I am sitting in front of my Coach on a Zoom Call. She has just asked me about the vision for my business and I’m off elaborating on all the creative ideas that I have.

As I am getting more and more excited about my vision, my legs have come across each other and even my arms have ended up in a twisted pretzel kind of posture. My breath had shortened and I’d started feeling a knot in my diaphragm.

Pause, she says.

What’s going on in your body right now?

Busted. I have resistance to tuning in what’s moving for me. But I know she is right. Somehow my subconscious has taken over the paintbrush and started splashing colorful and yet uncomfortable physical sensations all over my body (in an attempt to communicate some profound and yet obscure truth no doubt).

As I’m tracking what’s happening in my body, (the tightness in my solar plexus, the shortness of breath, the resistance itself) a whole zip file of feelings are starting to unravel in front of my inner eye.

Oh shit.

Two minutes later I’m crying as I get in touch with that part of me that’s very young, scared, and angry. The part that’s been starved for my attention and that has been in the way of me manifesting the life that I want.

What a relief to finally see, feel, and give it permission to be.

Instantly I feel lighter and more relaxed. I start speaking of my creative projects again and there is a sense of effortlessness and pleasure there, rather than the subtle frequencies of desperation. A different (more grounded and mature) part of me is in the driver’s seat again.

What made the difference?

The session was an hour long and I feel I made a quantum leap. One little tweak and it unlocked a big part of what’s been running my life hidden in the background.

How did we get there?

The keyword is Embodiment and even though it has many definitions the example above gives a little taster of what it is. Or, more importantly, how it can be applied.

To me it’s a bit like this:

All of life is consciousness. This consciousness we experience through our bodies. It is a bit like the pixels on a screen, except that the screen is our body and the pixels are our physical sensations.

Every thought and feeling runs as a physical sensation through our bodies. (Remember the green code in Matrix the movie?). There is no separation. Hence you can enter the system either through your thought, your feeling, or your body. They always work together.

When it’s in balance it feels good and you know that it runs ‘truth’. When it creates ‘discomfort’ you are running code that is not in alignment with truth.

Simple.

But of course not so easy as we are living in a society that has chronically conditioned itself to not pay attention to the subtleties of ‘physical sensations’. In fact, we have been taught to disregard this whole dimension of our being.

That’s why so much of inner work doesn’t work. Not in a long run. People go to therapists, do ayahuasca, read spiritual texts and they come up against the same set of challenges over and over again.

This holy trinity of mind, feeling, and body need to work together in something called tensegrity (tension and integrity). They are interdependent with each other. One informs and responds to the other in a continuous dance.

It’s like we have been given tools but we haven’t been really taught how to use them. So we are hammering with a drill and drilling with a hammer.

Embodiment is really the coming together of all the parts of us (mind, body, soul) to create integrity and wholesomeness. It’s the foundational key underlying all transformational work that we can set out to do.

It doesn’t matter what therapy or modality you decide to do if embodiment is part of your tool-kit, you will most likely be successful. You will learn that the hammer is best used for hammering and the drill for drilling (which means you will stop using your mind to control your feelings for example).

The basic tools

The number one tool is to PAY ATTENTION. (which means to feel, breathe and slow down etc.) Read more here.

The second one is to NOT REACT – i.e. not judge, not make the experience wrong.

And the third is to CHOOSE where to put the attention (which means to resource ourselves first. To see the white wall, not just the black dot and to allow ourselves the gift of pleasure, which is based on the knowledge that there is inherently nothing broken with us and that we are good and deserving).

Personally, I love it. It’s so intelligent and elegant. Whatever we work on, wherever we put our attention, it becomes a practice to deepen our understanding of ourselves and to cultivate our self-healing abilities. It’s applicable to every aspect of ourselves and helps us to make sense of life itself.

It’s empowering and very rewarding as through the process itself we not only heal but learn how to heal. We become more conscious.

The role of the therapist or guru as someone who knows more than us because they have a degree becomes obsolete. However, if the person is connected to their own felt sense (regardless of their title), then they become a very valuable guide and mirror in initiating us back into our wholeness.

Through the simple act of helping us to pay attention to ourselves.

And as we start taking responsibility for ourselves in that way, we finally start growing up. We become mature humans whose role is to help others in the process of remembering their self-healing abilities.

Kasia Patzelt works as an Embodiment Coach and is passionate about integrating our spiritual experiences into the here and now of daily life aka how to be truly heart intelligent. She is a writer on Medium and works one-on-one with people online or on the magic island of Ibiza, where she lives. www.kasiapatzelt.com.

Image courtesy of Anna Tarazevich.