Embodiment

“To be in contact internally with our body is, at the same time, to be open to our environment. Everywhere we are in contact with ourselves within our body, we are alive and responsive to the world around us. This produces a lived experience of continuity and connection with everything and everyone we encounter.” -Judith Blackstone

Awakening in Life includes a focus on embodiment, with our body being the lived point of all places in this life.

Even with all the deep experiences we can have on the meditation cushion, you always have a body. Timeless presence, our living experience, our personalities, our relationships, our hopes and dreams, our pain and suffering, everything we were, are now, and are becoming, is experienced right here in our embodied existence.

By 'body', at first I definitely mean your somatic, physical body, but embodiment includes much more than that. For example, we experience correlations in our body with patterns of thinking and feeling and sensing the world. Thus we can embody a quality of knowing in mind, through our head and body, and we can embody a quality of love in our hearts and chests. All of our experiences take root in our body. Because of this, our body is an indispensable source of wisdom and memory, and a mirror for our awakening.

Through a cultivation of embodiment we can more fully awaken, heal, and respond to life. As such, we can integrate many practices of awakening with embodiment, making our awakening much stronger and more rooted and integrated in our lives.

Our embodiment extends beyond our individual self, to our collective social and cultural embodiment, our global and planetary embodiment, and universal or kosmic embodiment. It is important to note that all of these embodiments are happening simultaneously, and it is not possible to separate them. As such, Awakening in Life includes working with and cultivating embodiment through all of this dimensions of our human experience.