I’ve been eager to get to this topic for months, as it’s most central to my work and teachings, and has had such a profound effect on my life and on the way I see and experience the world that I made the decision to put aside a novel I’ve been working on for years because I believe it’s my urgent duty to speak about the necessity and value of embodiment to anyone and everyone who will listen.
But first—what exactly is embodiment? What does it mean to be embodied? In the simplest possible terms—to be embodied is to be in your body, instead of confined in the cloister of the mind. It’s to inhabit the now, through oneself as a living, multi-sensory being, instead of dwelling in the thought-delusions propagated by a disembodied consciousness.
To be embodied is to experience the world and oneself kinesthetically, as Morris Berman describes it, through all five of the senses, as opposed to the largely visual and therefore representational way we experience the world and ourselves when we liv…
