Basic principles ¦ Embodiment

Resilience & Embodiment
A user manual for the Body-Mind

workshops by
Andrew Cook MSc RCST

Embodiment

Finding the Earth. image Copyright Andrew Cook 2020

The idea of Embodiment encompasses a range of states of consciousness, skills and ways of relating to to the physical body, the senses, self, and the world. Full embodiment is almost impossible without reference to emotions related to Love - such as appreciation or gratitude.

Embodiment is very natural for a dog or a tiger. Or for someone who has been born outdoors and who sleeps under the stars. But when it has been lost (or misplaced!) it takes a little work to find it again.

If you could do just ONE thing that could

Improve your physical health and resilience
Improve your mental health and resilience
Improve your relationships with others
Improve your relationship with the natural world

… would that be useful?

These are all connected together though the way that your mind interacts with you body and senses.

Our culture has dug itself a big hole, by forgetting how our mind and body have evolved in relationship to each other. Many of the problems of the world and many problems suffered by individuals can be largely attributed to this body-mind dislocation - i.e. to a loss of Embodiment. Or to put it another way - to Dissociation.

Embodiment is a journey, in which we make friends with our body. The body then re-members itself.

...We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
(T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets)