Hello dear friends!

Over the last several years, in my work with clients as well as my own personal healing work, I’ve noticed an important overarching theme. In my practice, I’ve touched on things like food and herbs, as well as deeper issues like body image, past traumas, and healthy boundaries. I’ve talked extensively about “Earth School,” and how difficult it is for most of us to be in these physical bodies, experiencing this lifetime and all its lessons. And I realized, in my work, that everything comes down to our ability to inhabit our bodies fully, joyfully, and without shame.

90% of my energy reading or Reiki clients have a particular energy pattern, which speaks to this theme again. Their energy is either hanging around outside the body (like it’s been pushed out or walled off, outside the chakras) or it’s been pulled all the way up into the head. I rarely see someone whose lower chakras are full and vibrant, or whose energy is evenly distributed. This is yet another indication that embodiment is collectively a huge challenge for us.

After journeying and receiving many downloads on this, I realized that yes, we all have many clauses in our soul contracts for our relationships, career, and the like. But that underneath all of that, is the challenge of learning how to be a human in the first place. How to integrate these vibrant spirits of ours, with these dense physical forms. This is KEY. Our physical bodies were meant to be tools for us to use, through which we can experience this earthly realm. These bodies are conduits, gifts given to us so we can know and feel sensory stimuli. But most of us aren’t actually IN our bodies at all!

What does it mean to be embodied anyway? There are plenty of definitions of this, but I like the idea of “engaging with the world through our senses, with deep feeling of experience.” This is distinctly different from the typical mental view of the world, where we process and engage with things using our brains. Embodiment, to me, is less about thinking and more about feeling. It’s a deeper knowing, than the knowing we get in our heads. It’s taking up space in our physical self. It’s allowing our souls to take up residence in a physical vessel. It’s interacting with the world around us in an open, sensuous, heart-centered way.

Embodiment is about wholeness. It’s about having all the parts of you online. Being able to deeply and fully feel, process, and release everything that happens to you. It’s ultimately, about feeling at home.

All of us are born as perfectly embodied creatures. As babies, we absorbed the world through our senses. We didn’t yet have language or complex thought patterns to communicate our experiences. We FELT. We expressed. We moved. We cried. We touched and tasted and stretched. We didn’t question our bodies. We weren’t concerned with how our bodies looked or functioned. We simply existed in them. And I believe that it is one of our most sacred invitations, to reclaim the kind of joyful, curious, loving embodiment we had as children.

So what is standing in our way? What makes it so hard to fully inhabit our bodies?

In a nutshell, anything that threatens our sense of safety. When we sense a threat to our wellbeing, on a soul level, we pull up and out of the body. And this can take many forms, such as:

Abuse- sexual, physical, emotional, or otherwise
Betrayal/heartbreak
Addiction
Chronic pain, disease, or other health issues
Being in a marginalized body (e.g. POC, indigenous, disabled, etc)
Abandonment
Queer and/or trans identity
Eating disorders and diet culture
Suppressed or unprocessed emotions and traumas
Spiritual bypassing
Oppressive religious or political views
Certain medications

In essence, any experience you’ve had, or message you received that made you feel unwelcome in your own body, unsafe in your body, or unloved in your body. And yes, that can be a long list for many of us. It’s often an accumulation of lots of things that separated us from ourselves, and made us lose trust in our bodies (something I go over in my Body Trust® work).

For me it began in elementary school, when I started manifesting my OCD as a body-focused repetitive behavior, or BFRB. Shortly afterwards, I hit puberty, and the sudden body hair, large breasts, and tall height made me feel alienated in my body. Then came the eating disorders, the food restriction, the overexercising, and the self-harming behaviors. Then the early signs of dis-ease showed up in my teens- the brittle hair, the cold feet/hands, the weight gain, the fatigue...and the eventual diagnoses of hypothyroidism. Then came the sexual shame, then the coming out as queer. Slowly over time, I began to think of my body as something that was defective and untrustworthy. By the time I was in my late 20’s, after years of serious illness and surviving a painful divorce, I was as disconnected from my body as I’d ever been.

There are lots of ways that this pattern shows up for people, and everyone is a little bit different. If you resonate with any of these things, you’re likely struggling to feel completely at home and safe in your body:

Stuck in the dieting cycle
Body-focused harm, such as cutting, picking, hair-pulling
Inability to orgasm
Fear of, or disinterest in, sexual intimacy
Continual burnout or exhaustion
Avoiding mirrors or your appearance in general
Not enjoying hugs or other platonic physical touch
Disgust at certain body parts or body hair
Disgust at body functions, especially menstruation
Having no idea where you are in your cycle (for female-bodied folx)
A sense of numbness in the body
Fantasizing about having a different body type/shape/size
Numbing out with food, alcohol, drugs, sex, etc…
Reliance on things like makeup, botox, cosmetic surgery to feel “normal”

The list could go on, of course, but I think you get the idea. You probably also identify with at least a few of the things I mentioned above. When I talk to clients, especially walking them through their unique body stories, the overwhelming desire is for embodiment.

We all long to come home again. We all long to feel like our bodies are working with us and for us, instead of against us (spoiler alert- they always are). We all long to let go of our blocks, our hangups, and our insecurities, and to live life with all of our senses. We long to feel confident, to move with ease, and to claim our pleasure. These are innate human desires, and this embodiment is the key to experiencing the richness that life has to offer.

Over the years, I’ve explored a wide variety of practices, to help me get back into my body. I’ve explored many of these with clients as well. Of course, this is by no means an exhaustive list, but here’s a few things that I’ve found to be helpful, on this journey to full, joyous embodiment:

Breathwork
EFT/tapping
Somatic experiencing
Sounding/singing
Yoga or other mindful movement
Body awareness meditation/body scans
Mindful eating exercises
Letting go of restrictive diets and food rules
Felt sense awareness
Yoni/cervical de-armoring
Menstrual cycle tracking
Flower essences
Herbal medicines
Crystals/gemstones
Self-touch, both platonic and romantic
Grounding/earthing
Spending time in nature

Getting fully back into your body, especially if you’ve had many decades of disconnection or have experienced many of the things in that first list, can take a long time. It’s important to be patient with yourself, and to be committed to this healing process. True embodiment goes against many of our culture’s over-thinking, appearance-obsessive, diet-crazy, patriarchal messages. And it requires courage to dig deep and rewrite your body story. But it’s ultimately one of the most important things you will ever do, and is (IMHO) one of the biggest parts of our soul contracts.

To learn how to fully integrate soul and body is the key to unlocking our true power and potential.

You deserve to fully occupy your body. You are worthy of a loving, peaceful, collaborative relationship with your body. Your body is your best friend, and your sacred dwelling place.

The only question is…

Are you ready to come home?

The Body As A Dwelling Place: It's Time To Come Home