Are you someone who wants to ‘get out of your head’ and ‘into your body’ but don’t know where to start?
We hear you, and we’re with you. Starting is not as hard as you might think - you actually already have what you need, there’s just a little twist involved. Your head and body are not separate so ‘getting into your body’ is more about being in the whole of you. Rather than thinking about yourself in parts, which leads to experiencing yourself in parts, what would happen if you started to think of yourself as an integrated whole and approached things from this perspective…?
You are embodied and woven into your environments with others. You can draw your attention to this reality and experience the whole of you while going about your daily business through physical mindfulness exercises. Physical mindfulness is about growing your embodied presence.
4 key things to know when growing embodied Presence:
Your head and body are not separate.
Your body includes your head. What we’re really hearing underneath this statement is a call for a different quality of being. So let’s take a moment to rephrase the statement - ‘I want to get out of my head and into my body…’
How about: ‘I want to stop over-thinking and feel more’
or
‘I want to be in this moment with everything I’ve got’
Does that catch your sentiment? This way you have not cut yourself into parts when what you’re after is a more connected holistic experience. Let’s literally talk the walk.The Matter of you Matters
People have no problem accepting that the brain is a site for knowing but it’s commonly not acknowledged that all our living tissue (our heart, skin, guts, blood, brain, nerves etc.) has capacity for unique knowing. Much of our attention is drawn to thinking - it gets a lot of love. When in fact your cells are a site of knowing - in fact the first to know so let’s give them some love. Growing your Embodied Awareness is about turning your attention to your living tissue, and the knowing that lies here in these cells. Taking time listen to this often non-verbal pathway of knowing is worthy of your attention. The matter of you matters.
You are multi-sensory.
Information comes to you in multiple ways through your senses.
Try this… wherever you find yourself right now, take a moment to notice what information you are receiving from your senses - what can you hear, what are you touching - notice the texture, what shape are you making, what is the temperature around you, what can you see at the edges of your vision?This collection is merely scratching the surface of a cascade of sensory information coming to you in any one moment from your interior and exterior environments. Some believe we have over 30 senses. We can only be conscious of a small amount of this at any one time - where do you want to place your attention?
Movement is a nutrient.
Everything is moving. Nothing is fixed. We are fluid and immersed in an ever changing world. As Biomechanist Katy Bowman says, “Movement matters. Not just movement - your movement. Not only to your physiology, but to those in your family and your community. Your movement matters, not only to those you see on a daily basis and yearly basis, but to humans elsewhere, that you’ve never met. Your movement matters to the forests and bees in your local area…You have a role in the ecosystem, and it’s not a static position a the top of a food chain as you were taught. Your role is a dynamic one, critical to all the other living things on this planet.”
Bowman K. 2016, Movement Matters: essays on movement science, movement ecology and the nature of movement, p.1
Experience the transformative power of physical mindfulness exercises, try our 4 week introductory course starting soon…