The Healing Power of Intentional Embodiment

It is common knowledge that it is good to exercise. However, mindless exercise often does more harm than good. 

Blasting music in your ears, checking out, gazing at yourself in the mirror, and focusing on how many reps you can complete is often a better path to injury than a path to health.

Yet if you look at any gym, that is precisely what most people are doing. Exercise is often not a way to check in with your body, to feel the depths and contours of the landscape within, but a task like any other, a box that must be checked to have ‘health.’ 

"A human being's life is not to be understood as a summation of tasks completed but as a continuous becoming."

–Soren Kirkegaard

Checking out  is understandable. Though we may know that our body is a grand masterwork of biology, we often rightfully feel that our bodies are a place of illness, pain, suffering, disappointment, and alienation.

Yet, health is qualitative and subjective. It is something only we can feel for ourselves, and is cultivated by our courageous depth of feeling, our inner sight, or insight. Of course there are ‘objective’ markers of good health, but there is a deeper layer.

To truly have health requires to be at home in the body, at ease in one’s skin, to become oneself continuously, to be able to love the exploration of one’s inner world when it is both pleasurable and painful. And there is no objective scientific measure for that. You cannot measure inner peace, or interoception (depth of feeling) for that matter, with an instrument. 

Our ability to be in our body, to be fully embodied in the only home we will ever have, is in itself a spiritual path, a journey of its own. Indeed it is a heroic journey. Most of us have one or more health conditions that we would very much like to avoid feeling. But, to bravely love our bodies, even when they are painful is a heroic path towards feeling better, and healing. 

This is not abstract or some mere feeling (although if it were only that, would that be so bad, why might we dismiss feeling better?) 

Developing depth of feeling and courageous embodiment has practical benefits to your health--what if you have chronic knee pain that comes from having an unbalanced gait, chronic neck pain from holding too much tension in your back, chronic shortness of breath from hyper-tension, chronic stomach issues from eating, perhaps overeating, mindlessly? 

These and many more ailments can be eliminated by cultivating an intentional relationship with your body--cultivating a loving relationship with your self. 

Yet, too often we do precisely the opposite. We work out, we treat our bodies as though they are troublesome, problems that need to be fixed--and our inner monologues certainly don’t help. 

This is why ‘exercise’ is not by itself sufficient for health. It is not what we do, but how we do it. 

The chronic dissociation from one’s body is baked into our fundamental philosophy of life--we say that ‘I’ have a body. But where is this I? When we truly look into the statement “I have a body” we might find that the “I” collapses into the “body”. 

SO, one must change the perspective of merely having a body, to also being a body; that at least in part, we are the body we live and experience the world in. 

For true health, one must fully commit to embodiment, to the body that we have.

And in doing so, one chooses to fully embody this life. By committing to the internal world one also commits to the external world. 

In doing so we might learn that the inner world is infinite and a place where opposites collapse. It is both ecstatic and agonizing, joyful and tragic, vast and tiny. 

We might learn the unconscious shadow is not merely unconscious mental phenomena, but unconscious psycho-somatic, mind-body, phenomena.

And we might learn that the more we cultivate our experience of the tensions and relaxations of the muscles,  the health of our organs, the strength of our bones, that they have a direct relationship to the emotions we experience. 

We might find that joy is a full heart, confidence is ease in the body, love is an expansion of the chest.

This is a large part of why intentional bodily practices like somatic meditation, yoga, taijiquan, or qigong are so valuable, and effective. The philosophical elements of intentionality, relaxation, and courageous inner exploration are woven into the practice. 

In closing, health is not just a state of the body, but an orientation, and a journey. It has a large intentional element, and is cultivated by courageous and deep diving into feeling. 

One simply has to explore the inner landscape, with an open heart, a non-judgemental mind, and a courageous spirit.