The word embodiment has been appearing more frequently in everyday language for the past twenty or thirty years, but a simple online search offers multiple definitions.
Embodiment, in its modern setting, seems to mean different things to different people and groups. Is anyone really sure exactly what it means these days?
Two of the settings in which I often notice the term coming up are in therapies such as psychology and psychotherapy, and in the philosophy of mind and consciousness. Other areas which have their own uses of embodiment include Artificial Intelligence and religion.
As the author of a philosophy book about feeling and the body, and a practitioner of bodywork, I’m more qualified to explain the contemporary use of the term embodiment in the first two settings: therapy and philosophy.
I suspect that many people reading this article will have heard the word embodiment in a context that has something to do with health and healing. Even in this context the use of the word isn’t always clear.
Some people equate embodiment with mindfulness, and while it does have a connection to mindfulness and meditation practices, I understand it as broader than both of those.
Many people will have heard the word embodiment as something you can have more or less of (as in, you can be more or less embodied in a given moment or over time), and that somehow being more embodied is better, for your health and in your own experience. But why? What does it mean to become more embodied?
What does it mean to become more embodied?
Obviously, in a straightforward sense, we are all in our bodies all the time. Being in a human body is just being human! At the same time, people do talk about being more in their bodies or even learning to be more in their bodies. This is what becoming more embodied is getting at.
As I understand it, becoming more embodied means that you are more able to notice your own body within your experience, in a moment-to-moment way.
This in turn means that you are better at noticing the feelings and physical sensations in your body, and that these are more easily integrated into your ongoing experience.
So what do I mean by that?
Being embodied doesn’t mean that your body experience—feelings and sensations—takes centre stage in your overall experience all the time. But it does mean that your body experience is somehow closer to your conscious awareness more of the time, and that when you do turn your attention to the body to see what’s going on or how you’re feeling, it’s almost effortless.
We can also understand this by looking at the opposite, being disembodied, which in everyday life is really like being in your head, or not noticing the body at all. So when you spend a lot of time daily sitting at a computer or looking at a screen, you might become quite disconnected from your body during that time. You might forget to eat or not feel the impulse to get up and stretch.
If you’ve been stressed for a long time, you might have trouble enjoying things you used to love, or experience sudden bursts of anger or irritation that surprise you. If you’ve experienced a significantly upsetting event or even a trauma then you might have trouble feeling anything at all. Alternatively, you might become overwhelmed by bodily responses you don’t understand, and then the last thing you want to do is to feel the body more! In all of these cases, some aspect of our body experience is minimised (such as hunger, discomfort, irritation or fear) or even disappears from our experience altogether.
These are all ways that we accommodate ourselves to the requirements of our lives and our difficulties. There’s nothing inherently wrong with any of our responses to these situations—sometimes they even protect us. Still, the more embodied we are, the more we notice what our bodies need and the more we notice our own feelings before they burst out of us or become overwhelming.
In the case of trauma, and if done safely, becoming more embodied can be profoundly healing. Becoming more embodied means you can notice and, importantly, tolerate a broader range of feelings, both physical and emotional. I like to think of this as bridging the gap between our sense of a separate self and the world. The more embodied we are, the more we can attune to the world around us, particularly others with whom we interact. We simply become more at ease.
Becoming more embodied also helps us to feel more vital and resilient. Feeling the body more brings us into direct contact with the simple fact of our own aliveness. This contact seems beneficial in itself, like a more direct understanding of the aliveness that connects us with each other, with other living beings and with the natural world.