In which I remember I have a body, and discover it has been trying to get my attention for years.
For most of my early adult life, I treated my body rather like an elderly uncle I am obliged to invite to dinner but don’t particularly wish to engage in conversation. I fed it, clothed it, occasionally exercised it, but mostly saw it as a necessary inconvenience,something to carry my brain from one meeting to the next.
It’s an oddly modern malaise, this detachment from the flesh we inhabit. We tend to live in our heads, (maybe it’s just me!), or worse, on our screens. Our bodies become transportation units,bio-pods for productivity. That is, until something breaks, creaks, slows, or sighs in protest. Then we go searching for a fix, like someone calling IT support because the printer isn’t responding.
But embodiment, I’ve come to learn, is not a flaw in the system. It is the very condition of being human.
There was a moment,embarrassingly recent,when this truth first struck me. I had wandered into a pilates class, mostly because someone I admired said it would be “centering.” I didn’t know quite what that meant, but I was assured there would be no chanting, and I fancied myself limber enough to survive it.
Well. Suffice it to say, I spent most of the session wondering whether I had injured something vital. But in between the stretches and mild indignities, I noticed something remarkable. I wasn’t thinking. Not in the usual anxious, future-oriented, mentally spreadsheeting way. I was… present. In my breath. In the strain of my limbs. In the curious architecture of my bones. For once, I wasn’t hovering above my body like a mildly disappointed supervisor,I was in it.
And there, in that odd assortment of postures and the slight humiliation of cramping and toppling sideways, I glimpsed the grace of embodiment.
To be embodied is to be tethered to the real. It is to experience life not merely as an idea, but as touch, taste, ache, and breath. It is to know joy as something that hums in your chest, and grief as something that lodges in your throat. The body does not lie. It cannot. It speaks in the language of sensation, and,when we learn to listen,it teaches us things the mind alone cannot know. As Dr Bessel Van Der Kolk says, “The Body Keeps the Score”.
This is why the great wisdom traditions have always insisted on the holiness of the body. Incarnation, after all, is not just theology,it is a kind of posture toward life. It says that the divine does not hover above the world but dwells within it,within flesh, breath, skin, and soil.
And yet, how often we ignore this. We treat the body as either an object of shame or of conquest. We push it too hard or adorn it for approval, but rarely do we attend to it with gentleness. Rarely do we ask it how it’s doing,not in terms of metrics, but in terms of meaning.
Have you eaten slowly today? Sat in the sun? Walked without hurrying? (no shame here, my mother tells me I was born running!), Touched another hand with intention? These, I think, are not just acts of self-care but acts of remembrance. They remind us that we are not disembodied minds hurtling through space. We are creatures of clay and breath and wonder.
Embodiment is where presence begins. It is how we arrive in the moment,not as ghosts haunting our own lives, but as participants in the great messy miracle of being alive. It is the grounding practice beneath all others. You cannot listen, or love, or pray, or laugh meaningfully if you are not in your own body.
So let us practise embodiment,not as a new project for self-improvement, but as a return to our truest home. Let us honour the wisdom in our muscles and the memory in our bones. Let us pay attention to our tired feet and our tightened shoulders. Let us breathe, and in doing so, consent again to life.
This body,yours, mine,is not a problem to be solved. It is a sacred invitation to presence. It is how the soul takes up residence in the world.
And if, like me, you sometimes forget that you live in a body, let the morning light on your skin or the ache in your knees remind you.
You are here. You are whole. You are wonderfully, stubbornly, beautifully alive.
