Day 1 Practice: Embodiment
“It is not half so important to know as to feel.”
Embodiment is the first foundation of mindfulness, a wonderful starting point towards greater presence and awareness. I often recall my first yoga teacher instructions, encouraging us to move from “thinking and into feeling”, feeling the various sensations continuously present in the physical body; feeling all our emotions, moods, and mental states rather than thinking about them or living into their story. Feeling into our current experience enables us to have direct contact with reality without adding on or subtracting from what is happening through the mind. To sit in stillness, feeling the body and feeling the breath, is quite a powerful practice that can take us away from the mind made prison that we often create for ourselves about the past, the future, relationships, dramas, etc.
When we connect to our felt experience, living from the neck down rather than the neck up, we are freed from our cognitive hold on life, our many assumptions, judgments, and expectations. In contrast, when we are disembodied, it’s difficult to know how we are feeling and why we are feeling it, often causing us to act out. When we are unaware, it is difficult to learn from what is happening. When we are disembodied, we often feel disconnected from life, feeling isolated and alone. So, embodiment is a sort of homecoming, a remembering and connecting from within. And as we sharpen this quality of attention, wisdom and compassion deepens.
By practicing embodiment, we may also come to understand the ephemeral nature of life, the constant change, phenomenon appearing and disappearing, i.e., views, opinions, desires, emotions, health, relationships, and financial status. And maybe for a moment we consider how much stress we create in our lives when we deny this fundamental truth, our desire for things to remain unchanged, trying to control things we cannot control, or rely upon that which is unreliable?
So today I encourage you to stop multiple time throughout your day and practice being in your body rather than your thinking mind; feeling your way through the day, your experiences, needs and emotions rather than assessing, overanalyzing, or adding onto your experience. Embodiment is living by our felt experience.
“No one can ever explain to us how to have an experience. If they could, we would all be enlightened by now. Our task as practitioners is to bring the teachings to life in a personal way.”
“I meditate so that my mind cannot complicate my life.”
“As we practice meditation, we get used to stillness and eventually are able to make friends with the quietness of our sensations.”
“Many of us have been running all our lives. Practice stopping.”
“Finding a way to enjoy just sitting is key. Sitting meditation is a refuge, not a test.”
“We miss the real by lack of attention and create the unreal by excess of imagination.”