Socially Engaged Artist and Creative Producer
As part of the EveryBODY project, I've gathered some resources and meditations on the topic of embodiment, with practical exersizes and meditations to help you connect with your body, and settle your mind.
These are useful practices in an every day context, but perhaps particularly useful before embarking on creative or personal exploratory exercises to help you get into a more grounded state of flow.
Lecture and Meditation series
'Being Embodied' by Tara Brach
Somatic Meditation
A Somatic approach promotes embodied self-organisation and internal authority.
It focuses on cultivating sensory awareness
through working with;
BREATH
TOUCH
CONNECTIVITY WITHIN THE BODY
AND INTO THE GROUND
Somatic Meditation takes our body as the fundamental arena of meditation practice - our body is the space. Connecting first with the body to have impact on the mind.
Somatic Meditation develops a meditative consciousness that is accessed through the feelings, sensations, somatic intuition, and felt sense of the body itself. We are simply trying to tune in to what is already there.
The Hand Sensing Exercise, by Eckhart Tolle
This is a very simple grounding meditation by Eckhart Tolle, designed to help us get in touch with our inner sense of aliveness.
Close your eyes and hold out your hand. Allow yourself to feel your hand.
Now ask yourself: without touching anything, without moving your hand and without looking at your hand, how can you know that your hand is still there?
If you pay attention, you realize that you can feel the inside of your hand - a subtle sense of warmth or tingling.
That’s it.
Now move your attention slowly to the rest of your body and feel that sense of warmth/tingling throughout. Add progressively more and more parts of your body until you can feel that sense of aliveness in every single cell.
This is a really simple and pleasant exercise you can do anywhere at any time.
The results over a short period of time can be amazing.
Other Resources & Exercises
PODCAST: The Embodiment Podcast with Mark Walsh
AUDIO: Bodyscan Meditation with Jon Kabat-Zinn
ARTICLE: '6 Core Elements of Embodiment' by Kasia Patzelt