The Wisdom of Your Body: Finding Healing, Wholeness, and Connection through Embodied Living

by Hillary L. McBride

She cupped her hands around the remnant flame of spirit inside me, protecting the flickering light until it grew stronger, and then placed my own hands around the flame and made me the protector of this growing force. Unlike

What you do with your body says so much about what is happening inside of you, and how it is to be you.”

Thoughts are like blossoms on a flower—there’s a stem and then a whole root system beneath them. Thought substitution alone is like plucking off a dandelion bloom, glue-gunning a daffodil blossom on the stem, and expecting daffodils to keep blooming. In this case, lasting change requires digging up the roots of one flower and planting a new bulb to grow the other. These new bulbs are embodied experiences; the soil is the context that supports our blooming.

proven to be true time and time again. Change does not happen through trying to trick ourselves out of a story we have been groomed to rehearse through our developing years. Rather, transformation happens from the ground up: when we have a new experience of ourselves and hold our attention on it long enough for it to sink in.

This allows us to know ourselves more fully, experiencing ourselves as good and sacred, and hold safety within ourselves no matter what happens around us.

Embodiment is a kind of re-membering of who we really are, because what we picked up along the way was disembodiment. But disembodiment is not how we come into the world. It can be unlearned, while embodiment, our birthright, can be remembered. So embodiment is a coming home, a remembering of our wholeness, and a reunion with the fullness of ourselves. Embodiment coach and

may have an agenda or way of being of its own. A philosopher named Maurice Merleau-Ponty gave us the paradigm for this way of thinking: body as object. The body is a thing. But there is another way of thinking about the body. In this way of thinking, the body is not something you have but something you are: you are your body. Although we have all experienced being a body at some point, for many adults it can feel foreign or even impossible. Try repeating after me: I am my body. How does it feel to say it that way? Your body is alive, conscious, and indistinguishable from your self—the two cannot be disentangled. From this perspective, the mind is the body and the body is the mind. Merleau-Ponty refers to this perspective as body as subject.

The body is a being, conscious, and the place where our sense of “I” exists and engages with the world.

This nondual perspective of the self invites us to consider the ways in which believing the self to be divided—the mind as separate from the body—has been both damaging and neuroscientifically incorrect.5

Tada Hozumi, cultural-somatics practitioner and activist, has identified this as the effect of historical traumas from inter-European imperialism. Such historical trauma is passed down epigenetically and interpersonally through descendants of light-skinned Europeans and is revealed in the fabric of Western, largely white culture.6 In this culture, it seems we have started to recognize this unease and fragmentation. In our desire to experience wholeness again and remedy the poverty within our context, we have looked to other cultures and traditions, typically those of people of color, for their wisdom, embodiment practices, and insights (for example, yoga, Tai Chi, martial arts, and breath work). We must speak about embodiment while acknowledging that these are not new conversations or practices; otherwise, we rehearse the systemic wounds that divided us from ourselves and each other. Our individual healing can’t happen without addressing our need for collective healing, culturally and as a collective human body.

Sometimes I imagine this process as collecting the shattered pieces of a family heirloom. To put it back together, we have to search for all the fragments, even the ones that scattered under the fridge, as if to say, “This, yes, this part is also essential for being whole again.” We need to reclaim every shattered fragment of our body to experience wholeness. Healing happens as we invite our bodies back into the narratives of our lives. Even if our body still feels somewhat separated from the self, this invitation can be the first act of acceptance and arrival to learn to say to ourselves, “This is my body.” Because every moment comes with an invitation, I invite you to pause and say to yourself in this moment, “This is my body.” Practicing Embodiment

You might be familiar with the adage about fish in water. In a 2005 commencement speech, David Foster Wallace describes two young fish swimming along when an older fish swims by and says something like, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” Once alone, the two younger fish look at each other and wonder, “What the hell is water?” Wallace goes on to say that “the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about.”

Whenever I do these exercises, I notice an uneasiness when thinking about my arm as a series of parts that function as a flesh-machine. But when I practice moving my hand freely, this little experiment of choosing movement reminds me of my capacity for agency and the pleasure of making choices about my own body.

Embodiment is the self in motion, the living, breathing story of who you are and the culture and people you have come from.

It is the how, what, why, where, and who of existence—the ground zero of consciousness, of present-moment living.

Your embodiment is always telling a story. Learning to listen to, interpret, and work with this story is central to connecting to wisdom, an integration of what we sense and how to make sense of it.

Some things are better felt than said, and so we drop into the living moment to be with what is without rushing to describe it.

What unifies these two people and their stories is the experience of a pain point—bodies crying out to tell stories that have been disregarded or dishonored. Most people forget about the body until pain, aging, illness, trauma, incarceration, or impending death brings it to the fore. These experiences are a frustrating reminder that we can never truly put mind over matter and overcome our physicality. The body tells the truth—the painful parts, the joyful parts, and everything in between.

One of the underlying messages here is that the body needs to be paid attention to only when there is a problem. The body becomes the scapegoat and, as a result, we often miss the more subtle bodily messages that come before the alarm bells. And there are messages before the alarm bells sound, believe me.

Our bodies are telling the stories we have avoided or forgotten how to hear—and sometimes our inability to feel our feelings (the messages that precede the alarm bells) means our bodies have to scream in order to get some attention.

This could mean, for example, realizing that our mind-over-matter mentality isn’t something we came up with so we could play a football game with a sore ankle but that it comes from the influence of Greek thought and Enlightenment ideology woven into our social fabric. It also means grasping that our cultural views of land as an object to be used, conquered, or stolen are relics of settler-colonialist ideologies—as is the belief that we are hyper-rational individuals who can exist and thrive outside of community. These cultural views have cut off the deep knowing of our interconnectedness to our bodily selves, each other, and the earth.

Together, these influences create the proverbial water in which we swim. They dictate the scripts we are handed about gender, religion, family of origin, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. So embodiment is the way you are in the world, but that embodiment is influenced by who you have been allowed to be—through what has been discouraged and encouraged—and your sense of safety and agency in it all.

For some, especially those for whom being in the body feels unsafe, disconnecting from the body can be an unconscious survival tactic. For others, disconnecting may feel like a moral choice, especially if we have been taught that our body is inherently evil or that it caused the hurt or violation done to us by others. In these contexts, we might even feel morally superior for being able to disconnect from the body. If so, an invitation to reconnect to the body can ...

While for some of us it may take an event—a serious illness or a trauma—to remember that we are bodies, many people do not have to wait for a specific event to remember the centrality of their body. That’s because their body is placed outside the cultural hierarchy of the “ideal body,” and so they learn early on that their body makes them “other.” Most forms of oppression are directed against the body as “isms”: racism, sexism, ableism, heterosexism, ageism, si...

To say that you are your body is not to further overidentify each of us with the ways our bodies have been made objects, but rather to remind us that our personhood is inextricable from our physicality.

The body is where life happens—both the beautiful and the painful, our individuality and our relationships, the now and the past—but many of us have forgotten ourselves as bodies. We did so in order to survive the pain or to be compliant, but in the process we left behind so much of the beautiful. We cannot leave one without leaving the other. At best, most of us have a conflicted relationship with our bodies, forgetting there is more to being a body than our appearance, or tolerating that appearance. At worst, the stories we tell ourselves are ones of shame, hatred, frustration, confusion, or indifference. But there is another way.

but all of these activities are relatively disembodied. The irony is not lost on me. I can sit all day reading about neuroanatomical structures responsible for how we sense emotion as a bodily process, only to realize hours later that I have forgotten to eat a meal or that my leg is numb. To do what I ask people to do—to live embodiment and not just think about it—I have been looking for ways to weave myself back into wholeness, for thread to stitch back together the fabric of my life into something greater than the individual parts. And so, on Wednesday nights, I clear my schedule, drive to a dimly lit community center on Vancouver’s West Side, and gather with strangers for several hours of movement and music to practice coming back into my body.

The long, open room is filling quickly with all sorts of people, and I’m trying not to think about what anyone else is doing or thinking. I’m there to remember myself. The

“Between our heads and our toes, there are a million miles of unexplored wilderness,” she says. And with that, I imagine removing the part of my brain that censors and judges the way I take up space. I put it in a jar near the door where my shoes sit, and I give myself over to the music, letting my body lead the way, telling the stories of all I have known and felt, each story held within this body.

Yet our devaluation of bodies leads to psychosomatic disorders and prevents us from honoring the bodily cues we have learned to ignore, messages telling us that something is not right, that we need medical attention, or that it’s time to rest or receive care. If we cannot listen to these messages, we cannot begin to live lives of peace (because we are at war with ourselves), presence (because we are not in the here and now), and pleasure (because we are disconnected from our own sensations).

But body-image research shows that the closer we get to achieving our ideal appearance, the more conditional our sense of worth becomes, and the more we fear what it will cost us when our appearance inevitably changes. When we conflate appearance with the body—and if we have struggled to appreciate our appearance—it makes sense that we might try to get as far away as possible from our body. That, of course, is only a defensive strategy, because we can never actually leave our body, and even frustration and shame about our appearance are experienced in our body as emotions.8

The most recent scientific research reveals that what constitutes health is much more complex than weight alone.12 Health is composed of several highly individualized factors impacted by environmental, psychological, economic, and genetic history, as well as current and future needs. Health also includes mental well-being, relationship satisfaction, and community belonging and safety.13

Bodies get in the way of what really matters: theology and intellect. Theology and intellect aren’t superior to the physical aspect of human experience, but we have a history of using them as a way to escape, or bypass, the difficult realities of our bodily existence. But prioritizing theology and intellect over other forms of wisdom, knowing, and spirituality is in many cases a by-product of privilege. Who has the luxury of being able to identify more with thinking than with bodily existence? Traditionally, it was men of high status who could spend their time in the academy or seminary rather than engaging in physical labor or caring for children. Others with less privilege or status could not escape the needs and demands of their bodily existence, especially since social status related to the amount of physical labor a person did. Historically, those with the least social status have been people of color, women, and those with physical disabilities. The paradox here is that the individuals who had more social power because of their bodies did not experience themselves as defined by their bodies, but they made choices that affected the day-to-day bodily realities of others. Obvious examples of this include men determining the reproductive rights of women, or people without disabilities designing buildings that restrict building access for those with disabilities. While thinking, theology, and philosophizing in and of themselves are not bad, we miss out on the full picture...

Piran describes embodiment as feeling a sense of positive connection or being at one with our body.

Behaviors characteristic of disembodiment include self-harm, forgetting or disregarding bodily needs, trying to make our body disappear or conform, following diets instead of hunger cues, and pushing our body to the limits even when doing so causes us pain or injury.

To increase our physical freedom, Piran suggests (1) engaging in physical activity that feels free, expansive, and unrestricted by appearance standards; (2) existing in spaces where our bodies are safe; (3) tuning in to ourselves and providing self-care; and (4) connecting pleasurably to our desires. Because we are all connected to each other and my physical freedom is bound with yours, we need to be creating communities where all of us can experience physical freedom.

If you have social power, you have a responsibility to both acknowledge your privilege—the social stories and systems from which you have benefited—and widen those stories and systems to make them inclusive for everyone.

While most of us think that change happens because we learn new ideas—and, yes, that is part of it—the deepest and most lasting change happens when we have new experiences and then integrate them into the larger story of our lives, and our collective story.20 Embodied experience is undeniably the most powerful channel of change. Ultimately, remembering our bodily selves, becoming embodied again, is slow work—it is compassionate instead of perfectionistic, communal instead of individualistic, process oriented instead of achievement oriented, and mutual instead of hierarchical. We cannot arrive there through the same mechanisms that pulled us out of our bodies in the first place. When we have embodied experiences little by little, and go about this in a new way, we are able to craft a new story and enter into a new experience of ourselves. Then we wake up one day and realize the world has become a better home for all of us to be in our bodies.

Our bodies are constantly speaking up, telling us who we are and what it is like to be us.

We can also use our bodies to resist problematic systems. I have learned from scholars and theologians Robyn Henderson-Espinoza and Tricia Hersey that in a culture that has been oriented toward consumerism, profit, and achievement, it is a form of resistance to listen, rest, and be present. This could mean intentionally practicing rest or stillness to untangle ourselves from the drive to perform or achieve. Because of how much our heads are down, looking at our phones, it can even be an act of resistance to put down our devices and look up and around in the world, keeping our hands, eyes, and minds free from constant stimulation and the ensuing anxiety or numbness. While there are many forms of resistance (some forms are more or less accessible or poignant for each of us), we can be thoughtful about how we use our body to resist injustice and oppressive systems by paving a way for a future where all bodies can simply be as they are.21

For example, if the body is sacred, do you treat your body as such? This could mean being gentler, being more nourishing, or choosing to listen to your sensory cues instead of ignoring them, understanding we are not just form or function but being itself. Historically, labeling the body as the dwelling of the Divine has been harmful for many people’s bodies, resulting in bodily control, food restriction, and all-or-nothing practices of sexual purity. Instead of using this paradigm to move into more rigidity and guilt, we can remember that the sacred is already here just as we are, in us from the get-go, which invites us to know that we do not have to change to be loved or valuable. And sometimes in knowing that, we are inspired to treat others’ bodies and our own from a place of love, care, and connection.

When we have nearly died—or encountered anything overwhelmingly scary or stressful—the last thing we need is to feel as if there is something weak or morally wrong about our reactions. At best, such judgments may temporarily diminish the reactions only to drive them deeper inside the body and compound the trauma. What we need when we are hurting is patient understanding that proves to our whole brain-body system that we are safe. This shows us that whatever we went through is in the past—it is not happening again in this moment as we try to make sense of it all. This kind of compassionate response—generated internally or from others—begins the process of healing the stress and trauma, even within moments after it occurs.

Whether or not we perceive a stressor as threatening is unique to each of us, usually determined by a combination of past experiences, genetics, and the meaning we give to something. In other words, the same event might create stress in one person but not another. For example, although running a marathon is a huge physiological stressor, it’s unlikely you’d perceive it as a threat if you signed up for it, trained for it, and had friends cheering you on. Because you have control, you would perceive the experience as meaningful rather than threatening. You can imagine it would feel very different for a person forced to run a marathon against their will.

trauma occurs when something negative and unexpected happens, and it leaves us feeling confused, overwhelmed, and powerless.

At the moment we are overwhelmed to the point of shutting down, we are experiencing something categorically traumatic. Whether we experience shutting down as floating above our bodies or mentally disappearing into a happier time, this is what our body has determined is our best chance to get through this. And so our bodies get floppy and limp, we curl up, we faint, we dissociate (present in the body, but elsewhere in the mind), or more commonly, we feel like all the life has drained out of us and it is easier just to stay in bed all day.

burnout. Our body is giving us everything we need to get to safety; we need to listen to what is happening within us and honor it. We move up the staircase

We complete the stress cycle when we release our trauma response mechanisms by moving the stress-related energy out through the body. This often happens involuntarily, through shaking, but we can help ourselves by doing it on purpose—by running, dancing, wiggling, jumping, or squeezing our muscles for a few moments with all our might. Using up this energy sends a signal from one internal monitoring mechanism to another to let the brain-body system know that we are now safe.

This is how trauma gets stuck. This is what makes it hard for our nervous systems to know that we are safe—that what happened was indeed scary and overwhelming but is now over. When we cannot move through the processes that allow our nervous systems to climb the staircase to safety, or when we try to socially engage and all we get is more judgment and criticism, our systems never get the message that the pain is over. As a result, instead of moving from pain to safety, our systems move from pain to pain.

The phrase “return to safety” implies there is safety to return to. But what happens if we never got to return to safety? When hurts occur repeatedly at the hands of those who are supposed to protect us, or when there is no safe place to return to, we call this complex trauma. In complex trauma, unrest might actually feel like the easiest, most comfortable place to us. What should feel safe can feel dangerous, and what should feel dangerous can feel safe. It often means that we never learned it was safe to trust, which leaves us feeling desperately alone inside without knowing how to be connected. And often, if this happened at a young enough age, that overwhelm was managed by a shutdown state of shame, the fundamental sense of being “broken.”

When we go through trauma, every ingredient of the experience combines in a way that makes it impossible to separate one from the other. So the brain combines the separate elements of a trauma into one memory package, engaging in some extremely helpful processes to keep us safe later. The elements might include things such as a smell, the time of day, the body’s posture, close and faraway sounds (including music), lighting, who we’re with, where we are, and what happened just before things got scary.9 Whatever is in the memory bundle associated with the trauma gets neurologically coded as deeply threatening to our safety.