Embodiment expands Consciousness which is our capacity to have Choice
Sensation - what makes feelings tangible
Feelings = Emotions = Energy in Motion
Interception - feeling yourself from the inside out
Proprioception - feeling your body in space
Nervous system - how sensation travels
Poly-vagal Theory- the concept that sensation travels up from the body and 80% of that information can be translated into information by the brain, 20% of information can travel down from the brain and translated into information by the body
Mind - focus, attention
Body - sensation
Awareness - observation or witnessing that results from sustained focus
Consciousness - choice and perspective that becomes available as a result of increased awareness
I often say to clients, I want to help train your brain to be in service to your body. I want to help people use their brain to focus on sensations of safety: SLOW, SOFT, WARM to become embodied, learn how to participate in their own healing, have increased access to choice and perspectives on past, present, and future circumstances.
We connect to sensations of safety by using our mind to follow and track sensations. Some practices that I find helpful in accessing sensations are breath work, yoga, yoga nidra, and sound. As we build endurance to sustain attention on sensation, we simultaneously build capacity for self-awareness. This capacity for focus also us to see and watch which develops our witness consciousness to track sensation through the entire body. This is the process of embodiment. Scientifically, we call it interception, or the ability to see and feel ourselves inside our body. In other words, it is how we come into relationship with our being. The importance of identifying and tracking sensations of safety moving through our body is that those sensations can touch places inside of us that we do not feel safe, cannot orient to, or are cut off from sensations of safety. These places inside of us are stuck in protective holding patterns or fearful states of being. The sensation of these places is often felt as the opposite of slow, soft, and warm. They are typically experienced as: cold, tight, numb, disconnected, far away, buzzy, stuck, etc.
When we rest our awareness and presence on and in the sensations of slow, soft, and warm, eventually we realize that these sensations move through and about our body. In my experience, these sensations will eventually come into contact with those spaces of tension, hardness, coldness, or even numbness. The process that I follow is to then invite that tension to be enveloped by, held by, or rest in the gentleness of the softness and warmth at a slow enough pace that it can start to unfold. It helped me to understand that these places of pain in my body were just a reflection of the places inside me that felt separated from and cut of from safety, pleasure, and ultimately love and acceptance. As the warmth touched and supported the places of tension, freeze or numbness they started unwind, melt, or become felt as freeze or coldness. I realized this magic is how the body innately knew how to heal itself, it just needed space and attention.
Following the path of sensation allows us to connect to the crystallization of how everything we have ever experienced is imprinted, stored, and held in our body.
Sensations hold the memory of emotion. Much like a red blood cell carries oxygen. Sensations carry our emotional experience of everything we have ever experienced. Even when we do not consciously remember, every experience is imprinted in our bodies and accessible again through a sustained practice of journeying in and through our body via sensation. As we use our mind to connect to sensation the information of that sensation travels through our nervous system, up along the brainstem and is then projected into our mind as memory, story, and language.
Information from the Poly-Vagal Theory has helped us to understand that when our bodies are full of stress, tension, and protective mechanisms (regardless of what is happening outside our bodies), that sensory information is traveling up to the brain and creating a projection of life as full of stress and tension. As we create more sensations of safety in the body, more felt sense of slowness, softness, and warmth, the information that we are safe and okay will travel to the brain and project a very different perspective of how we see and experience ourselves in the world.
I find working with sensation in and through the body the to be a profound catalyst of healing. Through sensations we become deeply feeling and attuned beings with a sense of mastery in how we relate and choose to be. We become narrators of our story, instead of being narrated.
Feelings create thoughts and thoughts create behavior… when we can work at the subtle level of feeling, we can understand the core of who we are and regain choice about how we want to be in the world. We so often operate solely based on what we are think, I often wonder how different our work would be if our felt experience was more consciously involved in that process. My hope in providing this work with people so they can live their life from a more embodied and conscious place. A place where we feel from the inside out and the outside in simultaneously so we have more choice moment to moment as we move through our day.
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