04 Deep Embodiment + The Absence of Mastery

So far, we’ve been weaving together the threads of science, psychology, social context, contemplative practice, emotional balance, and the body. We’ve looked at what interoception is, why it’s so important, and how it relates to what and how we think.

Yet the true warp and weft of embodiment may be the hardest part to pinpoint and to live into: how, exactly, do we do it? This column explores what it means to practice embodiment in real-life situations. Putting words to the deep experience of embodiment is a little like trying to hold a cloud in our arms; it can feel unsubstantial and hard to communicate.

Modern western culture levies so much pressure on us to live in our heads—to come from our intellect. Yet as we’ve seen, embodiment often occurs below the reach of conceptual insight and verbal processing. This isn’t to say that we can never layer conceptual insight onto an embodied experience, or that it’s not helpful to do so. But if we approach bodily processes primarily through the lens of conceptual thought, it’s hard to get close to its essence. We miss a major piece. We miss the body as an organ of perception—and as the subject, not merely the object, of experience.

In the mid-1960’s, my parents lived on a reservation in upstate New York while my father was making a documentary about the U.S. government’s displacement of the First Nations people who lived there. As part of his work, Dad wanted to chronicle the seamless connection between people, land, and community. He decided to photograph the deer who inhabited the Alleghany River area. He would lie for hours, belly to the earth, on the banks of the river. He did this day after day: curious, patient, a little enraptured at each encounter. Over time, the observer in him began to disappear, as though he were a participant—part of the herd. The footage is astounding; it has a visceral quality, an immediacy, which draws the observer into the center of the gathering.

I’ve thought of my Dad’s work, and the way he worked, throughout the years in light of my own relationship with my body, others’ bodies, and embodied experience as a whole.

Body is Nature. At one time, our ancestors viewed Nature as indivisible from who we are. The same was true, I think, of the body.

Our bodies are now a kind of uncharted wilderness. To our conscious minds, the sensations, emotions, and experiences that inhabit this wilderness differ from the conscious mind and can feel raw, unfiltered. Foreign, even, and therefore other.

My Dad’s approach to the deer that lived alongside the river feels instructive to me, both beautiful and deeply relational. It offers a kind of signpost on the quest to draw closer to the inner world of the body. Let’s look at how this applies to our experience with our own bodies, our interactions with others, and any deep exploration of social justice and equity.

Embodiment As a Personal Practice

Embodiment circles sometimes equate challenging sensations and experiences with the ones that carry trauma, discomfort, or challenge of some kind. But positive sensations and emotions—joy, excitement, deep love, personal agency, sexual attraction and orgasm, the intenseness of being alive, even awe—can also be hard to inhabit fully and give deeper expression. This is true particularly when they carry a negative historical, familial, or social overlay. Put another way, strong sensations of any kind can challenge us. So how do we approach them?

The Approach + the Self-to-Body Relationship

Tempting though it may be, charging headfirst (literally through cognition!) into the vulnerable spaces within us to gain insight into what resides there seldom works well; it often carries the energy of capturing or extracting knowledge. If we approach in this way, the very essence of what we pursue often simply retreats further inward. In my experience, it’s nourishing to respect the defenses erected to protect our direct experience. The alchemy often resides in waiting patiently, lying on the riverbank, and being with the experience of approach itself.

This quality of approach feels inherently relational to me. We go in as close as we comfortably can, and remain present with what we’re sensing without trying to conceptualize it (at least not in the moment, and maybe not at all). We approach gently, regularly, the way we might do with a wild herd of deer or a skittish child. We do so even when we’re not “producing” anything or getting results, and when it might seem like there’s no payoff for doing so, or when we have a multitude of other things we could be doing instead. We can go as close as we can go safely and comfortably. We can stay as long as we can without pushing. And we can surrender just a little to the body’s inherent rhythm and wisdom in revealing experience in its own time. This helps establish the body not as object, but as the subject of experience. It helps us develop a rich and robust self-to-body relationship.

Feel free to explore these anchors for inquiry that help develop relationality and approach (and also add your own):

• What’s the tone, or felt sense, of the approach I’m making to my embodied experience?

• Does my approach feel patient?

• Is it curious, perhaps even kind?

• Am I willing to lie for hours on the borderlands, waiting, even when it seems as though nothing is happening?

In a previous column, I referenced the work of my mentor and friend Sebene Selassie, including her emphasis that we’re not thinking our own thoughts; we’re thinking our culture’s thoughts.

We can also inquire, When is my self-to-body relationship infused with the culture’s thoughts, attitudes, or judgments? Often, this occurs when our self-to-body relationship is overpowered by thoughts about our size, shape, weight, or level of conditioning. Or when we buy into the notion of the body as just a vessel that we exist in, or a vehicle that ferries us from one place to the next. When these occur (and they will, because we live amid culture and not apart from it), there’s no need to refute the thought. We can simply renew our approach to sensory experience, and draw closer to that.

And a quick note here: When we enter the realm of the body as the subject of experience, we encounter numerous false binaries imposed by the culture—for example, that we either need to improve ourselves, or need not to. Or that we should be either surrendering to sensations and emotions entirely, or learning to regulate them. These are false binaries. Embodiment is a both/and: There’s no need for improvement, but we also practice to create change. We practice to surrender to sensations and emotions, but also to better regulate them. There are myriad false binaries. What other ones can you identify?

What If You Teach Embodiment?

First things first: It’s Never About Mastery. (Yep, another binary, as though we could actually “master” embodiment.)

Regularly in my Masterclasses and other teachings, a colleague—often a teacher or yoga therapist—will ask about the tension between their own embodiment practice and leading others through that practice. The question goes something like this:

What if I’m a yoga teacher [or therapist, bodyworker, embodiment guide] whose work aims to bring people deeper into their bodies, but find myself withdrawing from difficult experience in my own practice?

I think these questions might be getting at something like, Does encountering my own resistance—my fear, grief, dissociation—disqualify me from offering embodiment to others?

The answer is no: Encountering resistance does not disqualify us. It simply makes us human. And it offers a blessing: A genuine window into how and why embodiment is so difficult. This, in turn, can give our instructions and our work with others an authenticity and relationality that parallels the self-to-body relationship we want to cultivate.

Imagine that we have two selves: There’s a self that teaches, which we might nickname the “competent self.” And there’s a self that experiences the world, which we can call the “vulnerable self.”

On a concrete level, let me acknowledge: Of course we don’t want to teach from a place of incompetence. But we don’t want to offer embodiment from a platform of competence, either.

Competence, incompetence; there is no difference. In the realm of embodiment, neither exists. The binary is a false one that can restrict us from being of service.

It’s part of our shared humanity to have grief. Anger. Fear. To have difficult layers of personal and social experience.

My professional experience is that the true gift, the what we offer others, lies not the smoothness of our language, the “goodness” of our practice, or even the fluency with which we navigate difficult situations. Rather, our humanity and vulnerability are the medicine.

In my opinion, people want someone who is doing the work of lying on the riverbank, who understands the importance of the approach. Who is patient and curious with themselves and others. Who—and this I think is the key—understands the difficulty of the terrain (where we get stuck, where we come undone, what feels difficult, and how we get back on the path). Who knows this so well from experience that they can translate the journey to others in a way, and through a language, that is itself a therapeutic container. You feel me?

Embodiment as a Relationship SOS

My Dad had a phrase he dusted off every so often, usually after one of us encountered a terrible driver on the roads. “There’s a person in the cemetery,” he’d tell us, “whose tombstone reads, This one had the right of way.” The phrase seems to refer to bad driving, and to the notion that adhering to being “right” without yielding to other drivers can be unproductive. (Can, in extreme situations, kill you.) But it’s a great metaphor to describe the futility of being “right” in relationships.

I confess: I was born with the brain of a lawyer and can make an airtight case for my own rightness in most situations. So Dad’s phrase is a nourishing motto for me. But as many of you also know, being right, or even being intelligent, is not a valuable relationship skill. In fact, it rarely helps deepen intimacy. And we can end up wielding rightness, intelligence, and integrity like weapons.

In the landscape of relationships, interoceptive awareness can help us sidestep the smarmy conceptual insight we sometimes want to offer (or, um, wield against) others.

Interoception helps us to be present with the intense sensations and emotions that occur within us during conflict. It also enables us to be more in tune with the intense sensations and emotions of the other person. Over time, we sense that they are activated, too, and that helps us approach our own direct experience with more self-compassion and to approach their experience with more compassion. It offers perspective over time. And less reactivity.

Here’s what that can look like in action.

A year or so ago, a close friend and I had an argument. I relayed some thirdhand feedback on his new novel, certain that it would be well-received. But I’d miscalculated.

Things escalated quickly, to the point where neither of us could feel the other and emotional safety was not guaranteed. (I knew I was right, of course—I mean, that was obvious. My mind helpfully began to run through all the ways that I was right and he was wrong.)

While my friend was speaking and my mind was occupied with building a conviction, I did a quick Embodied Check-In (see the exercise at the close of this column). This helped me register my body’s alarm response: my ears buzzed, heat seared my throat, and adrenaline jolted through my abdomen.

I felt an overwhelming desire to engage in mental sparring, to prove that I was right. Instead, I breathed slowly through my nose. I revisited the sensations of alarm in my ears, throat, and stomach; in moments, I began to feel grounded in these sensations, even though they weren’t pleasant. I did it again; even better. For a few additional rounds of breath, I focused on the way my abdomen changed shape with my breath, how it felt heavier on the inhale and lighter on the exhale.

To my surprise, grounding in my own body’s sensations not only helped me ground into my own experience; it helped me sense what was happening in my friend’s body, another benefit of interoception. To my surprise, I was able to note his agitation. It didn’t feel like the “signature” of domination, or an unwillingness to receive feedback, as my mind had already judged. His reaction felt instead like a full-on fight-or-flight response. Realizing this, I felt an answering sense of bodily empathy. We opted to take space for reflection and hung up the phone soon afterward.

Before we talked again, I encountered the strong pull of righteous indignation, the urge to justify my position. (That’s the mind, doing its thing again.) And yet, this didn’t erase the strong memory of my embodied experience. The two existed together side by side.

When we spoke again, I sidestepped the expert psychological analysis that would have re-ignited the conflict. I spoke about what I’d sensed. He responded in kind. We created a more generative space, a groundwork for future engagement.

Social Justice, Equity, and Privilege

The ability to approach the wilderness of our sensory experience in difficult conversations with significant others in our small community has an “afterlife.” It helps us expand resilience in difficult conversations in the larger community.

In my efforts to incorporate social inclusivity and equity into embodiment work, I receive a range of reactions from people with privilege. The two most common are the question “Does everything have to be about social justice?” and messages that begin, “I’m all about scholarships for BIPOC, but…”

These reactions are carriers for defensiveness. They also indicate that even after the racial reckoning of 2020, the person making the inquiry has not yet undertaken any anti-racism education. They’re also microcosms of the reactions that people with privilege often have to hearing about social inequity, cultural appropriation, racism, or many other issues that infuse the world of yoga, mindfulness, and embodiment. (I recommend the work of Resmaa Menakem and Prentis Hemphill, among others.)

So what’s the deeper embodied experience underlying these reactions? Often, what lies beneath them is shame, a feeling we’ve trained all our lives to avoid. (So much so that we hear the U.S. proponents of book banning and teaching our history often say that they don’t want their children to encounter any information that could make them “feel bad about who they are.” And yet, the experience of shame is universal. And burying it deeper down can limit us in myriad ways, as shame researcher Brene Brown has illuminated.

So how can we learn how to tolerate difficult internal experiences so we can live from a place of vulnerability, wholeness, and social intelligence?

First, it's not necessary to get to the why, to find conceptual insight about our direct experience. And we don’t have to plan what to do about it. We can simply approach, lie on the banks of the river of our sensory landscape, and learn how to be with it more deeply.

To be clear, this is the beginning, not the completion, of any social justice work we do. It’s a worthy foundation to build upon in developing social competence and, more importantly, deeper relationships.

Practice: The Embodied Check-In

One of my favorite methods for approach and patience—what in Buddhist teachings is sometimes referred to as abiding with—is the embodied check-in. We can check in several times a day. Note: You need not hit all the nodes of experience below; choose the ones that feel most salient to you in the moment.

On a practical level, you can try the Embodied Check-In HERE. It’s a tiny, two-to-five-minute tool. But it packs a big impact. When you practice it regularly over time, it becomes much more accessible in difficult moments, where something arising from within, or catalyzed from an outside source, feels challenging.

Begin by choosing a comfortable position. You can do this standing, sitting, or lying down.

Add support. If standing, that might mean leaning against the wall; if seated, some height under your sitting bones; if lying down, perhaps a bolster under your knees.

Begin this gentle inquiry:

• Is my awareness rooted in my body in this moment? If so, to what degree?

• What is my level of physical energy or resources right now? Do I have any reserves?

• What’s my emotional tone?

• What’s my level of nervous system overdrive?

• What is the depth and rate of my breath?

• What is the theme of my mental narrative?

• What do I notice in my abdomen?

• Can I feel sensations in my body? (warmth, fullness, etc.)

• Do I feel a sense of agency or ability to initiate in my body?

• Do my muscles/connective tissue feel sore or dehydrated?

• What is the quality of my self-to-self (and self-to-body) relationship?

• What is the quality of my self-to-others relationship? Is there contagion?  

Add any signature noticings that stand out to you in his moment.

Afterward, note anything that might feel different.