Healthy Embodiment

A guest post edited and curated by Molly Weingrod, LSW from Autonomic Compass: Finding Home in Your Nervous System

The body is a site of much deeper intelligence than most of us realize. It is also the primary site of learning when we talk about the Autonomic Nervous System. For some of us, this is good news, for others, not so much. It depends on your relationship with your body. In order to do this work effectively, though, we need to cultivate a particular quality of relationship with our bodies. Let’s look at some of the common obstacles to this deepened relationship, and how to overcome them.

We have been trained, in the modern world, to identify with thinking. If we track back to the origin of this tendency, it was initially an assertion of rationality in a world governed by faith, that has transformed into an identification of identity with cognition and cognitive process. Yet the reason people reside in thinking is because we are traumatized. When people are traumatized, living in the body doesn’t feel very good. If we can figure out how to wear our bodies in a way that is more nourishing, and where we feel safer, this can change.

OBSTACLES TO HEALTHY EMBODIMENT

I AM SPIRITUAL, AND THE BODY IS THEREFORE…

Irrelevant? A distraction? Sinful? There is a deep history in modern Judeo-Christian religion, in many of its variants, of dividing the body from the spirit. There are strong taboos in many religions against experiencing embodied pleasure. There are origin stories that teach that the body is sinful. Without going into all of that here, the Autonomic Nervous System is the altar of your spirit. It is a neuro-electrical interface between spirit and matter.