What Does Being Embodied Mean?
Let me tell you about Joanna.
Her name and identifiers have been changed for confidentiality.
Joanna sought coaching from me because she wanted to leave her corporate career and start her own business. She’d planned this move for a couple of years and had saved up enough money, but kept coming up with excuses for why she wasn’t ready to quit her job.
Deep down Joanna felt stuck and terrified of the unknown. Not knowing how to move forward, she considered therapy but landed on somatic coaching.
While she wanted to uncover the root causes of her situation, Joanna didn’t want to delve into her past but rather focus on the present and how to move forward.
Joanna received coaching for three months and in the process, realized that throughout her days, she was disconnected from her body.
She was so focused on her to-dos, meetings, deadlines, family responsibilities and paying bills, that by the time she had a chance to breathe and check in with herself, all she felt was burnt out.
Like most of us, Joanna wasn’t moving through her days from a place of being embodied.
Joanna’s emotions were getting the best of her, with fear keeping her from making a career move and impatience affecting family dynamics when she got home. In the last year, she’d developed chronic pain in her low back and nagging tension in her jaw – both of which worsened with stress.
Through coaching, Joanna learned to be with the sensations in her body and feel the emotions that were buried from her conscious awareness.
She learned somatic techniques that, through changing her posture and movement patterns, released stress and created healthier emotional patterns.
Joanna learned that low back pain is associated with feeling unsupported in life while jaw tension is associated with suppressed emotions, particularly anger.
She learned to begin to unwind these patterns in her body and create new ones to feel supported and in a safe way, express her anger.
In this process, Joanna learned to listen to her inner voice that had dreamed of her own business and began to take steps to make it happen.
Joanna’s coaching journey, like that of many others, invited a shift in how she was showing up from one that focused on what she was doing to how she was being.
She learned that in exploring how she was being, Joanna could create coherency between her mind, body, and emotions. Once that was established, she could take steps to align this embodiment with her outer world – her work, family life, hobbies and self-care practices.
Being embodied is simple – babies and kids naturally do it – they inhabit their bodies rather than moving through life stuck in their heads. For adults, it’s more complex because we have to unlearn conditioning that’s taught us to ignore our emotions and body.
As Joanna learned, being embodied brings more nuance and texture to life, more vitality, mindfulness and compassion, it helps us get unstuck, and creates new possibilities for the future.
Are you ready to be embodied? Click here to learn more about Somatic Coaching. And click the button below to schedule your free 30 minute call with me to see if this approach is right for you. Reach out today!
So often we go through life feeling like our mind and body aren’t connected. You can feel like you’re stuck in your head and that it’s hard to feel your emotions. Somatics seeks to bridge this divide and the result is that you feel embodied. Your mind feels aware of, and connected to, the felt sensations in your body. This gives access to your emotions so that you can feel them and let them move through you, rather than getting stuck inside. Being embodied has other benefits too, such as a feeling of aliveness and joy that’s often elusive. Somatic Somatics offers online Somatic Coaching which has embodiment as foundational to our approach.