BENEFITS OF EMBODIMENT

There are physical, emotional, social, mental, professional and developmental benefits of staying in experiential contact with your physical body.  

Some of the specific benefits are:

• Improved physical health - for various simple reasons, such as you stop eating when your body is satiated, rather than overeating, or you notice that you are slowly hurting yourself with a certain exercise - and accordingly you become more careful with that exercise, avoiding what would have otherwise developed into an injury. It is probably easy for you to see how being more in touch with your physical body will result in a healthier physical body (because it's ignored and neglected less).
• Improved emotional health. As you allow yourself to feel past experiences that have been buried in your unconscious and stored in your body, these experiences are slowly released. The result of this over time is that your emotional responses to what happens in your daily life are actually simply about the present moment, rather than carrying a charge from something in your past.
• More social grace and ease - as you consciously relate to trauma held in the body - rather than unconsciously enacting (and therefore continuing) it.
• Healthier relationships: both through your own improved emotional health and because you are in better touch with the emotions of others. This allows your relationships to not only be healthier, but also deeper and more real.
• Increased effectiveness through improved social intelligence that comes with your improved emotional intelligence.
• Greater awareness of the rich world outside of your thought stream. (Because your thought stream is no longer monopolizing your attention.) This naturally gives rise to more clarity about the impact of specific thoughts and actions; including whether each (thought and/or action) is helping or harming you and/or others.
• More awareness of your impact on others and their impact on you allows you to make more informed and therefore better choices about who you share the time of your life with (and who you decide not to).
• Better decisions in general through access to and integration of the intuition of the body (e.g. 'Straight From the Gut' by Jack Welsh who is widely regarded as one of the most successful business leaders of the 20th century).
• Opportunity to integrate mind, heart, and body intelligences for a higher order understanding of challenging situations. Better understanding naturally results in more effective behavior, which reinforces the earlier point about increased effectiveness.
• Related to the last point, more sophisticated thinking and a deeper understanding than is possible through mere logic. By accessing more streams of intelligence than just your logical thinking - you start to become aware of and slowly learn to integrate the rich embodied complexity of the situations that you find yourself in.
• Essential for development into later stages of psychological development: At a certain point - if we want to continue our journey of psychological development - we need to break our attention free from identification with the mental stream. At the latest stages of development we no longer experience our self as a bunch of thoughts and emotions inside a body. Instead we experience our self as awareness.
• Feeling grounded and peaceful more often, and when we lose our feeing of grounded-ness we are able to bring ourselves back more quickly and easily through our contact with our body.
• More powerful presence and greater impact.

For an impressively poor quality video recording of an embodied introduction to Leadership Agility click here.