I spent most of my life disconnected from my body. Ask me a decade ago, “what is embodiment?” and I’d have cringed. Sounds like unshaved armpits and tie-dye, I’d have said, and moved on. Then my ex told me I walked “too stiff,” and the meaning of embodiment suddenly felt a little closer to home. Was I really that stiff? Was I really that… absent?
Still, I had no real idea what embodiment meant, and frankly, how to become embodied felt even further out of reach. Then came August 2022, the middle of what I’d declared my official slow year, and a trip to Tulum that would challenge everything I thought I knew about what it means to come home to the body…
I arrived in the early afternoon with grand ambitions to scout retreat spaces, map out offerings, and figure out how to share everything I’d been learning about slowing down. I settled into my bungalow, then decided to wander the jungle and get acquainted with the grounds. That’s when I noticed a group of men shoveling glowing rocks from a blazing furnace into a clay dome nestled in a clearing among the trees. What is that?
I made my way back to reception. A Temazcal, they told me. A traditional Mayan ceremony for detoxification and purification. Lovely, I thought. A sauna under the stars. Perfect way to kick off the trip. I signed up, went back to my bungalow, threw on a bikini, and showed up an hour later ready for a relaxing evening.
The ceremony began with about fifteen of us, including a shaman, gathered outside the dome. The shaman began speaking about rebirth. About how the clay dome represented the womb of Mother Earth. About cleansing the body and mind.
“You might feel fear,” he said. “The darkness and the heat can bring up things you’ve been carrying for a long time. That fear is not yours.”
My heart skipped. Fear? Not mine? I wasn’t planning on doing any emotional heavy lifting tonight. And yet, I was just curious enough to stay. Twenty minutes later, I was sitting inside a pitch-black clay dome on a hard concrete floor, people pressed in around me, the air so thick and hot I was struggling to breathe. I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face. The walls felt closer than they were.
I have to go. The thought rose fast.
“I can’t breathe,” I told the woman blocking the entrance, my voice already climbing. “I’m going to leave.” I started climbing past her toward where I knew the opening was. Then the shaman’s voice cut through the dark.
“The fear is not yours, sister. The fear is not yours.”
I froze. I didn’t understand what he meant. But something in those words made me pause long enough to notice that the others were breathing. Labored, effortful breathing, but… breathing. And so was I. I drew in a slow sip of air. Got a small measure of relief. Drew in another. I placed a hand over my heart. Okay. Okay.
I flipped over and pressed my forehead into the ground. Please God, give me peace. I stayed there for what felt like forever. And slowly, something started to relax in me. I stopped trying to think my way through and started moving… rubbing my chest, shaking my arms, breathing into each sensation instead of running from it. I became so present with my body that my mind went quiet. There was a stillness I hadn’t earned through discipline or meditation, but through surrender.
I didn’t fully understand what was happening. But I instinctively knew I didn’t need to. My thoughts had given way to my body, and my body knew exactly what to do.
The Real Meaning of Embodiment
Embodiment means fully inhabiting the body, being present with its sensations, its emotions, and the aliveness that pulses through it at every moment. It’s both a state of being and a dynamic practice of returning to presence. Of moving out of thought and into full feeling.
When we allow ourselves to actually feel our emotions, our physical sensations, the full range of what it means to be human without running away, something begins to alchemize in us. We begin moving through life with courage, with deeper awareness, and with an ineffable connection to all that is. A connection that can only be experienced.
For a long time, I didn’t have that. I feared the grief of a breakup, convinced that emotional pain would simply undo me. I feared being alone, feared failing at my business, feared what people would think. I’d push forward a little, then retreat into cycles of thought and doubt. I overthought my appearance, my sex life, my relationships, my bank account.
Coming home to my body changed that. It started in that Temazcal and slowly unfolded over the next few years of exploration and practice. Learning to fully inhabit my body, to move with it and trust its natural intelligence, has been the most transformative experience of my life. Because the body doesn’t lie, it doesn’t spiral, it doesn’t catastrophize like my mind does. It simply is.
Out of the head, into the body. And with that comes a groundedness that is felt both within and without.
How to Become Embodied
Becoming embodied is not something you can think your way into. It’s something you have to experience. I say this as someone who spent the better part of her life living almost entirely from the neck up. The kind of person who led with intellect first, feelings a distant second. And while that served me in many ways, it also kept me at arm’s length from myself and from the full, felt experience of being alive.
Embodiment asks us to do the opposite of what most of us were trained to do. It’s a process of surrendering, of freeing the mind, of rising above thought, so we can truly feel ourselves, again and again. So we can know, and not just understand, who we really are.
Here are the four core practices that have shaped my journey home to the body.
Move Your Body Without an Agenda
Close your eyes, get on your hands and knees, and just move. It sounds almost too simple. But as we all know, simple is not the same as easy. Because the real question is, how often do you actually allow yourself to just feel your own body? The pleasure, the tension, the vitality, the discomfort, the joy that lives in it.
When we start to feel the body without directing it, without a workout goal, or a dance performance or anything else, we begin to experience ourselves in a new way. We find movement we didn’t know was possible. We find parts of ourselves we’d forgotten were there. The body, given permission, knows exactly what it needs.
Dance When No One’s Watching
I used to think this was the most cringe-worthy advice imaginable. Dance alone in my living room? Please. And yet, I secretly loved to dance. I’d just spent so long thinking of my body as something for a partner or for an audience that I’d never let myself simply have fun in it. The first time I danced alone I felt ridiculous. Like I was doing it wrong.
Today, I dance almost every day. It’s how I get in touch with the flow of life moving through me. It’s how I express, transmute and integrate the experiences of the day. The frustrations, the joys, and the things I haven’t yet even found words for.
Get to Know Yourself Sexually
A couple of months after Tulum, I started working with a tantric coach. So much had already moved in me. I’d begun to understand the roots of my fear and to move through the world with more presence, but I sensed there was still so much of myself left unexplored.
It was through that work that I found the courage to truly look at, and feel, my whole body. Including the parts I’d long ignored or felt disconnected from.
Your sexuality is not separate from your embodiment. It is your embodiment. It’s your life force. The energy that creates, that expresses, and that connects you to your own aliveness. For too long I treated it as something outside of myself and something dependent on a man to activate. Learning to reclaim it as my own source of pleasure, power and presence has freed me in ways I’m still discovering.
Quiet the Mind
Some people may push back on this one, and that’s okay. The beauty of embodiment is that we each find our own way in. But what I’ve come to know for myself is this: the noisier my mind, the less I feel. The less contact I have with sensation and the less present I am in my body.
So on the days when I’m most in my head, my practice isn’t movement or dance, it’s actually complete stillness. Eyes closed. Feeling my inner body. Noticing sensation as it moves and transforms, without any effort on my part. The felt sense of simply being here, in this body, in this moment with no-one to be, nowhere to go, and nothing to do, other than be right here. Right at home.
Coming Home to the Body
An hour later, the Temazcal ceremony ended, and I crawled out through the low opening of the dome. The shaman was kneeling at the entrance, one hand over his heart, his eyes steady and kind as he watched me emerge.
“In your courage, you will be healed, sister,” he said. “And in your healing, all of us will be healed.” I looked him in the eye and nodded. I know.
As I stepped outside, the cool night air washed over me. Above, the stars were impossibly bright. The jungle was alive with sound. My heart felt both lighter and fuller, like something I’d been holding onto tightly had finally let go. Fear had been living in me silently for years, shaping the way I moved through the world. And I hadn’t even known it was there until I was forced to stop running from it.
That night in the jungle, I didn’t find freedom through thinking. I didn’t reason or analyze or intellectualize my way through. I found it through the only thing that was available to me in that darkness — my body. The breath, the ground beneath my hands, and the simple, animal fact of being alive.
The body is not a problem to be solved. It is the very instrument of our liberation. It’s the place where fear is met, where emotion is metabolized, where we stop being a concept to ourselves and start being real.
Embodiment has been the most transformative journey of my life. I move differently now, I feel more, and I fear less. And when fear does come I know how to meet it.
Out of the head, into the body. That’s where your life is waiting for you.
Are you ready to come home?
