Guest post by Jack Adam Weber, September 2023
Back in the day, when I used to practice tons of yoga, meditation, and qi gong (I still do some regularly), I used to think I was embodied.
It’s commonly believed that doing physical practices, like dance and body-mind practices means that one is embodied. To a degree, this seems generally true, but not at a deeper level. Integrity necessarily includes working out the stuck, old emotions in the body. So that the body is free to effortlessly join and sustainably influence the mind.
It wasn’t until I worked through the backlogged emotional pain from growing up that I learned how much these common embodiment body-mind practices couldn’t touch. After all, the therapy work I engaged was itself a body-mind practice, just at a much deeper level than any common physical practice.
The reason for this seems to hinge on what embodiment means. For me, it means deeply feeling, having access to, being in intimate relationship with, energetically living from, and relying upon my body for wisdom and guidance. If my body is holding significant past trauma—replete with backlogged emotions that block me from accessing and inhabiting myself—it’s easy to understand why I would be prevented from embodying, and thereby living from, its wisdom and creativity.
Maybe this is why when I began the deep emotional work long ago, my creativity blossomed and never turned off.
When our emotional and feeling machinery has wrenches (trauma) stuck in it, we are deprived of a major component to making good, wise decisions. This is because, as Antonio Damasio’s ground-breaking neuroscientific studies showed, emotion is needed to make decisions at all (yet, relying only on emotion, without reason, is also a pitfall). In fact, he showed that most of our decisions originate in emotion. It stands to reason that if our emotional body is gunked up and stuck in wounding, that our decisions (not to mention our mood!) will thereby be similarly compromised.
We just can’t navigate life wisely and joyfully without emotion . . . without the ally of our hearts to aid our minds. To make our hearts an ally, most of us need to do major housecleaning, which means dipping into our bodies and working through the pain that’s there . . . that HAS been there for some time. But, we can’t really determine the degree of clean-up by mental assessment—you have to feel it. Paradoxically, this is where body-mind practices can really help: they foster an initial deeper, connection—that psyche-soma integration as a first step towards deeper integration through emotional healing.
Embodiment, then, is a symbol for integration, integrity, and trustworthiness. Emotional work is needed to go the rest of the way down into embodiment. From the ground, we flower.
Jack is an author, poet, organic farmer, Chinese medicine clinician, and holistic medicine practitioner. He is writing a new book on embodied trauma work. He can be reached at jackadamweber.comjackadamweber.com