Embodiment isn’t everything
That might be a strange thing to hear from someone who has been doing embodiment work for a decade. But I mean it.
These days in particular, I’m sceptical of anything that promises universal effectiveness or resonance. Our lives are too complex, our individual experiences and circumstances too diverse for there to be a formula that meets all of our needs, triggers, limitations and possibilities.
“Embrace diversity or be destroyed”, writes Octavia E. Butler in Parable of the Talents. That might sound dramatic but I believe it to be existentially true.
Fascism thrives on uniformity and seeks to destroy any form of deviance until it eventually eats itself. Diversity is an antidote to the trajectory of uniformist mass extinction we’re on.
What does that have to do with embodiment? Diversity in this context means first and foremost recognising that people show up the way they do for a reason. Some might be struggling with overwhelm because they feel the pain of the world deeply in their souls. Some might be trying to compartmentalise and strategise their way out of the chaos. And others might move in a near constant state of dissociation to get through the day.
Our bodies are wise. Probably wiser than our minds might ever become. They know intuitively how to keep us safe.
So all of our survival strategies are in essence ingenious attempts to stay alive. There is nothing wrong with them. Absolutely nothing.
Sometimes people might realise that their survival responses last too long, are too intense or no longer work and look for different coping mechanisms. That doesn’t mean the survival responses are ‘bad’ or that person is of some lower category of consciousness.
There is no ‘right’ way to survive. Especially in a time of dehumanisation at a mass scale.
Photo of tree branches covered in snow against a cloudy sky with the sun peaking out from a gap in the clouds, turning the sky slightly yellow.
For some people, including myself, connecting with our bodies can be a portal to our humanity and feel like salve on a burning scar. But for others, being connected to their bodies is not a safe, accessible or sustainable state to be in.
This could be for a million reasons. For example, someone living with chronic pain may not want to turn closer to that pain by paying more attention to their body. Being numb to that pain might be the only way their body can cope.
Many survivors of sexual violence have had to learn to dissociate from their trauma in order to carry on with their lives, particularly in a world in which that violence is very much ongoing and very rarely with any real consequences.
If you live in a body that is shamed and stigmatised by society - such as a Black or Brown body, a disabled body, a trans or gender-expansive body, a fat body, a balding body, an ageing body etc. - connecting with it might be a lot harder than for someone who does not experience such judgement every day.
And sometimes, the circumstances of someone’s life might mean it’s simply not safe for them to get in touch with their bodies because they don’t have the space and support to truly feel what they’re feeling.
Shira Hassan articulated this really thoughtfully in a recent conversation with Dean Spade:
“We place such a high value on presence, on being able to show up, on being able to be verbally communicative. There’s so many layers to how we make boundaries that involve a lot of self-knowledge. […] [This] create[s] a really interesting dilemma for anyone who’s in an altered state or who may be disabled or who may be dissociated and the ways in which that can affect presence. […] I think it’s a tension that exists in a lot of what I do [because] now we’re adding the layer of being embodied, which to me is like the hardest hurdle.”
What I hear her pointing towards is the risk that, with all our important and well-intended focus on re-connecting with our bodies, we might end up re-creating the very same hierarchy that we set out to dismantle in the first place - except that this time, embodied knowledge is at the top.
That can never be the goal of embodiment work - nor any other modality that seeks to support people into more wholeness and aliveness.
Shira is right - in a world of so much pain and trauma, in which most of us have not been taught embodiment skills and instead been made to feel estranged from our bodies, becoming more embodied and present with our inner selves can be incredibly challenging.
It’s a lifelong practice, so let’s be gentle. There is no rush. People come into this work whenever they are ready, and some of them never do, which is also completely okay. As adrienne maree brown reassured her students during hers and Sonya Renee Taylor’s 2022 course, Radical Permission:
“Whenever curiosity awakens, you are right on time. You cannot be late for your own life.”