Embodiment, Part One

Where I've come from

Living in a body, last Friday

In the summer, our intro counselling skills class caught me off guard with its somatic emphasis.

"Where do you feel that in your body?" I dutifully asked my client, but I couldn't tell the answer myself. I've known some of my friends experience their emotions this way, but despite being a deep, intense feeler, I've always thought, "Not me."

My supervisor encouraged me recently to trust my skill in helping my clients connect to their bodies. I thought, "I don't have any skill in that. How can I trust it?"

I find it hard to know what my body is telling me. And yet, I love the sensory world. I'm hungry for beauty, whether in the thrill of the year's first plum blossoms or a finely crafted piece of pottery. I love good food and a simple cup of tea. I love creative clothing and the world of art. I love planting bulbs and digging my toes into wet sand. I'm aesthetic, not ascetic.

I don't want to live in the ivory tower of my mind, yet I've often fallen trap to the assumption that the more rational I am, the better I am. The Romantic and analytical parts of me seesaw up and down. The embodied part gets little attention at all, or attention that comes and goes. When I'm hiking or swimming, I feel embodied, but it's easy enough for me to let all that go again and climb up the ivory stairs to where I feel competent and in control.

I love talking about and thinking about emotions. Actually feeling them in the moment? Not so much. Yet in some of the best counselling sessions I've had, my therapist got me into my body and helped me connect with my emotions directly. Something shifted in and through my emotions. I'm drawn to theories like EFT and AEDP that focus on emotions as adaptive, a wave we need to ride rather than suppress, so we can come down the other side then take appropriate action. And a huge part of the way these theories work is through attuning to the body.

Blast. I guess if I want to be a brave therapist who gets right into the messy emotional work and helps my clients have courage too, I need to figure embodiment out for myself. I can’t put it off for later anymore. My prof Gillian says, "We can't ask our clients to go further than we've gone ourselves."

Very well then. Why is embodiment so hard for me? A few thoughts.

I hit my teen years in an era strung between two extremes: the hyper-sexualized secular culture and conservative Christian purity culture. From Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera, I learned I was valuable insofar as I was sexy, skinny, and had straight blonde hair. But I bombed the heroin chic aesthetic, curves erupting all over me come puberty, including my curly hair. From purity culture I learned that how I looked didn't really matter, as long as I wore a hoodie instead of a crop top. It was doing everything right that mattered, and if I did everything right, I would automatically be rewarded with Hunky Christian Virgin Husband in my early 20s. The most important thing about my body was what it didn't do and didn't feel.

One extreme emphasized my body as an object while the other emphasized my body as a danger, a potential temptation to myself and men. (Let's be honest, Christian culture expected the beauty ideal too, just covered up.) Both emphasized that what men thought about my body mattered most. Both told me that as a woman, I needed to be less, whether less flesh or less desire. The more I could perform this disappearing trick, the more I'd be loved by God and a man. It's not surprising I grew up with conflicted feelings about my body, like many others my age. "Too much and not enough," was the subconscious mantra swirling around me.

When my early 20s arrived and no husband was air-dropped on my stoop, I thought, "Oh well, I can survive until my late 20s." And so on and so forth, until my late thirties, where my lease is nearly up. At some point I had to reckon with the fact that what I thought I was promised—the sexual prosperity gospel—was never a promise from God. I've had to grapple with my shattered assumptions and try to to understand my life as good and meaningful even if I don't get what I've always desired.

Within that, it's hard to know what place my body has. For me, being in a body has involved a lot of sadness and struggling. It's easy to think that if I met some beauty ideal, maybe I wouldn't still be single. It's easy to experience my body as my enemy when I have to tell it every day, "You can't have what you want—and maybe it's your fault." (Poor body.) The reality of unmet desires can't help but shape my theology. Any worldview that tells me, "You can have it all," is out of touch, not only with my experience but with countless others who experience suffering, disability, and limitations in their bodies, some far more than I ever have.

One of the best ways to be embodied is to experience the body for what it does, not primarily for what it looks like. And yet, this is a struggle for me. I've never been into sports or dance, just fits and starts of exercise. I enjoy them but don't feel compelled enough to sustain them once motivation winds down. So I carry another "should", that of health culture: I should be at the gym, I should juice cleanse, I should weigh what I weighed when I was 25 and biking and running all the time rather than sitting at coffee shops writing psychology papers all day.

And yet being in a body has also been a deep source of joy, as someone who lives intensely and loves the physical world. I do believe that we were created to be embodied: "God saw what he had made and called it good." I've done work in telling myself that it's okay to take up space—who I am is not too much or too little, it's just enough. I can be silly and intense, a big thinker and a big feeler, wear loud clothing, have a lot to say, and never ever subject myself again to low-rise jeans. (Gen Z: it's a trap! Run away.)

I've become better at this stuff, but I still don't really know how to listen to my body, the messages running through my heartbeat, muscles, and nerves. I want to get better at valuing my body and attuning to what it's telling me. But I stare up at a steep cliff I don't know how to climb.

For now, when I get a little thrill about something sensory—a velvet cushion, a branch bursting into bloom, pickled red onions—I remind myself I can experience this because of my body. I'm grateful for that.

Now when I think, "I feel sad," or, "I feel anxious," or, "I feel happy," I ask myself, "How do I know that?" This is a recommendation from Hilary McBride, embodiment guru of Vancouver. (I'll present some hot takes on her later... right now they're lukewarm.) McBride is right—I know I feel sad because my chest feels heavy and my shoulders slump. I know I feel anxious because my gut is knotted and it feels hard to take full breaths. I know I'm happy because my shoulders open up, my chest expands, and I feel light. My emotions come to me through my body. Who knew?

"Baby steps," I tell myself. I've got a lot to unlearn and retrain. If I know how hard it is for me, I can understand how hard it is for my clients, too. I hope with time I'll figure out how to come home to the only body I have. Then maybe I can share a little light with others on that path.

Note: I hope to process more through these posts as I continue this journey. It felt important to start with my own experience before getting too theoretical. In posts to come I'll throw out various thoughts on theology, psychology, body positivity/neutrality, and whatever else I think is cool. I'm no expert so I'd love any feedback on your thoughts and experiences around embodiment.