We live in a world where disembodiment is normal.
We are conditioned to leave ourselves in many small ways and often don’t even realize we are doing this. In a culture that glorifies optimization at all costs, our bodies become inconvenient logistical problems to manage, fight against, or drag around on our never-ending quest for efficiency.
We don’t notice we’re thirsty until we get a headache.
We refuse to stop working long enough to go pee.
We say yes when our body is screaming no.
We push through exhaustion.
Our bodies are always sending us signals, the problem is they get coded as interference. The override is so automatic it often doesn’t even register.
Yet, at the same time, people wonder why they feel so anxious or can’t sleep.
They don’t understand why they overthink so much and don’t know what they want.
They can’t trust themselves.
Or reliably relax.
We don’t even see this as the chronic self-abandonment it is.
We see it as responsibility, productivity, discipline, being good, or being easy to be around.
We are not doing this on purpose, we do it out of habit, out of necessity, or out of conditioning.
Rev angel Kyodo williams has a fascinating talk called, Belonging: From Fear to Freedom on the Path to True Community, where she shares a lot of insight around why this happens.
She differentiates between true belonging and conditional belonging, which she also refers to as “membership in a club.” To maintain our membership, we learn early on that things like approval, goodness, performance, and pleasing were safer than authenticity.
We learn to enter every room scanning for what must be left behind until we don’t even recognize ourselves anymore. We implicitly know what gets us approval, what makes us “good,” and what keeps us connected. And very often, maintaining our membership means losing ourselves in the process.
Yet, there are also spaces where we can get glimpses of a return.
Even if you spend your whole life relating to yourself one way, you can still enter a room that’s organized completely differently and feel something shift.
A room where there is no urgency, no anticipation, no performance, and no cognitive load communicates that you don’t have to fight yourself there. And this allows you to experience a totally different way of being.
At first, this experience will be fleeting. You’ll only be able to feel it when someone else facilitates it for you. In this intentional room, on retreat, or with a particular teacher.
Sometimes we need to experience these conditions in relationship first before we can reliably recreate them for ourselves. This allows us to tap into someone else’s regulation or embodiment and borrow it for awhile.
This is powerful because it gives us a glimpse of what embodiment feels like. Over time and with practice, we can begin building this for ourselves.
Reclaiming our embodiment goes against the grain of culture.
Culture conditions us to passively consume and mindlessly seek relief. The drive for efficiency and instant gratification can be a b***h to break. Yet, we can learn to loosen our grip, to relate differently, and to slowly create more sustainable conditions for ourselves over time.
What we first borrow from someone else can gradually become our own.
But that doesn’t happen automatically.
Returning to ourselves requires significant fortitude.
We are used to being in spaces where belonging is conditional: be agreeable, be loyal, be useful, don’t rock the boat, don’t need too much, don’t feel too much, don’t tell the truth if it makes the group uncomfortable.
Belonging to ourselves is something completely different. It is the increasingly embodied experience of not having to self-abandon in order to remain connected.
You can feel something without immediately overriding it.
You can stay firm in what you know without needing anyone else to agree.
You can stay with yourself in the presence of disappointment, conflict, shame, or fear.
You no longer enter every room unconsciously scanning: What part of me has to be left outside in order to belong here?
You don’t need to belong to anyone else because you belong to yourself.
As rev Angel says, “Once we become committed to the ultimate practice of intimacy that is self-belonging, we become philosophers, every single one of us. And when we pull back the veil and step into that love of wisdom, we automatically become atopos, or out of place, in so many places in our lives.
There’s something really seductive about that solo hero’s journey, just as it’s seductive to imagine oneself clawing your way through and then over the masses of humans bogged down in their misery, treachery, and violence, on behalf of everything from God to country to football teams, aka belonging. Swimming against the stream of society, social media, and cultural norms is a tall order and it’s commendable.”
It is a tall order indeed because the body isn’t only a place of intuition, personal power, and wisdom. Being in the body also means encountering difficult feelings like grief, loneliness, shame, desire, fear, and all the truths you’ve been avoiding your whole life.
That is not comfortable.
And that is why leaving makes perfect sense.
We were taught to leave.
Leaving was how we survived.
We didn’t notice we were leaving.
We never built the capacity to stay,
The work is not to become someone who never leaves. It’s to become someone who notices when they leave and builds the capacity to stay. It is remaining in contact with yourself even when there is friction between you and the world around you. It is feeling safe enough within yourself to be able to handle all of it.
As rev Angel teaches, if you’re not in your body, there’s nowhere to stay.
And you cannot stay with yourself while living outside your body.
Embodiment is learning to inhabit your body and yourself more fully. When you can stay in your body, you increase your awareness of your own experience while it is happening. This allows you to lean into curiosity and to listen instead of being in a constant fight against yourself.
Over time, your body becomes a source of wisdom rather than something your mind constantly overrides. Your body is sending signals, pings, constriction, yeses and nos all the time. The question is whether consciousness is receiving those signals or whether habituated override is interfering.
Embodiment is what closes this gap.
When the gap narrows, we return to ourselves.
This continual homecoming increases sensitivity which means we can feel more and notice earlier. Our body no longer has to scream at us because we can now hear its whispers.
We gain more body literacy, more emotional granularity, we have more choice, more self-trust, we understand what we are feeling in real time, we recover more quickly, and we stop asking, “Why did I just do that?”
An embodied person has more capacity to stay. They have access to more information about themselves while there is still time to choose intentionally.
As Rev Angel teaches, “The purpose of a body practice is to increase one’s sensitivity to your own experiences, emotions, and to learn in the process what it is that you tend to keep out, what it is that you’ve been taught to ignore or look over or bypass…. A body practice helps us not only to learn to tolerate more discomfort, but also to be able to be more and more sensitive so that we can recognize when we’re resisting our practice, when we’re resisting becoming more intimate with ourselves.”
Here’s how this translates into ordinary life.
Perhaps someone asks something of you and instead of automatically accommodating you pause long enough to feel a contraction. You create space and feel your body saying no. Now, you can respond without abandoning yourself.
Maybe you are having a challenging conversation and something triggers you. You feel your body brace and your temperature rise. You are aware of the urge to defend yourself, but you notice it in time to pause before immediately reacting.
Sometimes grief arrives. The impulse to distract or escape is strong, but increasingly, you stay a little longer. You discover that difficult feelings can move all the way through without destroying you.
More sensitivity means more life, more choice, more range, more availability.
You become more available not just to the hard moments, but also to things like beauty, pleasure, joy, love, connection, awe, and satisfaction.
You can step off the hamster wheel of more, faster, better because you can appreciate what is already enough.
Embodiment is not just hearing yourself, it’s gradually becoming more trustworthy to yourself. The gap between who you are and what you do shrinks. You have a stronger relationship to yourself and a center of gravity that is internal.
You stop checking parts of yourself at the door.
You can stay in the conversation longer.
You can get up and go pee.
You are more available to your life.
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But this doesn’t happen through magic, manifestation, or because you understand embodiment intellectually now.
The habits of self-abandonment were built through repetition and so is the capacity to stay.
This is where practice comes in.
We are practicing all the time. The question is not whether we are practicing, but whether we’re conscious of what we’re practicing.
Every override is practice. Every refusal to pee is practice. Every performance is practice.
You practiced leaving before you realized you were practicing.
Now you can practice staying on purpose.
Every pause, every truth, every boundary, every intentional choice interrupts autopilot.
Practice is repeated conscious participation.
Thousands of small interruptions, each one giving the nervous system new evidence that it’s okay to stay.
At first, this happened to us.
Someone else created the conditions through a class or retreat. Or we experienced a moment of interruption like awe, grief, or profound beauty that allowed more of life to reach us.
But we cannot sit around and wait for life to shake us awake, we have to participate.
We need to notice our own habits and ways of responding to life while it is happening. We need to create our own interruptions and practice them until they feel familiar.
This is how our nervous system learns and our capacity grows. This is how our body begins to feel like home.
This is how staying begins to feel less threatening.
The feeling that once required a retreat, a teacher, or a carefully curated room becomes increasingly available to you.
First, someone else shows you the way back.
Then you practice your own way back.
And eventually, you know the way home.
The borrowed return becomes your own embodied return.
And this changes everything.
You no longer need to leave yourself every time life gets uncomfortable.
The game of whack-a-mole can stop because you can see how the entire web is connected.
We tend to experience all the ways we leave ourselves as separate problems: anxiety, porous boundaries, overthinking, low confidence, immature relationships, poor self-regulation, indecision, etc.
I see them as different expressions of a common underlying issue: not feeling solidly located inside of yourself.
This manifests in many familiar ways: overriding what you know, second-guessing what you feel, looking outside of yourself for permission and approval, shape-shifting to maintain your membership in the club, self-abandoning when someone else disagrees.
Solving everything from the neck up.
And living with the anxiety and fragmentation that follow.
People come into coaching saying, I want to trust myself, I want to know what I want, I want better relationships, I want less anxiety, I want better boundaries, I want to feel like I am enough, I want to be myself.
What they are reaching for without having language for it yet is that they want to belong to themselves.
And they want everything that comes downstream of that: being able to tell the truth, maintain healthy boundaries, have difficult conversations, self-regulate, access more beauty, intimacy, and grace, repair ruptures, feel more satisfied with their lives, and experience more mature relationships.
And here’s the thing, once you can stay with yourself, you also become more capable of staying with others.
If you can tolerate your own insecurity and disappointment, you don’t need others to fix it for you.
If you can tolerate your own discomfort, you can stay more curious about how you impact others.
If you can trust your own experience, you can let others trust theirs too.
Self-belonging reduces what your relationships are asked to carry for you.
As your self-belonging increases, your relational capacity does too.
The capacities we develop do not stay inside of us.
The more you can stay with yourself, the more others can stay with themselves in your presence.
Your internal work becomes their external conditions.
We are influencing each other’s nervous systems all the time.
Your capacity for discomfort determines how much truth someone can tell you.
Your capacity for shame determines whether or not someone can hold you accountable.
Your ability to self-regulate affects how much others need to manage your emotions.
When others have to manage you less, they are safer to be more of themselves around you.
Your self-belonging allows others to be more free.
Your embodiment has a ripple effect that extends far beyond you.
This is how your entire life changes when you learn to become somewhere you can stay. You stop scanning every room to determine what parts of yourself to leave behind. You hear and honor your own knowing without needing buy-in or approval from others. You don’t care about your membership card anymore.
You are strong enough within yourself to be able to withstand other people’s reactions. Losing someone else’s approval no longer means losing yourself.
You can hear the whispers before they become screams, respond to them while they are happening, and stay when things get hard. And because you no longer need to abandon yourself to belong, you can relate to others without requiring them to abandon themselves either.
Most importantly, you realize that your body was never a logistical problem to whip into compliance, it was the place you were always trying to come home to.
The following embodiment practice to accompanies this essay:
Nicole Griffin is a coach and facilitator whose work focuses on what gets between people and direct contact with their own lives — and what it takes to return.
Work with Nicole.
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