Embodiment
Embodiment is the process of integration of our lived experiences through our bodies or felt sense. The field of embodiment has grown greatly over the past ten years, with practices ranging from Trauma therapy to mindful walking emerging, while a growing body of research has shown the rich impact practicing conscious embodiment can have on everyday experience.
Embodiment work builds the space and time for feeling back into the body and the skin we live in. Sometimes this work is simply there to help us come in contact again with the pleasure that is our body, that can be found in movement or touch, in being held and seen. Other times this work goes deeper: we find places of tension and resistance which, while felt in the present, draw on habits of the past. When we come to ourselves through our bodies we are asking our minds to yield space to the present, to what is happening at this exact moment. In this place resides our unknown creativity, the spontaneous body without narrative. As we allow our bodies’ voices to rise and our minds to drop, a sea of stories flow forward, which we can begin to untangle and perhaps even allow ourselves to let go of.
Our lives are often lived through the lens of an identity we have built for ourselves a long time ago. Old patterns of talking, old expectations, roles we chose once but forgot we could also eventually let go of. Life often gets lived through the stories of past times, and we forget that we may to choose to live life in the present. Contemplating our experience of life via the body, rather then just though talking, we make physical these stored stories, and we begin to move with them, stretch in them, loosen them. We physically feel identity as malleable and the ability to step out of one frame into another can be liberating and breathtaking.
Sessions combine both talk and touch, whereby I explore with clients the questions they face in their lives which leave them uncertain. Together we establish a safe space where the tight hold they might have on the narratives of their lives can slowly loosen, they can breathe into the question of their identity once again and return to a felt sense of their lives. It is in this felt sense where we can often rediscover curiosity, joy, pleasure and safety. From this space are we more ready and willing to unhook habits of being which no longer serve us and new bodily experiences are a cause of curiosity rather then fear or shame.
Sessions typically lasts 60 minutes