Embodied Self Awareness

“Oh! Is there something inside my body I should be paying attention to?!”
Someone asked me that in a movement class once. Their question was funny and honest.

In “The Psychophysiology of Movement: The Lost Art of Sensing the Body” Dr. Alan Fogel begins:

“Only human beings have come to a point where they no longer know why they exist. They have forgotten the secret knowledge of their body, their senses, their dreams.” (Lame Deer & Erdoes, 1972, p. 157)

I’ve been called to assist people on a journey home to themselves. On a journey back to what Dr. Fogel calls “embodied self awareness.” A fancy way of saying being present with one’s full being body, mind, and heart.

“What may come as a shock is that the loss of attention to ourselves brings with it additional losses. We risk losing our emotional equanimity, our physical health, and our sense of well being” (Fogel, 2009, p 1.)

By “attention to ourselves” is meant self awareness, not self absorption. Self awareness is open, attentive, awake but relaxed. It opens out to others around us. Self absorption shuts us down and shuts out the world around us. I create a learning environment where the highest value is placed upon reconnecting with the interior landscape of  body, mind and heart in service to reconnecting to the outer world in meaningful ways.

There are plenty of places where we can go that offer ideals of what we should be doing with our body and that is a perfectly fine way to learn and it’s not the only way to learn. It brings us closer to someone else’s ideal of what your body should be doing. It’s good to be able to discern between different kinds of learning.

And it’s good to know how to work with those ideals in such a way that you can make them your own because embodied self awareness is about authenticity, that is, being comfortable in our own skin.

Uncovering our deep resources for embodied self awareness which includes self regulation and emotional intelligence requires patience and self compassion. Embodied self awareness  builds trust and offers a return home that so many of us long for.