Come Back To Yourself
Embodiment is the state of living while paying attention to ourselves, feeling our systems alive and online. This is not just a relaxing treat, embodied awareness has been crucial to our survival for the overwhelming majority of human history. We needed to be able to precisely sense where our bodies were in space to hunt effectively, if we couldn’t sense the state of our digestive system, we would be more likely to get poisoned, and so on.
Our human systems have been shaped by the unforgiving nature of evolution, and nature has valued the connection to our embodied experience. It’s a mistake to casually toss it aside as fluffy New Age.
We are no longer trained as a culture to relate directly to our body’s internal state — we’re taught to sit down quietly at school, ignore the urge to go to the bathroom, suppress how uncomfortable it is to sit in a cubicle all day, and so on.
Sometimes in order to respond to threats and challenges from our environment we need to go offline, and that is natural. Our nervous system has an efficient way of doing this, by directing resources away from self-renewal and awareness and into rapid defense responses.
It’s a very human thing if, at some point along the way, you needed to stop noticing what you were doing and go offline. Maybe one day you woke up and suddenly realized you gained 15lbs, or now have chronic neck pain that no one can figure out, or this pressure in your chest comes out of nowhere while you’re in public places even though you are not consciously afraid. At the same time, maybe you can’t explain how or why this happened.
As strange as it sounds, these are all normal responses to living in the modern world with the Paleolithic hardware we are given.
The good news is, it is more than possible to come back to yourself. You can learn to work with the waves of sensation-based physiology inside and change the way you act based on that information. Authenticity is both a psychological and physical connection to the truth, and we can all reclaim that lived experience.