What Does it Mean to be "Embodied"?

Excerpt from “In an Unspoken Voice” by Peter Levine...

"Historically, as individuals congregated in populated communities, their survival need for constant environmental vigilance waned. Their awareness of bodily sensations took on more of a social function. Survival no longer depending solely on the urgency of fight, flight or freeze. Rather, as society became more and more complex, the need for greater mental capacity to navigate our position within the group increased. Nuanced body language – the reading of facial and postural cues – gave way to establishing impulse control, which propelled our progenitors toward an increasingly mental framework.

"By the so-called age of reason, in the mid-17th century, the importance of rationality ascended to new heights. Disembodiment, in the alleged service of this rationality, had become the norm. Instincts and the immediacy of physical drives (such as sex) had become an embarrassment or worse. The subjugating power of the church reinforced this deepening split between mind and body. Finally, the supremacy of rationality congealed in Descartes’s “I think; Therefore I am”, an iconic statement for modernity. The rest is history, for better and for worse.

"However, while apparently disengaged, our compelling instincts remain coiled, waiting to ignite and reunite body and mind into effective coordinated action. If, for example, we become stranded in the wilderness, our instincts for predation, protection and shelter will click into sharp focus. If not we will surely die. When death looms, rumination is worthless, while body engagement in the here and now is invaluable.

"Today our survival depends very little on actually executing our basic instincts. Rather, our physical and psychological health depends on having deliberate and nonreactive access to them. Because our ancient design plan remains intact, it is our legacy to feel fully alive only when our survival instincts are fully engaged. However, and this is the rub, modern life rarely provides the opportunity for that kind of raw and powerful expression. And when we are called to action, being swept away with a fight or flight response is rarely appropriate to the social context in which we find ourselves. As such, we are damned if we do and damned if we don’t.

"Unable to feel our instinctual aliveness, we are left with certain cravings. These impulses generally revolve around two of our primary instincts: those for self-survival (threat) and those for species survival (sex). Furthermore, if we cannot find a “real“ situation to evoke these instincts, we manufacture one. Most of the time, however, we have solely our thoughts as meager substitutes for our instinctual drives. We not only put a lot of energy into our thoughts, but we also frequently confuse them with reality; we come to believe erroneously, as did Descartes, that we are our thoughts. Thoughts, unfortunately, are poor surrogates for experienced aliveness, and when disconnected from feelings, they result in corrosive rumination, fantasy, delusion and excessive worry. Such perseveration is not really surprising, as the paranoid tendency toward concern for potential threat in the face of ambiguity might have had a significant adaptive advantage in earlier times. Now, however, it is the currency of our judgmental, negativistic “superegos.“ On the other hand, when we are informed by clear body sensations and feelings, worry is diminished, while creativity and a sense of purpose are enhanced.

"We all ruminate on the undigested cud of unresolved problems, whether or not this helps us to solve them. “Unnecessary suffering,“ through repetitive negative thinking, is well-known to practitioners of meditation and other spiritual traditions. It is also the impetus for cognitive behavioral therapies. These practices, traditions, and therapies point to a common solution: defeating the tyranny of obsessive thinking before it spews it’s toxic emissions into the body. However, approaches that attempt to tame the restless mind may not be nearly as accessible or effective as those that help us return to our bodies in a sustaining way.

"For our distant forbearers, survival was the only game in town. This put them in a perpetually reactive mode – surviving from threat to threat, triggering one protective instinct after another. While we are under the domination of these same instincts, saddled with the reflexive reactions to perceived threat, we possess the opportunity to recognize them, stand back, observe and befriend these powerful sensations and drives, without necessarily acting on them. The conscious containment and reflection upon our wild and primal urges enlivens us and keeps us focused on actively pursuing our needs and desires. It is the basis for reflective self-awareness. Rather than automatically reacting to (or suppressing) our instincts, we can explore them mindfully, through the vehicle of sensate awareness. To be embodied means that we are guided by our instincts, while simultaneously having the opportunity to be self aware of that guidance. This self-awareness requires us to recognize and track our sensations and feelings. We unveil our instincts as they live within us, rather than being alienated from them or forcibly driven by them.

"These facts of life make living in the now, free of ruminative thoughts, a formidable task. When embodied, we linger longer in the lush landscape of the present moment. Even though we live in a world where bad things can and do happen, where unseen danger nip at our heels, we can still live in the now. When we are able to be fully present, we can thrive with more pleasure, wonder and wisdom then we could have imagined.

“ ‘Embodiment' is a personal – evolutionary solution to the tyranny of the yapping “monkey mind.“ It is one that paradoxically allows instinct and reason to be held together, fused and joyful participation and flow. Embodiment is about gaining, through the vehicle of awareness, the capacity to feel the ambient physical sensations of unfettered energy and aliveness as they pulse through our bodies. Is here that mind and body, thought and feeling, psyche and spirit, are held together, welded in an undifferentiated unity of experience. Through embodiment we gain a unique way to touch into our darkest primitive instincts and to experience them as they play into the daylight dance of consciousness; and in doing so to know ourselves as though for the first time – in a way that imparts vitality, flow, color, hue and creativity to our lives."