Are You Riding a Horse Without a Horse?
Understanding the Importance of Embodiment in Meditation
January 19, 2022
Written by Jennifer Finch on Medium
(* A Word before you begin: All Meditation is Good. Emphatically Good! In this article, I am simply denoting the differences in my experience when the body is included vs. when it is not. Do NOT take my curiosity I bring to non-somatic meditation practices as a sensitivity that I am somehow against them…I am not.)
Are You Riding A Horse Without A Horse?
Understanding the Importance of Embodiment in Meditation
The importance of somatic (embodied) meditation verses meditation (mindfulness) as it is commonly being taught in Western culture, is that we need a conceptual and felt container (the body) to receive our experience, or we chance increased disembodiment. You might read that sentence and think, “Duh!” But I keep asking, then why are we still practicing it in our already, oversaturated, extremely disembodied culture without the wherewithal to include a body?
A lot of things can happen during an experience of meditation, and if we explicitly use meditation practice to single-handedly explore our mind, we can increasingly unhinge our body. It works like this: Most likely we are disembodied and living in our heads before we sit down to meditate, as most of our Western culture is currently presenting; but, when we witness this in experiential sitting without good somatic instruction, we begin to really palpably feel this disconnection. Disconnection from our sense of self (and our own body) can leave us trembling, tapping into numbness, impatience, bitterness, an open-fire hydrant of thoughts, insecurities and a number of other really unnerving discoveries. There is no palpable container to hold all of these frightening or often suffocating experiences, so we feel alone with them with no real exit strategy. And if we leave it to our mind to figure it out, well, it’s just flight-y and at times real fight-y. Not dependable. Definitely not reliable. Fleeting.
In classical, Westernized teaching of mindfulness, we have no good instructions on how to re-assemble our heads to our bodies.
So, we try, and try, and try at our attempts to sit still and meditate, but nothing good is coming of it, and we begin to feel even more fragmented, ungrounded, deathly bored, or top heavy… Like Mr. Mackey’s (South Park) helium filled head floating away, but instead of helium, we feel the constant static noise of today and tomorrow and of course the finger-poking past.
For those who are successful in meditating with the mind, they seem to purport increased awareness, and stability of mind. Excellent. But my guess is that they were already living in awareness and simply gravitated to a meditation practice that felt suitable to match where they were already open. But are they balanced in their emotional stability (free to be with any emotion out there in our human experience)? How do they resiliently respond to hardships? Can they sit in a room with a depth of suffering that touches the Dark Arts with a complete vote of compassionate confidence? Are they attuned to their ebb and flow of physical sensations? Do they know the container intimately where they end and others begin? What about the contingency space that exists between us and them, or them and us? Are boundaries still an issue? Do they merge with others’ suffering? With others’ emotions? With others’ moods? Or, do they have a complete and solid differentiated sense of self unbound by uncomfortable imprints from others’ “stuff”? Are they rid of age-old genealogical traumas? Have past events been fully resolved, forgiven, and released from the body? Or are they still constricted, clamping down on, and numb in areas of their body? Do they still think in dualistic ways? Just a few questions I might have for the successful analytical meditators out there. Not judging, I am seriously curious if meditating without the body is the be all end all.
Because for me, it definitely wasn’t!
The body holds all of that stuff mentioned above, and beyond. And when it is ignored, it has a miraculous way of making its discomfort known. We can either keep ignoring it, shoving it down, putting it on the back-burner, or we can simply address it. And no better way than the gentle, and safe practices of embodiment (somatic meditation). I.e. The Healing Ground from the Realization Process
If we include somatic exploration as the process of meditation, the discipline becomes focused first and predominantly on building this supportive container so we feel we have a ground underneath us. This is important. Especially to those whom have experienced full blown trauma or leaky traumas that have spattered throughout the chronological timelines of our lives like a Dexter crime scene. Because, to those with trauma, which is many of us, it feels as if there is no ground underneath us at all. It was blown out from under us at one time or another, or just seems to continuously play tricks on us. There, not there, there again…just kidding its not really there. So reclaiming one, a ground that is, is first up in the initiation process to somatic meditation.
Once we have a ground (of our being), a total and complete adherence to a sense of Self, then we can carry our full Selves to any mediation we choose.
In November of 2016, Ruth Whippman published an article in the NY Times titled, “Actually, Let’s Not Be in the Moment.” This witty article actually counters the toxically positive meditation culture and states: what’s the big deal with being “present in the moment.” The present moment is boring. And who wants to bring mindful awareness to washing the dishes? I couldn’t agree more with Ruth’s observations. In fact, many days, washing the dishes, I stare out my window to my wooded back yard and just day-dream. I let my mind float in fantasy, artisanship, creative flow, and simply do nothing with my mind. Trying to rein it back in and tame that wild horse, feels like a taxing and possibly toxic and choke-holding task. We don’t have to be PRESENT in every single moment of our day. What we need to learn to do, is relax the G-D mind! And training it to do something it simply DOES NOT want to do, seems a worthless effort for a whole lot of nothing. It’s like riding that horse, without the actual horse.
You can read Ruth Whippman’s full article here:
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/26/opinion/sunday/actually-lets-not-be-in-the-moment.html
We don’t yet have the interpretative framework of the vast, expansiveness of the body in our modern world. When the emphasis is on restoring security and safety within the body, the mind naturally settles, and our focus stabilizes, becomes refined and enters one into their infinite wholeness. When we begin to take our bodies seriously and really identify, listen to, and build a relationship with it, our thinking mind surrenders its gripping claws, and we naturally arrive at a parasympathetic state of being. Let go into the body, and trust that the mind will follow. It feels weird and even scary at first, but it works. Our mind is still there with us, but our whole consciousness can expand and our senses integrate and widen. “We can let go of our grip on our experience, it will still be there (all of our experience), but we can let go of our grip on it,” as Dr. Judith Blackstone (my teacher) will often say. We feel deeply connected to our whole internal space of being and our mind is free to discover and be open to change and fluctuating conditions, which is most of life. Not boring.
If we don’t address our current default understanding of what a meditation practice is without using the body, then a lot of things can occur. I will leave you with the three main concerns that I notice in my teaching.
First of all, we don’t even notice what exactly it is we are doing and why we are doing it. Sure, we read the neuroscience and pop psychology magazines and understand that with a regular mediation practice we will decrease stress, cortisol responses, and inflammation, etc. But we will miss a lot just focusing on the entertainment of the mind. What would it be like to actually attune with such a refined and subtle focus on our adrenal glands or our pituitary gland? The two adrenal glands, located on top of each kidney, is where cortisol is produced; and the pituitary gland in the brain is where cortisol regulates production. What if we actually had skin in the game of attuning to our actual stress response? How would this change our feelings of our meditation outcomes?
If we don’t have a container, a body, as a receptacle, then nothing much will change in our mind. We won’t notice what is happening and we don’t understand what is happening either. What’s the point? Who wants to be mindful of peeling potatoes, when we hate peeling potatoes to begin with? Who wants to watch a paper airplane float through the sky when Orion, NASA’s newest spacecraft, is simultaneously blasting off in front of us? The simple nuanced, but very telling subtleties occurring in our body, have no chance to compete with the rocket ship drama of our minds. When we feel our body underneath the currents of the mind, and feel the container we sit in, interesting things begin to happen. We bring a refined quality and gentle witnessing to allow our experiences, past, present or imagined future to be integrated, metabolized and if need be, fully discharged from our whole body. Game changer. We are doing the practice with a purpose now. We have established control over our own healing process. We have a horse to ride.
Secondly, sometimes we sit down to meditate and big things feel like they are happening. This is mostly due to the fact that something big happened to us outside of our meditation practice. Maybe even a long while back. But it can feel as if they are happening all over again in this moment. And when we “re-live” these events by forcing our bodies to be still with the charged energy currents that are activated but on a closed loop circuit that haven’t been discharged properly, or somatically, we begin to think something is wrong or have a freak out because we don’t exactly know what is going on with us.
Third and finally when we practice meditation one of the biggest obstacles we face, in my opinion, is that our actual experience with it doesn’t match our range of expectation (high and unrealistic), with what we think is supposed to happen. And then we really think something is seriously wrong. Thank you Pinterest, Instagram and other social media sites that equate sitting still on a serene beach or mountain top, instantaneously cultivates bliss, emptiness, freedom and joyful gratitude toward self. If we just work with the mind, this would take years. Decades of practice even. When we sit with these mental pictures and activate “comparison mind” to our actual practice where we sit on our cluttered bedroom floors littered with books we haven’t read and have no time to read them, laundry that is dirty or clean and we can’t tell, and boots from Kohl’s that we still need to return, what do we think is going to happen?! Discerning and distinguishing our actual lives from social media and other grand expectations of hopes, wishes, dreams, and desires that our meditation practices will grant and bring us is a must.
In all my years of teaching and practicing meditation, I have never encountered a person who cannot handle what is arising when they are truly embodied. Our bodies are not going to keel over and die on a cushion because we are sitting still and watching with curiosity what is happening within us. So, if one of the mentioned scenarios above resonates with you, my guess is that you are simply dancing on the edge of something that could be the exact thing that leads to a huge breakthrough. Feedback, support and professional coaching can help the DIS- EASE and DIS-COMFORT you might be feeling and help it arise in a more titrated and pendulated way. Meaning not too much, definitely not all at once, and learn to use an internal brake system (polyvagal — vagal brake) that we all have within us.
Learning to communicate your experience with skilled professionals (not teachers who learned to become a mindfulness instructor in a weekend workshop), can change your life for the better, through your renewed allegiance to somatic + embodied meditation. My students who make the serious commitment to mediate for greater change in their lives, stay in contact with me and the larger close-knit community. They are not out there doing it alone. Communicating and understanding your experience can help you process even the largest tidal waves that you might be feeling. When you feel stuck, or concerned or that something is going wrong, go see a trauma informed meditation teacher or coach (somatic if possible). Start with a true identifiable embodied container and then everything becomes workable. Especially now as things arise to your conscious awareness, it is a blessing that perhaps signals it is time to be released from whatever it is that your body no longer wants or needs to hold onto.
What can feel overwhelming at first, in my experience, turns out to be an actual blessing and an opening. Most of the time, when we crack the door it feels scary because we still can’t see what’s behind it. But when the door is wide open, and we can see, usually what lies behind it, is not that scary after all. Facing those fears, and anxieties with good, solid support can be the transformation we all need in this process. But this only will occur when we have included the body, and built a supportive container for the work. Embodiment and a somatic approach is the secret jewel that fundamentally lets us know that we can face every single thing that is stored within us and prepare us for what’s to come.
So, let’s get into our bodies in full form and bring it to our meditation practices, because now you know that without being in the body, not much is really going to happen. Put a horse underneath, and the winds will carry you far my friend.
Until next time,
Jen
