Embodiment

In my previous post, I wrote about my resistance to claiming my own body, to admitting I was embodied to a group of people who were being trained to use their bodies as compasses to direct them toward their truths. (Does it mean anything that in order to make my point in the previous sentence I used the word “to” five times? Language can be a wall between us and life, and it can also be a lighthouse saying here here here.)

In that post, I quickly transitioned from believing I was not embodied to allowing myself to believe I was. But a lot happened in-between Point A and Point B, so I want to slow down and examine more closely what it means to 1. not claim your (my) body and 2. to claim your (my) body as a place in which you (I) reside.

First, I want to talk about life force energy. Yesterday in one of my writing classes, one person stumbled and said life focus energy when she meant to say life force. Life focus! YES. Show me an adopted person who doesn’t struggle with some form of what could be diagnosed as ADD or ADHD, and I’ll show you a giraffe without spots. See how our bodies and minds know how to create language to say what is really true!

Life force energy is wild. It’s not something I can ask for as a Christmas gift. Starbucks and pharmacies and drug dealers sell things that imitate or distort life force energy, but those things are not the real deal. If you want to see big picture life force energy, look at a photo of space. If you want to see life force energy contained, look in the mirror. When a human baby is inside their mother’s body, those two bodies are a we of life force energy—the child’s body is contained within the mother’s body; the child’s life force energy is held in the larger container of the mother.

When the child is born, their body needs to learn how to be a solo container for this life force energy. This is one reason a child needs to be with their mother to survive as a healthy being: it needs to learn how to contain this force. Slowly, slowly, the child’s body learns the boundaries of its own skin and it pulses as an individual. We’ve heard that when a solider is dying, the last thing many of them cry for is their mother, right? Life force energy cries for home.

When you take a child away from its mother, you end up with life force energy chaos. A “new” mother does not have the same specific life force energy chemistry to guide the child home to itself in the same way—or at least my dear, sweet mom didn’t share mine, and so I live in energy chaos, still.

So, years and years after birth, say, in my case 60 years, when the child who is now an adult is in a class where everyone else accepts without question they live in their body, can you see a little better why this child/adult might feel confused? The others in the class are Tupperware containers of life force energy while there she is, a universe without clear edges.

But: also: there, she is, a body in a class. So, ahem, how could she not be embodied?

Holy fuck.

There I am, embodied, without her. I did it without her.

How do I accept this? Do I want to accept this? Do I want to give up the belief that is buried so deeply in my brain that if I stay a baby my genetic mother will come back and I’ll be real? I am 60 years old. How much realer can I get? Will I let myself die without ever high-fiving life and saying, “Okay, here I am. I’m all in.”?

No.