Embodiment: Coming Home to Ourselves
“Embodiment is the practice of attending to your sensations. Awareness of your body serves as a guiding compass to help you feel more in charge of the course of your life. Somatic awareness provides a foundation for empathy, helps you make healthy decisions, and gives important feedback about your relationships with others.”
— Dr. Arielle Schwartz (2017).
Embodiment which includes interoception allows us to feel and relate to what is going on in our bodies. It is essential for emotional experience and its regulation, as well as many aspects of cognition, including meaning making (Ray, 2016).
Embodied awareness provides access to one’s present truth and past as it shows up through embodied implicit memory. Throughout childhood development and adult life, physical tensions, gestures, postures, and movement repertoires develop under the influence of environmental circumstances. Unresolved or repressed emotions and memories from the past can surface in present moment felt sense experiences, often without story or context. Incorporation of somatic awareness in therapy through paying attention and using language that includes the body aids a client to cultivate conscious embodiment and increase somatic literacy, empowering choice.
Reflection
How does becoming more in tune with our own felt experiences increase our capacity as therapists to support our clients to do the same?
Supporting Embodiment
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Embodiment is supported through secure attachment relationships in childhood (Burri, 2018) consisting of regular, healthy touch and ‘serve and return’ attuned reciprocal interactions, and also through experiences of relational safety and freedom from oppression in society. Embodiment practices such as dance, meditation, bodywork, yoga, and other cultural practices likewise support embodiment (Meehan & Carter, 2021; Williams et al., 2016).
Trauma, oppression, and cultural norms of distraction and prioritization of conceptual intelligence in education systems contribute to disembodiment. It is easy to bypass what our bodies know when individuals are taught to repress discomfort in a society that does not regard our capacity to feel as wisdom.
The First Nations Perspective on Health and Wellness from the First Nations Health Authority (FNHA) in British Columbia centres the interconnectedness within self (mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical), radiating outwards to family, community, Nation, and land with wisdom, respect, relationships, and responsibility (FNHA, n.d.). Embodiment speaks to the impacts of settler colonialism, and the disruption that occurred and is continually occurring in the experiences of Indigenous Peoples through colonization and forced disconnection to land, language, culture, and rights to self-determination.
Figure 1.1: Portrait of René Descartes (Wikimedia Commons, 1649-1700, public domain).
Historically, Western civilization has passed down a legacy of mind-body dualism, particularly influenced in the 16th century by René Descartes, that has privileged the mind whilst denigrating the body as a lower form (Matthew, 1998). Subjective experiences of the body have thus typically been marginalized in modern Western culture, contributing to disembodiment and influencing practices of industrialization, colonialism, medicalization, commodification, and the existence of binary norms.
Merleau-Ponty was a 20th century French philosopher who challenged the Western dualistic view of mind and body, and instead posited that embodiment and intellect cannot be separated since the body is involved in the very possibility of experience (Merleau-Ponty, 1962).
Learn More
An embodied oppression lens sees the body as both a site of social injustice and social resistance (Johnson, 2015). To learn more, please read Grasping and Transforming the Embodied Experience of Oppression.
References
Burri, L. G. (2018). Relational somatic psychotherapy: Integrating psyche and soma through authentic relationship. Pacifica Graduate Institute ProQuest Dissertations Publishing. 10843840.
First Nations Health Authority (FNHA) (N.d.). First Nations Perspective on Health and Wellness. Retrieved from https://www.fnha.ca/wellness/wellness-for-first-nations/first-nations-perspective-on-health-and-wellness
Johnson, R. (2015). Grasping and transforming the embodied experience of oppression. International Body Psychotherapy Journal, 14(1), 80-95.
Matthew, M. (1998). The body as instrument. Journal of British Association of. Psychotherapy, 35, 17–35.
Meehan, E., & Carter, B. (2021). Moving With Pain: What Principles From Somatic Practices Can Offer to People Living With Chronic Pain. Frontiers in psychology, 11, 620381-620381.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of Perception Routledge. (1st Edition ed.). Routledge.
Ray, R. (2016). The Awakening Body: Somatic Meditation for Discovering Our Deepest Life. Shambhala.
Schwartz, A. (2017). Embodiment in Somatic Psychology. Center for Resilience Informed Therapy. Retrieved from https://drarielleschwartz.com/embodiment-in-somatic-psychology-dr-arielle-schwartz/
Williams, P. B., Mangelsdorf, H. H., Kontra, C., Nusbaum, H. C., & Hoeckner, B. (2016). The Relationship between Mental and Somatic Practices and Wisdom. PLOS ONE, 11(2), e0149369-e0149369.