Reconnecting Mind and Body

The other day I had an interesting conversation with a client about embodiment and the mind.

And I want to tell you about it because I think what she perceives is something that others do too.

I talk a lot about the body, feeling into the body, feeling sensations, emotions and the practice of letting them inform our movement explorations for the benefit of becoming more in tune and more present. (I’ll write in detail about the benefits and the barriers to embodiment another time)

I don’t really talk about the mind as most of us women live our lives from a thinking, analyzing, strategizing place and my aim is to add another layer to our being.

Some would say using the mind is living from a masculine place. I prefer to call it Go as the word masculine is often misunderstood and too attached to gender.

And for what is generally called feminine I use the word Flow.

Flow we connect to through our body. Flow is our gut, our intuition telling us what comes next. Flow is feeling in our bones the decision that has to be made even if it is contrary to common belief. Flow for me is where my deepest desires well up.

One cannot exist without the other or we become unbalanced. We can neither live only in the Go, constantly thinking and doing, nor can we only live in the Flow, feeling and sensing, or nothing gets done.

But I love living in Flow! There was a time when I could have happily just floated through life, not caring about any responsibilities, it felt so good. Thankfully I had children that anchored me back to the ground.

I came to understand that I am at my core like water that needs strong embankment to become a river otherwise I dissipate and disappear into the ground.

The embankment is my Go, a structure, my mind that analyses, plans, is pragmatic, gets shit done. The embankment is necessary so I can swirl, be the raging river, and with my body be in the Flow without dissipating myself.

It has taken me a long time to find some semblance of balance between the two. The place where I know I can be in my Flow without worrying that I get lost, and then be the embankment, the Go, knowing that I can always dive into the waters again when I feel too contracted, tight and rigid from all the doing.

It’s my happy place.

But back to my client who is a highly intelligent and well educated and cerebral person, also on a path of discovering embodiment.

She said to me that she wanted to live with her intellect again, more focused on her brain and less on her body. And who can blame her, she is such an extraordinary thinker!

But I said to her why does it have to be either or. Why can’t it be both.

Why do the mind and the body have to be split?

Why not take our thoughts into the embodiment practice?

And while she has been in the world of embodiment for a while, she looked at me with bewilderment. What do you mean?

The instructions during practice are always to move with your sensations, your emotions, and even your thoughts.

Either asks to trust our bodies to know how to move. It is never something we force on the body. I let my thoughts come and go and let myself be moved. When a thought loop doesn’t change or I feel I start to put a lot of attention to one thought, trying to figure something out, going down a rabbit hole, when the thought becomes more important than my movement, I change the way I move.

In that way, moving expands my thoughts and my thoughts inform my movement.

It becomes the interplay between Mind and Body, Go and Flow, the split is bridged, and we get into alignment.

And again, I am in my happy place where life becomes so much richer in any moment of my day if I allow for both, Go and Flow, to exist together.

 With love and pleasure.

Theres