing everything to avoid their feelings.

Because here’s the thing: The brain and the head are part of the body. If we don’t include them in it, we are using our embodiment practice as bypassing.

(A great way to compare how common this dissociation is, is how people tend to talk about “nature” as something “out there”, while they themselves are nature. They’ll point to a bird’s nest as “nature” but will point to their own human’s nest as “not nature” or even “opposite to nature”. Even though human’s nests it’s made out of stones, clay, sand(glass), trees(wood) and built by a bunch of animals (us).)

The Performance Trap

Trying to do embodiment “correctly” rather than as an awareness practice can build an entirely different skill accidentally: Posturing.

Trying to control our body language, our degree of relaxation, etc. This can feel like embodiment. We might increase our heaviness to feel like we’re “sinking into the body”. But all we did was lean.

The main area this can show up is when we use embodiment for coaching: Trying to embody certain qualities to shift our personality. This is an incredible use of embodiment and I love working with it. But the distinction between personal growth and performance is a very small line.

This is the part of embodiment that draws on acting, martial arts and dancing practices. The distinction here here is that we tune into a feeling and allow it to move us, rather than move ourselves to mimic the feeling.

Controlling your body language to make a certain impression usually makes the impression that you’re inauthentic & not at ease with yourself.

What to do instead: Get in touch with what you want to show & deeply feel it. Let the feeling move your body into its expression.

Ways You Can Start Practicing the Basics

We’ve talked about the benefits and pitfalls, now it’s time for the good stuff!

A list of ways you can start bringing more embodiment in your life today.

Incorporating Embodiment Into Mindfulness

If you already have some form of meditation practice that is mind-focused. You can use this as a bridge to practice embodiment.

I highly recommend​ Tara Brach’s free guided meditations​ for this. She does an excellent job of speaking the kind of phrases that add elements of embodiment without taking away the mental aspect.

Feeling Gravity

While reading this, feel your weight dropping into whatever you’re sitting, standing or laying on. Don’t think about it. Just try to feel how gravity naturally pulls on you.

Waking Up Pleasure In Your Hands

Take an object, set a timer for 3 minutes, close your eyes and keep touching it.

Rotate it. Feel the texture, shape, temperature.

Use your hands to explore it.

Tune in to the feeling of pleasure in your fingers. How your fingers are receiving pleasure by interacting with it.

You can try the same with a partner. Touch, but instead of touching to give, agree to touch each other as an exploration of receiving pleasure through your own hands.

(I discovered this practice through the work of Betty Martin, who created the ​Wheel of Consent​).

Tuning Into the Physical Processes of Life

Take a pause from reading this.

Feel your heart beat, feel your lungs breathe, feel your digestive system do whatever it does to the stuff you eat

Focus on it. Become aware of the life inside your body as an ongoing sensation, rather than an idea.

With time, you can increase the depth of this practice.

Can you feel your blood move? Can you feel your cells interact with each other?

It may sound foreign, but it’s possible to feel these things.

Ground, Center, Open

You can do this throughout the day wherever you find yourself:

1) Feel your feet on the floor (ground)

2) Find your physical center of gravity in your belly (center)

3) ​Soften your gaze and let your awareness expand outward​ (open).

Notice how it changes how you orient yourself towards people and the world.

Some people add a fourth step, called “bubble”: Becoming aware of your personal space and imagining a bubble around it, then allowing that bubble to be yours.

I find bubble a really useful concept, but it’s best taught through in a workshop, because it’s easy to use the mind instead of the body for. this.

Feeling a Space Through Your Skin

Close your eyes and try to navigate the space you’re in by outwardly feeling with your skin.

How does this room or place feel as a sensation, rather than a visual thing?

Pendulation

Pick a sensation or feeling that feels painful for you. Then pick another sensation or feeling that feels neutral. Focus back. and forth between these 2 parts of your body to​ build capacity for feeling​ more of the parts of your experience you avoid by disembodying.

Ways to Integrate the Basics In Daily Life

Besides the “ground, center open” cue: Here are some skills you can develop over time by by playing with them:

Witnessing Through the Felt Sense

We often experience moments conceptually:

“I’m sitting at my desk right now, writing an article about embodiment.”

Embodiment allows you to experience moments through the pre-verbal, whole-body sense, distinct from any mental labels or stories you have about them.

For example:

Instead of thinking “I feel fear”, you would feel the unique subtle feeling you have in this moment that categorizes it.

Instead of thinking “I’m hanging out with Pep”, you would experience the current expression of person in front of you which you categorize as Pep.

(I believe the term “felt sense” originated in the work of Eugene Gendlin).

Staying at the Level of Sensation

If in a conversation, a feeling arises, you can play with expressing the feeling the way you experience it through the senses instead of the story you have above it.

For example:

“Hearing you say that, I can feel my chest opening and belly relaxing.” instead of “That feels nice to hear.”

This may seem like an odd thing to do, until you experience the powerful shifts this can create in an otherwise superficial interaction.

Just don’t make this your. default mode of communication, or you’ll be in physical bypassing territory.

(I learned about this from Circling, where it is one of the core principles.)

Tracking

Tracking is something we practice a lot in the Connection Dojo:

Following a sensation or experience as it change, moment to moment, and staying curious about its evolution instead of thinking we understand it already.

For example:

Instead of saying “I feel sad today”, you become aware of the feeling you’d normally label as such, and follow how it changes shape throughout the day. Which at many points in time, may not even resemble sadness at all.

This is similar to you’d follow a breath cycle in meditation and notice it changes shape throughout. How by the time you exhale, it’s something completely different from the inhale even though it was 1 movement.

This is particularly useful in social settings. Social dynamics are constantly evolving. And our mind loves to label what’s happening. Learning to replace this with embodied tracking will genuinely change your life.

(I learned tracking from ART International, particularly during their L4 facilitator course.)

Moving with Internal Attention & Intention

When doing anything physical (walking, running, working out, dancing), unhook your mental awareness from that process (examples of mental awareness are the mind analyzing your form, or deciding your next move).

Try doing the same things from your bodily awareness instead: Allowing your body to track your posture, allowing your body to intiate your movements, using the senses (sight, sound physical contact) to navigate the space around you.

This might feel clunky initially, as the mind can experience it as a loss of control. I find dancing a very useful place to practice it. Because you get immediate feedback on when you use the mind vs. the body.

My wish for this primer is that it becomes a resource that can be referenced for many weeks. Neither as a “full comprehensive guide”, nor as a 5 paragraph definition that only conveys the concept of embodiment through the mind, but something to send to people to say: “Here, if you read this, you can deep your toes into the water of embodiment and get a first taste of how it might help you.”

To end where we began with this article: Writing is, in a sense, a limited medium for this. Embodiment is best learned through experience. And those who can easily access embodied experiences through words probably don’t need this guide.

So if, after reading this, you do feel like you want to bring more of this in your life, just reach out to me and tell me what it sparked. Then I’ll match you with whatever guidance I sense would serve you best.

Much love,

Pep

(Featured image by Athena Sandrini)