What are the benefits of being embodied

Why living embodied over living in your head gives you empowerment and agency to live your life on your terms

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So what is embodiment in fact? Embodiment is simply having awareness of what’s going on within our bodies. What state are we in internally.

Chances are most of us spend our time in our heads and that can get us into the stress state very, very easily. We can be thinking about the future, we can be pondering on the past, we can be thinking about present conundrums. However being in the head, it’s likely that we’re going to be in a stressed state.

Being in the embodied state, dropping into the body, is just about noticing what is going on;  recognising that as we are embodied - in the body, we have thoughts and that we are not our thoughts.

We can get very caught up in thinking, and thinking that our thoughts are our actual selves. When really we are this embodied self. And when we have awareness of our embodied states, this brings us into our present tense and at that point in presence, we have power, we have agency to change, to direct whatever states we might be in at that given time, whether we are in a stress state.

We can bring ourselves back into presence and into embodied states where we can bring ourselves back into nervous system regulation; which means we have the opportunity to choose. Do we stay stressed, do we stay in that state of stress, or do we bring ourselves into the state of rest and digest where we feel soothed, relaxed, calm, creative.

So to be embodied is critical in this day and age to ensure that we have agency over ourselves, that we don’t allow our thoughts, our minds to run away with us and to feel out of control when we step into that paradigm of consciousness, of being in our heads more often than we might like.

So to be embodied is an opportunity to check out with ourselves really where we are at and to have that power in that moment to choose what state we would like to be in.