What is Embodiment?

It is the practice of living presently in your body. It is living in a way that honors, engages, and expresses your truest self. Embodiment requires personal dedication that is intrinsically motivated to become fully integrated into your way of being. 

We experience embodiment when our minds and bodies are in a present-focussed connection. This involves learning to listen to what our bodies have to teach us and then using that awareness and wisdom to make the best choices for ourselves in our lives and relationships.

It is simultaneously honoring your inner authority and your intuitive awareness, and allowing yourself to exist in alignment with that moment-by-moment truth. 

What is Sensuality?

It is our ability to connect to the experience of our senses - smell, touch, taste, sight, and hearing. Sensuality functions in part through the process of drawing yourself into the present moment through your sensual experience. Developing mindful awareness of your sensual experience, and then savoring that awareness with gratitude and present-focused attention, unlock the keys to embodiment. 

Realizing and pursuing your dreams, expressing your personality and passions, manifesting your desires, and openly sharing your essence are all aspects of living a sensually embodied life. 

The Pleasure of Sensual Embodiment

We are not often taught to center on our own experience and prize our own pleasure. Being shamed, or told we are selfish, for reaching for our own pleasure in our life and experiences, especially in regard to creativity and sexuality, is a common story. But, and this is a big but, you DO have the power to deprogram yourself, reframe your understanding, and embrace what it means to live a sensually embodied life. 

#1 IT IS NOT SELFISH

It is NOT selfish to prioritize self-knowledge and develop the ability to be able to fill your own cup. I would argue that this ability is at the root of personal power, self-confidence, and energetic magnetism. Practicing sensual embodiment can provide a never-ending wealth of opportunities for you to get to know yourself, and understand your power. But you have to hold space for yourself in order to manage it. 

Understanding what brings you joy and pleasure, and what ignites your desires, is powerful knowledge. Using that knowledge to look within, relying on your inner authority instead of external forces to charge up your vitality and vibrancy, allows you to show up more fully for yourself and ultimately in all of your relationships, too. 

You end up being able to see yourself, not as defined by the roles that you occupy or the things that you have and have accomplished. You tap into the purest you, your uninhibited and unrestrained energy that embraces your spirit, your innocence, your essence. Feeling to the core of you shows you who you are outside of the roles you play, and inevitably reflects upon them to allow you to exist more authentically in all of them. That doesn’t sound selfish to me!

#2 SHAME IS BULLS**T

Only we are responsible for our lives, and the footprint we create on this earth. No one owns you, your emotions, responses, capacity, or brightness. Shame is delivered by those not able to take full responsibility for themselves, instead projecting that energy as shadow onto another human being. And that is total bulls**t. 

Shame gets in the way of your fullest expression of self. It feeds insecurities and, ‘I can’t’ or ‘I could never,’ which are just another way to allow your inner narrative to hold you back from experiences and fulfillment of desires which may be critical to your soul’s journey. You can’t stop another person from projecting shame onto your being or behaviors, but you can choose whether or not you allow yourself to internalize it, and whether or not you accept people like that into your life. It is not easy to step into full personal accountability or to hold others in full autonomy of their own lives and actions. But it is part of the journey of sensual embodiment. 

Through sensual embodiment, you can give yourself permission to free yourself of that burden, and couple it with patience, forgiveness, and grace to keep choosing what is in honest alignment for you.

#3 SELF-EXPERIMENTATION LEADS TO SELF-DISCOVERY

You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. I mentioned permission, patience, forgiveness, and grace above, and those all come into play during the neverending journey of self-experimentation that allows your sensual embodiment to thrive. 

I find it helpful to remind myself when leaping off the edge of the known into the unknown, that there is no one I am safer with than me. Reframing any fear or intimidation into inspiration and curiosity can allow you to forgive yourself for ‘holding yourself back,’ and offer yourself the patience and grace to continue ‘making mistakes’ along the way. I accent those phrases because they are truly subjective, and only your mindset can define for you what they mean, and whether you designate them as positive, negative, or neutral in your mind. 

Holding yourself back and making mistakes, when considered inwardly, can have a lot to teach us. As much as successes and joys in many cases. After all, we are all fallible. That is an inescapable aspect of our human experience. Understanding that growth requires experimentation, and discovery doesn’t happen without trying, can be a huge motivation in getting yourself out there and trying on the different energies, practices, and experiences that you feel called to. How else will you ever discover what truly fits?

#4 EMBRACE THE INEVITABILITY OF CHANGE 

This process of self-experimentation is a lifelong journey and includes being able to embrace the inevitability of change. Ten years ago you may have been completely swooned by strawberry sorbet, but nowadays nothing but chocolate really makes you feel that way. People change, more than we think we do, in big and small ways throughout our lives. Like time itself, sometimes those changes move fast, and sometimes they move slow. 

Embracing that changes in ourselves and the world around us will occur, and that that is not only okay but beautiful and necessary, helps to shed some of the anxieties many of us feel around change in our lives. Kids grow up, our bodies get old. But none of that robs us of the potential to enjoy a vibrant and rich tapestry of being at every age and stage of our existence. This is part of taking responsibility for your own life. 

If you feel called to it, try it on for size. Go skydiving, take a slow walk through a forest of trees, wear red lipstick during the day, educate yourself on something entirely new to you, take the time to treat your body the way you would treat your lovers. The chance to discover and embody the energy of your experiences, to expand through your sensory experience, is a gift that only you can give to yourself. 

Mindfulness, Breathing, Savoring, Gratitude

The journey of sensual embodiment does not need to be daunting. There are simple ways you can begin living a more sensually embodied life right now. 

Here are four keys that helped me tremendously in unlocking sensual embodiment:

Mindfulness

Mindfulness can be thought of as the process of doing things with intention, or as the opposite of doing things mindlessly. Ever drive home from work with your mind on ‘auto-pilot,’ and arrive before you even realized it? That would be mindlessness. Mindfulness would have you feeling the leather of your seat on your skin, the heat of the sun through your windshield, the breeze from your open window upon acceleration, and your breath in your body as you do it. Then appreciating your consciousness of those sensations. It is being conscious and connected to your experience, and holding that conscious awareness without judgment, whatever that may be. 

Take a mindful pause to hold space for yourself in the present moment. Listen to your body’s wisdom. Hold your observations in front of yourself and evaluate them without judgment. Give yourself permission for whatever may come up for you to come up, and evaluate it with kindness and present-focussed attention. This practice can provide you access to a wealth of information, and a deeper understanding of where and how you feel alignment in your life, experiences, and relationships. There is no better way to build up your sense of inner authority and learn to confidently trust in that voice.

The mindful pause is an incredibly powerful tool to unlock self-awareness and is the precursor to all of the following practices.

Breathing

Your breath is your life force, and the current within which all of your energy is generated. As critical as it is to our existence, it can be easy to take advantage of. Anchor yourself with a few deep breaths during a mindful pause, and use the experience of conscious breath to allow you access to your sensory experience. 

Starting with your breath, rising and falling in your chest at its natural rhythm, move on to the other sensations you are experiencing through all of your senses. This practice of sensory exploration will help you unite your mind and body in the moment, and help you achieve that present-focussed attention. 

Savoring

Savoring is a key to pleasure, and the pleasure of sensual embodiment. When you eat your favorite food, do you scarf it down like Homer Simpson, or do you relish the experience of each bite? Do you feel the texture of every component, identify different flavors as they roll across your tongue, chew slower, and verbalize a delighted, “mmmmmmmmm,” after you swallow?

Slowing down to indulge in the pleasure of your sensory experience is what savoring is all about. Struck by the beauty of a painting? Slow down to appreciate the color story, the texture of the brush strokes, and the emotion that the imagery evokes within you. 

Instead of rushing through foreplay to focus on penetration or achieving orgasm, slow down to appreciate the heat and softness of your lover’s skin. Indulge in the sensations of their body on your lips, the sounds they make in reaction to your hard, soft, or lingering touch. 

Savoring deepens your experiences, and results in the reclamation of pleasure that charging through life simply cannot.

Gratitude

Now that you can take the mindful pause, anchor into your sensory experience beginning with your breath, and savor what you discover there, the final step is acknowledging your gratitude for those discoveries. 

Expressing gratitude is a simple yet powerful force that affects your mindset, which is what frames all of your experiences. Working expressions of gratitude into your inner narrative can transform the way that you think about yourself and evaluate your experiences. 

There are many ways to integrate a gratitude practice into your life. In terms of sensual embodiment, it functions as positive reinforcement for mindful awareness and savoring of your sensory experience. The words you choose to use are yours, and how they play out is up to you. I suggest finding reasons big and small to thank yourself for being yourself each day, to positively reinforce the sensual embodiment practices that you are developing. Creating positive feedback loops like this in your mind allows this energy to build up within you and results in the power to reclaim your pleasure, and choose you (and there is nothing selfish about it!).

After taking all of this in, I hope you can feel that juicy inspiration and curiosity bubbling up inside you, calling you to access the present of your moments and the vibrancy of your energy through your sensual experience. You can do it! The caveat being: It only works if you work it. You have to want this for and of yourself. No external motivation is going to manage lasting results. So, gather yourself around yourself, and start your journey of self-experimentation and self-discovery today.

Xoxo,

Jay