Was I disconnected from my body all along?

The odds stacked against embodiment

In the gym I heard a really slim woman telling the trainer that she wanted to shift the weight around her middle. If there was any weight there it was invisible, and I felt momentarily, deeply depressed that this woman was giving any time and mental space to the idea that her waist was a problem to be fixed.

It wasn’t a judgement on her - I bet there isn’t a single person amongst us who hasn’t internalised ideas about what a perfect body should look like and the ways in which we should strive to achieve it. It’s a very tricky lens to stop seeing through.

As a student I read John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, and his description of how women move differently through the world in comparison to men stuck with me ever since. He talked about how women - even when they’re alone - are always aware of how they appears to others, something he put beautifully as a woman being “almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself”.

Photo by Mike Von on Unsplash

When I read it for the first time, I remember considering how it might be to walk down the road a liberated woman, not caring what I looked like, not considering how I appeared in that moment. It was a wild idea, one dreamed up by a fantasist, surely? But I wanted it, now that I knew this way of being might exist.

That woman in the gym was very connected to ideas about her body, ideas both about how it looked and how it should look. There’s really only one other alternative to considering how our bodies look, and that is how they feel to us, as subjects; about how we feel in them, not just what we feel about them.

The psychologist Hillary McBride wrote a really wonderful book called The Wisdom of Your Body: Finding Healing, Wholeness and Connection Through Embodied Living. I feel like embodiment is a buzzword that none of us really understand, even if we have a sense that we should all be embodied, in the same way that we should be more mindful and more cardio-fit and more full of kale. She defines embodiment as “the lived and felt experience of being a body — not just having a body, but being a body.”

At the heart of her writing about embodied living are a few things:

1. a sense of freedom - for example, being free from imposed standards about how our bodies should look or function

2. compassion for our bodies - the deep sense that our bodies are good, our bodies are always trying to do their best

3. presence and awareness - the ability to notice what our bodies are experiencing (different from obsessing - note to self)

4. safety - feeling safe to feel all sensations and emotions in our bodies

5. joy and pleasure as our birth right

6. trust - our bodies know things, they are smart, they are always communicating with us

I’ve been thinking a lot about bodily experiences: pure, felt experiences, which have become very important to me. They’re something I’ve come to crave, partly as a way to get a handle on the health anxiety I’ve written plenty about on this platform. Anxiety is composed of (repetitive, overwhelming and even boring) thoughts and associated (unpleasant) bodily sensations, so much so that embodied, positive experiences are a welcome antidote. It’s the freedom from that my body desires - in this case from the anxious mind-body. And it’s the freedom to that anxiety can cancel out - including finding joy, presence and awareness, whether that’s through running, dancing, having sex, swimming outside, resting, eating something amazing or going in the sauna.

Hillary has something interesting to say about bodily experiences:

“Experiences are hard to describe because they happen outside of language. Simply thinking about how to describe our body, or our experience of the body, takes us out of the sensory and into the abstractions of language: categories, constructs, and symbols we use to build bridges between our experiential knowing and others’ experiences.”

Our experiential knowing. The idea that we might know something with our bodies, not in terms of conscious cognition. Pretty mind-blowing, and impossible to interrogate, seeing as we can’t think our way through! When I have a powerful experience in my body, my rational brain wants to package it up, interpret it and label it, come up with a final conclusion, some flourish on the last line. But it doesn’t exist in this way. A felt experience is what we feel, sense and notice in the moment, which is not just me thinking about them during or afterwards.

Trying to bypass the shoulds and listen more intuitively to what my body wants to experience - something I wrote about here - is not an elevated path, it’s not the latest wellness trend, it has no morality, it’s neither good nor bad, worthy or unworthy. It’s an experiment in becoming more embodied, less tied to thoughts about what’s right and listening more to feelings about what’s right. There is a neutrality here, even if the activities my body chooses to partake in are also quite good for me (surprise! we can trust our bodies).

With its associated stream of worries about my body, health anxiety has had me so focused on my body that I assumed I was very embodied, very connected to my body, thank you very much, but in a way I think that the opposite was true. Being worried about a body is very different to a connection to our lived experience as a body.

What if our ideas about our bodies - that they are good or bad, fat or thin, effective or failing, ill or well - are the very things in the way of a true experience of being a body?

I was disconnected from the fullness of this experience. I felt a kind of grief when I realised it. Now I - my body - is trying to find its way back. Keep moving, keep pausing, look up, take notice, keep going, keep experiencing, keep living. My ears - eyes, heart, hands - are open, are here for it.