What embodiment practices or routines support you to anchor in life, to stay connected to your inner compass, so that it keeps pointing you in the right direction? What practice of yours helps you to connect to your life, or to ground you in your life experience? With an anchoring embodiment practice we find our center in the storm. It is our lighthouse that holds the light for us in times of change or personal crisis, during societal changes or health challenges. It grounds us in a deeper sense of knowing, connectivity, and trust.ย
Embodiment practices ground you
An embodiment practice, or a spiritual practice, helps us connect to life, our surroundings, our inner wisdom and intuition. For some people it looks like religion and prayer, for others meditation and mindfulness, for some it is atheism but a strong sense of purpose. Personally, I know that an embodiment practice that I return to daily keeps me connected to what is most important. Personally, I know that an embodiment practice helps me distinguish between what I know to be true and necessary, and what is merely external noise, othersโ expectations of me, or other people trying to control or demand something from me that does not align with my values.
Find an anchoring practice
If we do not have an anchoring practice that keeps us in alignment with our values, relationships, dreams, and self-discipline, we divert from our own needs. If we do not practice connecting to our values and our purpose, we will follow other peopleโs values and agendas. But when you anchor in your felt sense of life, your body, and your embodiment, you meet the origin of your values, as well as your creative force, and your purpose. Many argue that we live in an age where too many people live without connecting to life fully – they do not connect to nature, or with other people, so how would they know who they are at their core, and what their values are?
An embodiment practice can be
- meditation with intention setting
- spending time in nature while connecting to nature consciously, breathing it in, being with nature, listening and touching it
- movement and free form dance, or
- martial arts and yoga that do not focus on fitness or performance. An embodiment practice allows you to consciously connect to a state of flow, lightness, trust and grounding. This is where you meet your intuition and inner self. This is not where you focus on fitness and performance.
Favor mental health and wellbeing
An embodiment practice connects us to our physicality as our senses become heightened and our emotions are allowed to be felt. Hence, embodiment practices favor our mental health and wellbeing.
- It keeps us guided and holds us in sync with what we know to be true, rather than looking for external validation, motivation, or authorities to lead us.
- As a spiritual practice it can be your meditation, your prayer, your ritual, your connection to nature and yourself, and lets you know that you are not alone, but a part of something bigger, something divine and magical, and that your life matters, and you can make a difference.
- An embodiment practice keeps us evolving and growing because it becomes a safe space for us to connect to what we know, and keeps showing us who we really are.
Connect to your true power
Without a spiritual practice, or without an embodiment practice, life turns outwards in search of meaning and ease, and becomes one of materialism and egoism. Your practice will instead ground you and connect you to something bigger than you can understand: Here you connect to your true power and inner strength. Here you learn how to lead in harmony with your heart open and your soul loud. This gives you vitality, clarity, purpose and life energy. And the longer you stick to your practice the deeper it gets, and as it gets more focused it gets better.
Opening up our world view
Based on my experience in healing my physical and emotional conditions I understand the profound importance of an embodiment practice and a spiritual connection to life; to our body, our surroundings, and our relationships. Opening up our world view, and our understanding of who and what we are, opens up for healing. I used to believe that doctors would do the helping and healing, but when I realized that there is the opportunity for me to heal my condition when I change my own approach, I made an impactful change in my life. Rather than trusting an external person to tell us what is happening and going to happen in my own body, I began to develop a close connection to myself and what my body was made of.ย
Connect to something bigger
When you change the way you look at your body, and the way you are relating to your nervous system and the neuro-pathways that you create daily with your thoughts and beliefs and patterns, you open up your understanding of the universe, how you are living, the relationships in your life, your hopes and dreams and desiresโฆ Now you can step outside of a box that frames your condition and your health, and with that change of perspective, huge changes can start to take place. My embodiment practice and spiritual practice invited newness to take place in my life and in my body.
I question โexpertsโ who focus on identifying with a disease or a condition and only work with the restrictions of that disease, because they encourage their followers to micromanage their day, their diet, their exercise routine, and sleep patterns. Focusing on symptoms makes your world revolve around your suffering rather than the bigger picture, which limits your life. The bigger picture is you connecting to something bigger: a practice in connecting to your embodiment, your holistic self, your emotional body, your nervous system, your spirit, your past, present and future.
Devotion holds healing power
Personally, as soon as I stopped identifying with my diagnosis and instead started to identify with health, my wellbeing and thriving, the old diagnosis or prognosis did not have such a strong hold of me anymore. When I opened up and devoted myself to my daily practice, the past diagnosis and prognosis had less control over me. You can actually make an impact on your healing and your health, rather than bumbling around finding solutions to symptoms. There is a purpose for this type of commitment on your part: to commit to life, to commit to your wellbeing, to commit to your healing, to feel your emotions, to commit to connecting to yourself, to feel your heart, to be with yourself. This holds so much healing power. Devoting years to my embodiment practice helped me find myself again and again in times of crisis, change, disease, heartbreak, and the pandemic.ย
If you do not know how to start an embodiment practice or how to begin this daily commitment ask yourself when you feel most connected to yourself, when your intuition is the loudest, what you enjoy doing, or what connects you to a sense of flow and shuts off the need to perform or proof your worth. When do you connect to your embodiment consciously without pressure to perform or achieve results? How do you understand yourself embodied; if you hold space for your embodiment in a daily practice, what is there to hold space for, what do you consist of? Let me know what you discovered.
Disclosure
In my coaching I neither strive to heal anyone or any condition, but rather hold a safe space for my clients for transformation to occur in its own time. I support people to come back to their body, with a trauma-informed approach, so that they can find a safe space to connect to their emotions, needs and desires, so that the heart and the mind can coexist. I offer empathic support during crisis and stressful life chapters. I know from personal experience that healing emotions and stress related conditions can only begin when a person finds a sense of safety and calm in the body, from within their own system.
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