The problem with embodiment as something else to achieve

“How do I connect to myself more?”, “How do I become more embodied?” and “How can I feel the feelings, instead of thinking and talking about them?” are regular questions I get from clients. Although they touch on several different things and can mean many different things to the person asking them, these questions often share a similar quality of urgency and objectivity. There can be an assumption that there is a tangible answer somewhere; a particular practice, exercise, intervention or way of doing things that will help us finally arrive at the place we are trying to get to - Oh, how elusive it is, oh how it escapes us!

When "getting it right" becomes the problem

After over a decade of working in mental health, one of the things I have become interested in is what happens when our relationship with ourselves becomes organised around finding the ‘right’ thing to do. This isn't a criticism of mainstream mental health treatment as a whole, and I certainly don't think that structured interventions, psychological therapies or practical strategies are inherently problematic. They can be incredibly useful, and there are times when having something concrete to work on is exactly what we need.

And, sometimes, even a useful intervention can become another thing we feel we have to get right, particularly when we are already approaching ourselves from a position of believing that something is wrong and needs to be fixed. We can become very good at learning what we are supposed to do, while remaining somewhat disconnected from the process of discovering what our own experience might be telling us.

This is what interests me about questions like “How do I become more embodied?” because the question itself can sometimes contain an assumption that there is somewhere else we ought to be.

I am not embodied enough.

I need to become more embodied.

I am thinking rather than feeling.

I need to learn how to feel.

There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting things to change, and wanting respite from distress is important. But I wonder what happens when embodiment becomes another achievement, another standard against which we measure ourselves, or another thing we can feel that we are failing at. Yes, capitalism seems to have its tentacles everywhere.

Enya, incense, and the limits of a checklist

I've written before about similar topics and about how, sometimes, what I really needed wasn't another intervention, but simply to listen to Enya and light cheap incense in the perceived safety of my bedroom. I don't know exactly what it was that made me stop in my tracks and tune into the calling of Enya instead of another calling that didn't feel quite right. There wasn't a checklist that led me there, and I wasn't consciously thinking about which evidence-based intervention would best support me at that particular moment. Something in me seemed to know that this was what I wanted, and for whatever reason, I listened and I am so glad I did.

I'm not suggesting that our bodily impulses are always right and should automatically be followed. Sometimes what feels right in the moment isn't necessarily what is helpful in the longer term, and sometimes we need support precisely because our ability to work out what we need has become difficult. What interests me is that there was something about that particular moment, in that particular context, that I was able to listen to, and that listening was meaningful in a way that no generic list of things to try could have predicted.

Of course, as a bodyworker and somatic therapist, I could quite easily reel off the many things one could try in order to become “more embodied” or “feel things more”. I could talk about noticing sensations, paying attention to the breath, tracking movement, grounding, journalling, body scans, doing lists, Focusing, or any number of other practices that can help us become more aware of our embodied experience. These things can all be valuable, and I use many of them myself.

But there is a difference between being given another thing to practise and developing a relationship with our own experience.

What feels right, rather than what should I do

What could happen if, instead of continually asking ourselves how to become more embodied, we sometimes asked, “What feels right?” or “What feels healing?” And what happens if we also take into account the place from which we are asking those questions?

• Am I desperately trying to find the thing that will finally make me feel better?

• Am I asking for a ‘cure’ or an absolute resolution?

• Am I asking from a place of urgency, fear or overwhelm?

• Am I so shut down or withdrawn that there isn't very much available to me right now?

• Or am I asking from somewhere with a little more space, safety and curiosity, where something might emerge without me needing to force an answer?

These questions don't necessarily give us an immediate solution. In fact, they may initially leave us with more uncertainty. But perhaps that uncertainty is sometimes part of the process of being in a human body in a world that is seemingly becoming more and more obsessed with certainty and fast results, increasingly incapable of holding nuance or uncertainty. Rather than immediately reaching for an answer, we can become interested in what is actually happening within us and what, if anything, seems to be asking for our attention.

Where Gendlin's Felt Sense comes in

This is where Eugene Gendlin's work on Focusing has become particularly important to me.

Focusing isn't simply about noticing bodily sensations, and it isn't the same as being told to “listen to your gut”. Gendlin's concept of the Felt Sense refers to something more complex: a bodily-felt sense of a situation, problem, relationship or experience as a whole, which may initially be difficult to put into words. It can be there before we fully understand what we are experiencing, and the process of Focusing involves developing a particular kind of relationship with that felt experience so that its meaning can begin to unfold.

What I find particularly valuable about this is that it doesn't ask us to choose between thinking and feeling.

I don't believe in mind over body, but I also don't believe in body over mind. Integration is everything.

We need our thinking, our language, our shared stories and our ability to reflect and make sense of our experiences. But there are also aspects of our experience that we can know bodily before we can explain them intellectually. Focusing creates a way of bringing these two forms of knowing into conversation with one another, rather than assuming that one has to be more important than the other.

This is part of what makes it different, for me, from simply being told to “get out of your head”.

Sometimes thinking is precisely what we need. Sometimes we need to understand something, analyse it, talk about it and put it into words. The question is whether thinking is the only place we are looking for an answer.

A Felt Sense might initially be vague, contradictory or difficult to explain. It might feel like a knot in the stomach, a heaviness in the chest, an image, a sense of pressure, an impulse to move, or something that is much harder to describe. The important thing isn't to immediately decide what that sensation means, but to develop a curious relationship with it and see whether something about it can become clearer.

What this looks like in session with me

For me, this is where somatic work becomes particularly interesting.

An inner Felt Sense is present within our embodied experience all the time, but that doesn't mean we are necessarily aware of it, know how to recognise it, or know what to do with it. A touch therapy session can bring sensations, emotions, memories, images or impulses into awareness, but the fact that something arises doesn't automatically tell us what it means or what we should do about it.

The work, therefore, isn't necessarily about making the body speak more loudly. It can be about developing our capacity to listen and enter into dialogue.

This is also why I don't see somatic therapy as simply adding a collection of body-based techniques to a person's existing mental-health toolkit. Techniques can be useful, but for me the more interesting question is what kind of relationship we are developing with our own experience. Can we notice something without immediately needing to explain it? Can we stay curious about a sensation or feeling without assuming that it needs to be fixed? Can we remain connected to our sense of agency and choice while exploring something that may be difficult? Can what we experience bodily inform our thinking, while what we think and understand also informs our experience of the body?

I really hear and feel the people who come to me looking for alleviation of symptoms, or trying to integrate what so often feels like a fragmented life story. As someone who has done this too, I understand the desire to find the thing that will finally make sense of everything, and I understand the relief that can come when something actually helps.

But I am increasingly wary of anything that turns healing into another performance, or embodiment into another destination we are supposed to reach. F*** capitalism!!

Perhaps becoming more embodied isn't necessarily about becoming something we currently are not. Perhaps it is about becoming more curious about the embodiment that is already happening, and developing enough space to notice what our experience is communicating.

And perhaps, rather than always asking ourselves what we should do next, we can sometimes pause long enough to ask a slightly different question:

What feels right here?

There may not be an immediate answer. It may not even be an answer we can put into words yet. But perhaps we can become interested in what happens when we give ourselves enough space to listen.

If this is where you've landed

If you've landed here because either bodywork or exploring a Felt Sense feels right to you, perhaps I can help you cultivate something that you can learn to do for yourself or with a partner. Different things feel right at different points in our lives, and some things never feel right for us. There isn't necessarily one correct route towards becoming more connected with ourselves. In many ways, I bet you are already able to sometimes connect to things that feel right and maybe none of those things have to do with therapeutic techniques or touch!

In session with me I can offer a safe(r) space where you are encouraged to notice and honour what feels right to you moment to moment, without having to arrive with a particular outcome in mind. We might explore sensations and emotions that arise while retaining a sense of agency and choice, or we might use Focusing to explore a Felt Sense around a particular question, relationship, situation or event.

We might also explore what happens when touch brings something into awareness, and how you can stay in relationship with the sensations, memories or emotions that arise rather than feeling that you need to immediately understand, suppress or act on them.

For me, this isn't about putting the body in charge of the mind, any more than it is about putting the mind in charge of the body. It is about developing a relationship between what we think, what we feel, what we sense and what we experience, and becoming a little more able to listen to the whole of ourselves as we move through the world.

So, to go back to the original question of “What should I do to become more embodied?”, I would perhaps start by suggesting that you become really curious about all the ways and all the moments where you already feel like yourself, or almost like yourself. It might be fleeting and it might be rare, but those moments may hold a clue about what feels right to you, and about where your experience naturally seems to want to go. Take note of them, notice them, write about them, tell someone or something (the wind?) about them, and keep listening until something clearer emerges.