Love Note #16: What the Heck Is Embodiment Really?
Dear Hearts,
Let's talk about embodiment—a word that's become spiritual marketplace confetti, tossed around so casually these days that its profound meaning has become lost in a shiny fog of misconception. We hear it in yoga studios, therapy offices, and meditation centers: "Just get into your body!" As if embodied presence can be willed or crossed off a spiritual to-do list.
But real embodiment? That's something else entirely.
I'm not talking about a technique to feel better or a way to manage anxiety. I'm talking about the most radical invitation of all: to allow the light of your true nature to penetrate every cell, every breath, every awkward and messy moment of your human experience. To allow unconscious aspects to integrate and young places to grow strong and clear in the light of consciousness. To bring heaven all the way down to earth in the form of a lit, mature and surrendered human tool of the Holy. This is the core of my teaching.
Let’s not stop at illuminating spiritual experiences on the meditation cushion, in the retreat, during peak moments. Let’s bring that light all the way down into our flesh, into our voice, our touch, our actions—until everything we do is pervaded with tenderness, harmony, clarity, and power. Let’s become so thoroughly here, in every cell, that we're simultaneously softened and woven back into the unified energetic field while being completely present in our humanness.
When we’re born, our attention is open to all that is, which includes sensation—the body’s experience. We experience presence and the flow of sensation as one whole, nothing left out. Part of our dominant cultural conditioning is to slowly sever that connection between presence and the inclusion of sensation in an effort to reduce overwhelm, numb pain, keep functioning, speed up to keep up. We are then conditioned to fuse our attention onto concepts, trading in a full-bodied, full-hearted experience of living for a semi-cut-off overlay of conceptual pseudo-reality.
When we are focused on mentation, leaving the body unattended, we zoom over our moments, days and lives like fighter jets, high above the terrain of the moment, lost in the conceptual realm of our minds. We've mistaken thinking about life for living it, forgetting we are life itself and life is only right here. True embodiment is about slowing down to the pace of being, allowing our noticing to come off of our mentation to include both presence and the dynamic and alive flow of sensation.
This is why the use of my embodiment tool, the Holy Work, isn't just another self-improvement program. It's about dropping into the warp and weft of the living moment, opening to presence, opening to our experience, so that we can actually be all here for our lives and meet what’s been shadowed by our conditioning. Here we meet the sounds, smells, and feels of actual life. Here we meet, get to know and bring to consciousness to the places where we go numb, where we react, where we find ourselves acting out of energies we aren’t proud of.
As well, here is the solid ground of being, the smell of earth, the breeze on our faces, the light in the eyes of those we love. Here’s the ripe peach, the tiny bug, the child asking for our company. Here we can return to ourselves, our full selves, from presence to the expression of our depths and the qualities of the creaturely body, bringing light into every dark corner, every mundane interaction, every challenging relationship, until our whole life becomes a living expression of presence.
This doesn't happen through bypassing, willing or forcing—it happens through a patient, persistent willingness to meet everything exactly as it is, moment by moment, to partner with our body's natural intelligence, to let love move through us more and more fully, and to be present for it. It takes practice. While simple, it’s not always easy. But we CAN return to being all here, taking up residence in this vibrating alive moment where life is happening.
The world needs your light–not some polished, perfect version of you–but the raw, real, radiant being that you are, fully incarnated in your human form.
Happily here with you,
Jeannie
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