Human beings are often said to be the most complex phenomena in the known universe (conventionally). Therefore it would be impossible to come up with an adequate analogy for why embodiment is so important for us. That being said, I’d like to offer an overly-simplistic analogy just to get us started, based on the idea of connection. Without embodiment, we would be a bit like a bicycle without a chain. Sure the tires would still move. Such a bike could even be ridden (e.g. downhill). But peddling would do nothing since the crankset would have no connection with the hub of the wheel to make it go.
For humans, the process of embodiment is like a connective force between our cognitive minds and the impulses of our bodies. It’s not a one-way street however. The body has a mind of its own, a different way of thinking, and even is directly exposed to different sets of information than our thinking minds. Perhaps a better analogy would be (bear with me) a situation in which a cat and a dog are piloting a spaceship, they are in different rooms and have no way to communicate with each other, and one receives visible light and Cartesian coordinates with access to the rudder while the other receives only radio waves and polar coordinates with access to the engines. Wild huh? That’s what life might be like living in complete disembodiment.
Lucky for us, embodiment comes naturally. Even when a person’s capacity for embodiment is damaged by trauma, it has a way of emerging organically when the opportunity presents itself. From an evolutionary perspective, we developed intelligence in our bodies long before we had any type of executive function in our brains. That body intelligence is still there. It tells us when we are hungry. It tells us when we are in love. It even has built in safety features to keep us out of harms way.
But like I said, it’s not a one-way street (and soon I’ll describe why it’s not a two-way street either). Sometimes our reactions seem to be mistaken and we end up feeling frightened when there is no real threat. Or we become attracted to people whom we know would not be right for us. Or we’ll crave things that haven’t been around long enough on an evolutionary scale for our bodies to know better. This is where the practice of awareness comes in. Awareness can be used to discern when and how to listen to our bodies versus our minds.
The combination of awareness and embodiment is the Embodimental path. It is a lifelong journey of organic learning. Neither “awareness” nor “embodiment” come strictly from either cognition or body sensations. They are both emergent properties of the mind-body connection. It is in this way that embodiment is not like a two-way street. Truly there is nothing quite like it in the known universe.
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