“You’re leaving your body,” Pam said. We were standing in the back of the room at a Craniosacral Therapy course. Pam was one of the instructors, and I was taking my first course. She had offered a hint of this bodily departure earlier in the course.
“You’re leaving part of yourself at the table,” she said as I finished a practice round as the therapist earlier in the course. Where we all tend to sit in our bodies wasn’t part of the curriculum. But I had a sense of what she meant, and I was intrigued.
At this particular moment we stood facing each other in the back of the room. Pam looked at me with her unblinking dark eyes. Her stoic facial features rested beneath a cool head of short, spiky, silver hair. I think even if I tossed a ball that hit her in the head she still wouldn’t budge. Or blink. It was break time, and the other students were walking around us as they filed out of the conference room.
“You’re leaving your body. You’re doing it right now,” she said.
I suddenly had a felt sense of what she meant. Kind of like when you finally find Waldo in the picture. He’d been there the whole time, but you just couldn’t see him–until you did. And then you couldn’t NOT see him. I had a sudden awareness of an energy floating above me. With that awareness, I felt myself consciously trying to pull it back down into my body. I had some success, moving it at least into my head and shoulders. It was a bit uncomfortable and felt like a strain to keep it there.
“You’re doing it again,” she said. Pam was unmoving. She just called out what she observed, with no judgment. No emotion.
I felt I could sense what she was talking about. But what was it? What part of “me” was I sensing? Was it my energy? My spirit? Part of me? All of me? And if I was leaving, who was running the show in my body?
This was the start of my fascination with Embodiment.
When I talk about Embodiment, I am referring to a kinesthetic sense. There is a felt presence to the energy in and around our bodies. This is something I feel we can all sense and see in ourselves and in others. This Embodiment can change moment to moment. This felt sense isn’t something we can necessarily think about and notice, which is one of the reasons why learning the skills to notice and interact with our energy is so important. It offers us information about ourselves and others that isn’t dependent on the voice in our head. While that voice is a part of us, it doesn’t represent our whole being.
Embodiment will be a topic of a lot of these blogs. I’ll share thoughts on what it is, what it means, how to practice it, and how to recognize when we embody aspects like archetypes or ancestral themes.
Thanks for reading today. -Carrie
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