First things first. We need to define embodiment and its critical contribution (e.g., embodied intelligence) to our full intelligence or whole mind before we jump into why embodiment is important to self-awareness.
What’s Embodiment
The word embodiment means to express a thing, feeling, quality, experience, or idea in a tangible or visible form. However, even more significantly, it refers to the process through which something becomes part of a living body through incorporation and incarnation. Note that both corp and carnate refer to the body.
What’s Our Embodied Mind and Embodied Intelligence
Humans Are Born Sensory-Motor Beings
Human brains are highly oriented to sensory (our senses) and movement-based learning. From birth through the first few years of life, our primary window onto the world is our somatosensory cortex and its affiliated body parts and systems. We begin life living through an embodied process taking in sensory information and developing an understanding through embodied thinking. All the while this embodied learning is contributing to the formation the thinking mind or the head brain.
Only at around two years of age do we begin to interpret the world through language. As our language capacity grows, our thinking evolves and deepens. However, we never stop sensing and using our body mind. Throughout our lives, the insula stores somatic information within the body and plays a significant role in brain prioritization and decision-making. This is our embodied intelligence.
The Role of Sensing In Human Intelligence Never Stops
Embodied information adds up to a lot: a whole lot. Ninety to 95 percent of brain activity is held within the subconscious. Not all of this activity is accessible to the conscious mind.
Furthermore, 80 percent of our nerve fibers are dedicated to communicating information from the viscera (our body) to the physical brain. And, this isn’t just a data harvesting process. Through neuro-signaling, biochemistry, and physics, our embodied mind informs and influences our analytical mind through iterative orientation and prioritization. So, the body brian and head brain make up our whole brain and whole intelligence.
From Ancient Knowledge To a Modern Embodiment Renaissance
Mind-body-spirit communication and integration is an ancient concept. Many Eastern worldviews have maintained the intrinsic value of this holistic relationship over centuries and even today.
Western cultures are rediscovering the importance of the body’s intelligence and its significant contribution to our full intelligence (mind and body) and decision-making processes. Hence the Renaissance.
Movement-Based Wellness Modalities
Movement-based wellness practices such as yoga, dance, physical therapy, and even some psychotherapy (e.g., trauma work) rely on embodiment and embodied practices to create conscious awareness of how the body senses and stores experiences.
They acknowledge that physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual awareness can promote healing and wellness. In this way, they expand the focus to holistic embodied living.
In this vein, we look specifically at why embodiment is important for self-awareness; although, not necessarily through physical or explicit movement.
Accessing Embodied Information and Wisdom
The Embodied Process
Essentially, to access embodied information, you must turn your attention to the inside of your body and sense within. To do this effectively, you listen with curiosity and without judgment. Through the process, you may notice particular sensations and felt senses. Put simply for illustration, these sensations may feel restrictive and uncomfortable or open and scintillating. In other words, your body expresses what it wants to avoid and what it wants to embrace and you can sense this.
Learning From Your Body
By turning inward and being interoceptive, you can become aware of how your body responds and thus you can embody specific past, present, or future experiences. Similarly, you can sense how your body responds to different aspects of your life (a job, friendship, hobby, etc). And, you can experience your body’s reactions or expectations related to choices and impending decisions. This is part of your inner wisdom.
Overall, embodied awareness informs you of how your body experiences your life and how it forms into a model or the shape of who you are and how you are. Maybe that shape is hunched and withdrawn. Maybe, it’s upright and outwardly oriented. In either case, it signals to you and others how you are in the world and how you relate to your experiences. Hence, the importance of embodied intelligence.
Tools of Embodiment
There are thousands of ways to turn inward. Self-directed meditation, Focusing, yoga, dance, and guided meditation are just a few examples. Furthermore, enormous variation exists within each practice.
Some practices put you in touch with how your body organizes to achieve an action (e.g., yoga). Others help you access the energy and flow of your emotions (e.g. dance). Still, others go deeper into subtler and more implicit felt senses (e.g., Focusing). Each offers a wide range of additional information through introspection and reflection.
The growing body of embodiment knowledge and practice is broad and sometimes complicated to understand. Furthermore, the structure and function of the embodied mind are complex, dynamic, and always evolving.
Fortunately, you don’t need to understand the mechanisms of everything to relate to your inner experience, become more self-aware, access the vast and unique intelligence within you, and live according to your full intelligence.
Doing so will enhance your experience of your life and facilitate your ability to guide your life forward originally and authentically.
Need Help to More Fully Embody Your Life? See:
- Listen to my FREE guided meditation, Getting Into the Body
- My Personal Growth, Natural Healing, and Wellness workshops. In particular:
- In-person or online Getting Into the Body workshop
- In-Person or Online Living From the Inside Out workshop
- Spiritual Life Coaching Sessions – A Whole Person Approach
Updated June 24, 2024
