Infinite Love is who we really are and who we refuse to be. This refusal is our most essential tension.

~ David Deida

Imagine two lovers. They have been living in the same house their entire lives. They do everything together. They go everywhere together. But they don’t speak the same language and have no efficient way of communicating with each other. Apart from the occasional outburst or breakdown, they don’t know what the other’s experience of life is.

This little dramatic tale serves to illustrate the core of the human predicament : body and mind living together as strangers. This is how you have been taught to live life, or rather not taught. In the story, the problem has an obvious solution : one or both parties need to learn the other’s language. In your life, the solution is just as simple. But what is the actual problem to be solved?

Because there is no efficient way of communication between body and thought, there is a great mistrust between the two. Teenage love drama is 99% miscommunication, fear and confusion. The same is true for our internal love affair. The body feels, the head doesn’t understand why, but is very eager to dream up its own reasonable reasons, for its own protection. The head acts upon its reasons, which does not serve the body’s needs (unless by accident) so the body increases the pressure. This frustrates the head because can’t you see I’m doing my best here? Drama ensues. Several times a day. For your whole fucking life.

Most of the self-help, psychotherapy, medical and pharmaceutical industries are built upon this simple misunderstanding. The human condition has always been a very lucrative illusion. When you read the story in the first paragraph again, you can clearly see why I use the word illusion. Our two lover’s problems are based on a mutual ignorance, which can easily be cured, after which the problems magically stop existing, leaving only puzzling memories behind.

In my previous post I tortured you with erecting a mental construct to satisfy your head. To make it understand and see the importance of the concept of embodiment. I spent a lot of words on contextualizing how thought rules the body. Now it’s time to look at the practical side of things. And we need to start with trust and safety.

Safety is a symptom of trust. If you trust something or someone, you feel safe. You might not actually be safe, or worse, think you are but not actually feel safe. This is why the mental distinction between feeling safe and being safe is important : feeling safe occurs in the body, being safe is a mental construct. Since we are concerned here with exploring the relationship between body and thought, we need to bring both sides to participate in this conversation. This is not the time to let your head lose itself in logical masturbation. I know it feels good to prove yourself right, but this is also the main reason why there is mistrust between your head and your body – you prefer being right to feeling what is.

Let me repeat that for impact : you prefer being right to feeling what is.

Imagine you want to get a massage. You go to the massage place and pay the massage person to give you a massage. If you feel confident in this person’s skills you can relax into the process and let them manipulate your physical body as they see fit. You allow these things to happen to your body. You might even allow yourself to be conscious of the sensations the massage evokes. This to me is a beautiful way to experience what the word embodiment feels like. In that moment, as you’re lying dead still on the table, you understand the need to trust and allow whatever happens to your body.

This understanding removes the need to question the experience, which in turn allows the sensations to be more fully experienced. In that moment, there is no apparent miscommunication or conflict between your body and your thinking mind. There is no fear and no distrust playing out. And it is also the real reason why people like massages. But that is where the analogy ends, of course. As soon as you get up from the table, pay the person, and walk out, the whole charade start right back where it left off before this little break. It’s only a very temporary and indirect way to experience relief from the inner conflict.

Human history and our current world are filled to the brim with ways to temporarily free a person from the dreadful agony that is caused by this inner conflict. Massages are a fairly innocent one, compared to prostitution, slavery, drugs (illegal or not) and the massive amount of false cures promised by all the sciences humanity has clung too, in the present and the past. Alcohol is probably the biggest one though, and also a great illustration of how natural the desire for this state of inner trust is. Alcohol is known as a social lubricant, but its real function is to facilitate our inner relationship. For a little while your body and thinking mind can be best buddies and tell each other how much they love each other in slurred speech. For a little while, and for a price.

A price which, as our little first paragraph story implies, is very unnecessary. A change is needed to get there, though not one that comes from outside the body. To take that idea forward, let’s first back up a little and take a look at the cause of the miscommunication. It’s important to understand that this is not a natural state. However, this does not mean we have to get back to the way things were. There is none of this miscommunication in animals for instance, but aspiring to a simpler state of being is not an option.

As a human being you have an innate mental capacity that far exceeds any other life form on earth. Left to its own devices, though, which it has been for millennia, the human thinking mind will try to solve fear in the body by physical contraction. The finer energetic mechanics are far beyond the scope of a blog post (or even my understanding) but I’m sure you know what it feels like to have your chest or abdomen tighten when you happen to see someone you’d rather not see. You can even feel it when you just try to imagine such a scene.

All this to draw a clearer picture of what the miscommunication actually is : the absence of a language used between thought and body. Not knowing a language is not a natural state for human beings. The human mind is built for spoken language, and will create its own if not fed with one from its surrounding peers.This is not so for the language that would connect body and mind. And it might not be natural, but it sure is the actual state of being human at this point in history, and has been for a very long time.

This language is, however, not a total mystery. It has been discovered and documented, albeit in a very fragmented way, all throughout human history. The need for this language sprouted as we grew from ape to human, and so has our understanding of it – but always countered by the temptation of not having to feel fear. Or not having to feel anything for that matter. Throughout our evolution, we humans have become very skilled at not feeling things, which is the exact opposite of establishing a line of communication between body and thought. Now it’s time for humans – for you – to become very fluent in this language. If you want to consciously take the next step in human evolution, that is.

Time for a side note. It’s a good one, I promise. Your sense of identity is constructed out of all the ways you’ve learned and were taught to cope with this lack of inner communication. One of the (very scary) side effects of embodiment is the falling away of that false sense of identity. Because even though it might be built on an illusion, this false sense of self feels very comfortable. You invested so much time in decorating your little box prison, it’ll feel like a waste to throw it all away. But clinging to this old crap will only (painfully) delay the inevitable. When you open the channels of communication between seemingly separate parts of yourself, you will no longer be able to hold on to all your old ways of being a broken mess. When you learn to be all your parts, you start to see you were never a bunch of different, contradictory parts to begin with.

Time to get very practical. When you truly want to learn a new language or instrument, you choose a method, you pick a daily time slot, and you practice, occasionally reaching out for feedback and course corrections from someone who has walked further down your chosen path. There is however one crucial difference when it comes to embodiment : learning is not your goal here.

It takes the average human body about twenty years to grow to its maximal height. It doesn’t learn to do this, it just changes, day by day, to take on a different form. If you want to change the way your body looks, you engage in different behavior than your usual one – eat less or more, exercise less or more – and day by day the body will change to take on a different form. I want you to look at embodiment in the same way. Honoring the cyclical and analog nature of the physical body, and allowing it to change in its own time, instead of forcing a new behavior onto it, without awareness or consideration of its needs or rhythms. This is again an invitation to stay vigilant for the thinking mind’s desire to hijack your practice and make it into a structured plan, designed to target a specific goal in a predetermined time frame through deliberate action steps. The language I used in the previous sentence should get the message across all on its own. #ew

Many words to state a simple fact : this is a slow process, and it has no end goal. You can change your mind on something almost instantaneously, if given the right mental arguments and having the openness to consider them against your own understanding. But your deep seated beliefs are rooted in the body, and it takes time and consistency to change them. When a new idea does not align with the old, unconscious beliefs that are held captive in the body, forcing your body to act upon this new idea will only create more inner conflict. This explains why many solutions to so-called psychological problems only work for a short time – if they work at all. It takes a lot of effort and will power to force your body to do something it doesn’t believe in.

We all have a twenty four hour day. About eight hours of each day you spend lying down, unconscious and totally useless. Much of what you do in the other sixteen hours of your day is motivated by the miscommunication between your head and body. Some of those activities might even be regarded as productive. Hard to tell when you don’t really know that who you are is built on rejecting half of yourself. It seems like a good idea to me, then, to use a portion of each day to figure that out. I keep using the words day to underline the importance of making this a daily practice. The body changes through daily repetition, as any proficient musician or athlete will tell you.

If you’ve really been paying attention I should be getting on your nerves by now because I still haven’t told you what this daily practice should actually look like. There are many modalities available out there, but instead of giving you options, I will give some prerequisites I found are necessary for a practice to bring about an actual, real connection inside of you, and slowly bring lasting peace and resolution to your inner conflict.

The most important box to be ticked is free body movement. Whenever a physical practice is bound to a certain style or form, it becomes an overt invitation for the thinking mind to come meddle with it. Am I doing this right? Are they doing it better than me? And of course there’s the endless rabbit hole of “advanced techniques” which will only feed the thinking mind’s quest for proof of its all-powerfulness and validate its need to exist. Free, unstructured body movement invites the body to discover, and then speak, its own language. At the same time, it invites the thinking mind to observe and learn how the body speaks. This is the meeting place where you will discover the simplicity of life, and learn to trust that simplicity, mentally. This in turn will bring about the feeling of safety. Feeling safe in your own vessel.

The whole point of an embodiment practice is that it induces opening, which is another important box that needs to be ticked. In a metaphorical way, you are looking to open doors inside of your physicality, and welcome old friends you were once erroneously taught were your enemies. You know better now, even if that first contact might be scary, awkward and timid. Step by step, day by day is the way to go here. In more practical words, you are relaxing habitual contraction in your body. In many cases the word habitual even fall short of describing how unconscious you are of these contractions and compressions. It’s all about discovering what was pushed away, sometimes long before you could even talk. This is done through creating and persisting in new habits of opening – not in going against closing, which is what you’ve been doing your whole life. Unsuccessfully.

It’s also important to have the proper mental framework around the concept of Contraction. These can be more than just a tightening of musculature. Contraction here means : any mechanism by which an unwanted experience in your consciousness can be pushed out of it. In a very broad sense, this pushing out and away of sensations, emotions, but also thoughts, is the miraculous ability of the human apparatus to remove certain flavors of energy flow from awareness. This energy doesn’t disappear, though. It gets trapped and stored in the body, waiting to be allowed to run its natural course.

In a freely communicating system, all energy flows until it has discharged its potential and returned to equilibrium. This also applies to the sensations, emotions and thoughts you have. It always amazes me that we, as human beings, have the ability to disrupt this natural process inside of ourselves. But this is what I meant at the beginning of this post when I said that the miscommunication between the head and body is not natural.

This stored energy accumulates over a lifetime. This can be clearly seen in elderly people – most of them look, act and think the same : the result of a lifetime of repressing, blocking and storing unwanted inner experiences. We call it natural old age but it’s mostly just a symptom of consistent and unnatural contraction, blocking and trapping of energy. This of course means that, as you keep opening your inner channels of communication, you will encounter energies which, for simplicity’s sake, I’ll just call youthfulness. Which can be clearly observed in elder people who, despite physically conforming to what an old person should look like, express themselves as a young spirit would.

If all the talk about releasing trapped energy is making your inner cynic frown: once you have experienced this for yourself you will see how accurate these words are. The natural life span of emotions is fairly short, they can move through the body in mere minutes. When making contact with emotional charges that have been trapped for a lifetime, it might take several weeks for that charge to fully dissipate and its corresponding emotional system to return to its natural functioning. Again, it takes a consistent practice to come to these experiences, but once you do, you’ll often find yourself mourning all the times you lived in such a small and compressed way. And deeply grateful for knowing better. And finally living.

Side note time : the whole topic of the benefits of an embodiment practice requires a conversation on its own. But that conversation is not relevant here. Not until you have settled in your own daily intimate moment with yourself, opening doors and meeting old friends, through free movement.

Another important box to tick : creating an inner and outer safe space to explore your darkness. Having a physical room where you can practice without interruption and distraction is a must, but this is also an inner requirement. Staying vigilant to not distract yourself with the voice of the thinking mind, who is trained so well to narrate and judge all your internal comings and goings – especially when these involve emotion that has been labeled bad all throughout your life. It is exactly this darkness and badness that will show you the way. On the one hand, the resistance to certain sensations and emotions can be seen as a clear invitation to turn your awareness around, in the direction of this resistance and explore what is underneath. On the other hand – and a much more challenging dynamic – following your darkest thoughts and feelings to where they are rooted in the body, will guide you to what is hidden the deepest in you.

One of the most important by-products of this daily door opening is a steadily deepening access the body’s intelligence and wisdom. As stated earlier, a solid practice will help you welcome old friends back into your life, bringing them out of the darkness they were condemned to, usually a very long time ago. These friends have names – Sadness, Loneliness, Pain, Shame, Anger, and the ring leader of the disenfranchised emotions, Fear – but they also have a lot of wisdom. Learning to hear these voices as part of your inner conversation will make them less obtrusive, cunning and violent, since they will not have to force themselves on you to be heard.

It will also give you much deeper access to the present moment. The body and its sensations do not operate in time, which is a mental construct : they live and dance in the now. Their truth is always in alignment with the present moment – which should be a powerful motivator to learn to embrace them. When the communication with the body is obstructed, the thinking mind is all you have to deal with the natural flow of life. That is not its job. It’s designed to remember and foresee, not to feel and flow. This is how you have been taught to live your life : outside of the present moment, outside of your body.

If you slowly create a true habit of opening these doors and learn the language of these voices – to counter your lifelong habits of closing – and communication starts to flow more freely inside your being, a new and very powerful form of wisdom will become available to you. As more and more of these voices get the chance to speak, and as this ever growing conversation refines itself, there will be a consolidation of all these seemingly separate inner wisdoms.

They will eventually start to present themselves as a single entity, which you will find to be a very trustworthy inner guide. At this point, the outside world will have lost a lot of its grip on you, and many confusions will slowly evaporate in the light that shines from within. As promised, I will always do my best to stay away from all things WooWoo, but once you have experienced the intimate nature of this way of doing reality for yourself, you will see how difficult it is to describe this state of inner knowing and certainty without sounding like an instagram witch, high on sage, rocking an amethyst butt plug. I will leave you with that nasty image in your mind. You’re welcome.

To be concluded.