EMBODIMENT

‚Embodiment‘ sounds like a strange idea. The body is always with us – so where could we be, if not ‚in the body‘? Seems easy, to just be here: since we already are. Yet often we aren’t – haven’t fully landed in our body. It’s quite common to live a slight distance from it. Which is tricky: for losing touch with our body means losing connection to our self.

So this is where we begin: with coming back to the body, again and again.

It’s the body that sets the pace in our sessions. The mind ist quick to comprehend, yet the body is on another timeline. Understanding something is one thing. Letting it sink into the body is quite another.

Slowing down, counter to our experience of it, is really the fast track. And: the most fundamental shifts happen when we are not trying for them. When instead, we are simply suspended in the moment, radically present.

In somatic coaching, we deliberately stay with the arising sensations only – as long as possible. Something interesting happens in these moments: we suspend meaning. We are learning to hover – that is, to be with sensations, images, feelings, without immediately needing to know what they mean. Which is something our meaning obsessed culture isn’t very good at.

So, where does language come in then? And where the mind? In somatic work, we talk about the ‘bodymind’ – realising that body and mind aren’t separate.

So there’s a place for words. In somatic coaching, we take time to capture the felt sense, these moment to moment sensations in the body – with precise words, metaphors, images, until the expression really captures the experience inside. Often, this felt sense is a ‚sense‘ in two ways. First: the felt sensations in the body. Second: the sensed meaning of those sensations. So at some point, we are ‘making sense of things’ – yet not from the mind, but from the bodymind.

This is how we eventually draw a new map. One that is built from the body up. One that is current with our Self. One that actually maps the territory.

The body leads us to new words. And vice versa, our words have an effect on the body. So words are central when it comes to our inner experience. Concepts, paradigms, ideas – they all format our experience. We can be trapped by ideas, or liberated by ideas: both possible. I believe we need to be totally embodied, yet able to go totally meta – to own our paradigms as well as inhabit our bodies fully. I call this: Embodied Thinking.

So, yes: In Somatic Coaching, we are talking. But when we speak, we are never just talking. And when we really land in our body, this idea that having a body isn’t the same as fully being in it makes all the sense.