The body feels before the mind reacts. Then we attach a feeling only after the body/mind has started its reaction. Embodiment allows us to sense thoughts and emotions as they are arising, before we begin to react. Feeling subtle contraction and shifts in the body allows a response instead of a reaction. As we become more familiar with the states of the body/mind we can notice when and how harmful states arise.
These are what we call skillful means. Being more in the body, or embodied, allows us to stop harmful states in their tracks. States like anxiety, anger, fear.
When things are uncomfortable, we want to be anywhere but in the body. This is when we love to distract ourselves – we’re bored, lonely, anxious, stressed….we don’t want to be there so we indulge in all our habits like procrastination, numbing out, overeating….
The opposite is actually more helpful. We can sense the Signals of things arising so that we have a choice. Before we are overtaken. The body will sense a thought or emotion before it is actually cognized. We don’t experience this particularly because it’s very fast. The body automatically responds to stress before we know what is happening before thoughts or emotions occur. One of the reasons to practice mindfulness is to slow things down so that we can be in each moment and work in these small increments. We often have big swaths of time when we say I don’t even know what happened there. A ton of things happened! I don’t know where it started. I don’t know where it went. I’m exhausted and now I need to recover.
If we can slow the speed of processing down we can sense a signal the beginning of tension. We all have one or two places where feelings arise if we’ve begun to notice that. And it can be different for everyone, as well as different for different emotions joy arises in a different place than anger. Once we know where certain feelings arise, it’s easier to know them and notice them before they run away with us. The body almost always raises its hand to us, hey here i am constricting getting uncomfortable… Notice me! Boom now you’re in the feeling. We aren’t trained very well to listen to the body. It’s not how we’ve been brought up in our culture. We are not great at recognizing emotions. Story of girl on date getting flu thinking it’s attraction
No reason to blame or be embarrassed, it’s not how we are culturally aware of the body at the moment. We can sensitize ourselves to the body and be more sensitive to what is arising before it turns into full blown episodes of something. Fear. Anxiety. Anger. All the experiences we consider negative, all the experiences that cause us to suffer. These are ways to reduce our suffering known as skillful means. Being more aware of the body so we can notice what is arising and work with it.
Being embodied is also known as interception or being aware of what’s going on inside the body; the marker for this is generally if you can feel your heartbeat. Some people can, some of us can’t and some of us don’t want to. When the heart really fast do you want to focus on that? Probably not. We can learn to increase this ability, but we are all different. This is more easy for some than others no judgment – not good or bad. Just inner awareness.
As meditators a lot of what we do is noticing the body and breath. Interception is now blending more with contemplative science to include thoughts and feelings. Noticing where we are internally while we move through the external world. This takes practice, period. It’s not again what we are taught when we meditate we are practicing this noticing.
We most often notice discomfort after it has taken over. This is not to stop feeling what we need to express like sadness and grief, we aren’t trying to squash those kinds of feelings. This is more about feelings of discomfort like anger and anxiety feelings we can know we can do without. When we let these feelings overtake us we can care for ourselves and do some self-care when we do get overwhelmed. We can use the breath take a walk journal exercise to make a comforting cup of tea talk to a trusted friend period. When we do these practices we begin to notice our own habits. Our conditioning and the more we notice or understand our habits the more we can work to unwind those that don’t serve us as well.
Habits and patterns are conditioned responses. They might be learned over the years from our family, from relationships, from our culture. We learn many ways of being that are simply learned over time. No blame, no shame. We can depersonalize this because it’s not our fault it’s just the circumstances we live in. We can always apply kindness and be gentle with ourselves about it. The thing about our habits is they can come on strongly and quickly. This is a well worn groove of experience. We are well trained in our habits Olympic gold medal winners of all our most common habits. We get used to being certain ways expect certain things and when things are not as we prefer we suffer.
We notice what causes discomfort, notice it as it arises. When we feel negative emotions, we can take slow deep breaths to reset the nervous system. Next we stop, take a pause and wait a beat to respond. This short circuits our habitual reactions, that can often be conditioned ways of being that don’t serve us. Responding instead of reacting. Making different choices that are within our control. We don’t want to sit in the discomfort so much as to find an alternate path. This can begin with embodiment, noticing where emotions are in the body. The more familiar we are with our habits of mind with our conditioning with our normal responses the more we can begin to change those and in doing so, make intentional choices that help us experience less suffering.