What is embodied awareness?
It’s easy when life is busy and stressful to get caught up in our heads, becoming stressed, worried or anxious. Yet, despite traditional Western medical thinking (which is slowly changing) our minds and bodies are inexorably connected. What impacts our minds also impacts our bodies, and vice-versa. Yet in our modern world, we can sometimes spend far too much time in our heads and not enough time connecting with our bodies.
As many people who practice mindfulness or meditation have found, making time in your life to stop and focus can have many beneficial impacts on our lives, such as lowering levels of stress, improving heart function and blood pressure, calming the mind to reduce anxiety and increasing levels of happiness. Yet, we’re increasingly trained to identify the mental and emotional impacts of stress and low mental resilience… we’re surprisingly not so good at recognising the physical impacts.
Have you ever had someone tell you to lower your shoulders, only to realise when you do that your shoulders were up around your ears? That’s embodied awareness – being aware of how your body is responding to stress. It’s likely that you were holding onto a lot of stress in your shoulders and neck, but you were so ‘in your head’ that you hadn’t checked in with the impact of that stress on your physical body. It’s about understanding and letting go of the physical stress and trauma.
In this way, embodied awareness could be seen as a natural extension of the psychological intervention called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), in which a trained professional helps you to accept your thoughts (the good and the bad) rather than trying to change them. This intervention teaches people that it’s OK to feel what you feel, without judgement. It has been shown to help with first identifying and then processing thoughts and emotions. Through embodied awareness, you take this self-awareness one step further and reconnect with your body too, bringing awareness to both your body and mind.
“As a process, Embodied Self Awareness respects the unity of our body-mind experience and endeavours to embrace our innate self-healing capacity. This transformative self-healing approach brings attention to how and where depression, anxiety, trauma, stress, and chronic health conditions are being experienced and maintained within the body-mind relationship, and how distress can be alleviated,” says Christina Manfredi, clinical psychotherapist and counsellor at Transpersonal and Shamanic Psychotherapy & Counselling Australia.
Questions to help you reconnect with your body
So, how do you do this? It’s important to remember that sometimes we all need extra help. If you need to see a professional, see a professional.
If you’re comfortable managing a low level of stress, anxiety or trauma and want to understand how this is presenting in your physical body, simply asking yourself the right questions can help. The following 10 questions are adapted from embodied awareness expert Dr. Alan Fogel’s recent article in Psychology Today:
- Are you aware of your own body sensations, stress or calm or emotional feelings during school, work, housekeeping, childcare, etc.?
- What are your levels of muscle tension like? Do you grip the steering wheel tighter than necessary, stretch your neck forward when trying to read a computer screen, hold yourself rigidly at attention when other people are around, or clench your jaw?
- Throughout the day, do you change your movement or posture to alleviate the tension in your body, or do you just keep going, moving, talking, working, and ignoring your body state?
- When you feel tired or achy, do you know what happened to lead to this state? Can you feel what your body needs in these states?
- Do you ever stop thinking and doing and just take time to feel yourself?
- Do you practice/receive any type of leisure activity that calls for embodied self-awareness such as yoga, massage, bodywork, meditation, dance, arts and crafts, music, sports, etc.? Do you practice this with the intention to expand self-awareness and relaxation, or are you caught up in “doing” it, trying to achieve a goal, or thinking about something else the whole time?
- Do you ever stop to smell the roses, engage in open-ended play with a child or a companion animal, indulge in prayer, walk in nature with all your senses alert, share non-demanding touch with someone you love, take a hot bath, or go to a spa with no agenda except to relax?
- Do you ask for help when you need it, or think that you have to do it yourself?
- If you ever suffered a serious injury, accident, were a crime, refugee, or abuse victim, been in a natural disaster or at war, suffered from racism sexual harassment or abuse, have you ever done trauma therapy to deal with the emotional aftermath?
- Can you talk about your emotions easily, or do you push them aside?
Why not take 10 minutes out of your day to truly read and answer the questions above?
Additional reading:
- Three States of Embodied Self-Awareness: The Therapeutic Vitality of Restorative Embodied Self-Awareness, International Body Psychotherapy Journal, Volume 19, Spring, 2020, by Alan Fogel
- Three States of Embodied Self-Awareness in Rosen Method Bodywork: Part 1: Practitioner Observations of their Clients Rosen Method International Journal, Volume 13, Issue 1, 2020 by Alan Fogel
- Albahari M. (2009). Witness Consciousness: It’s Definition, Appearance and Reality Journal of Consciousness Studies, 16 (1), 62-84.
- Bainbridge Cohen, B. (2008). Sensing, Feeling, and Action: The Experiential Anatomy of Body-Mind Centering. Northampton, MA: Contract Editions.
- Fogel, A. (2009). The Psychophysiology of Self Awareness: Rediscovering the Lost Art of Body Sense. New York: Norton & Company.