For Christmas, my Dad bought me a book (okay, quite a few books). We are both book lovers and have a problem with ‘the pile’ – the growing stack of books that never goes down, because when you read one, it is replaced immediately by five more (like when the treasure in Bellatrix Lestrange’s vault multiples when touched). A symptom of the pile is that books may hang around in your life for a long time before they finally get read. 📚 So it was with relative speed that I got around to reading Coasting just a few months after I received it, a book about running and life by Elise Downing.
As with my post about rootedness and aha moments, this book was absolutely an aha for me. The book follows Elise, a young woman in her twenties, as she takes on a mammoth run of the UK mainland coastline – from London, round to Cornwall, through Wales, up to Scotland, around to Northumbria and Norfolk, and back to her starting point. Fed up with work and in need of a change, she decided to undertake a challenge that most of us would think is not humanly possible. She runs through whipping wind, torrential rain, rivers of mud and baking sun – the many weathers of our rugged little island. 🏃🏼♀️
One of the things I loved about this book is that she doesn’t try to hide her humanness – she is just a woman on a run, having adult tantrums at the side of the road, running out of money, eating lots of cake, and cutting corners when she feels unsafe or wants a prettier route, rather than trying to do it some perfect, Instagrammable way. And because of that, it made me think that maybe I could run and enjoy it. She spoke about the strength of her legs alone carrying her 5000 miles, and there was something deeply inspiring about that. Just these little legs!
I have run on and off for a few years but never with any sense of enjoyment or commitment. But when I read this book, I experienced a new feeling about running – the feeling of possibility and self-belief. Firstly, as a woman, seeing a woman do something physically challenging using just the strength of her own body is incredibly empowering. 💪🏼 Something I don’t feel if I see a man doing things (which is why we need all the diversity in all the things!). Secondly, when I went running, (aside from the pain and doubt) I was egged on by this sense of my body being ancient – that it might be my body, but anatomically, it is almost the same body as humans living 100,000 years ago who ran while hunting or being hunted, or maybe during a game of tig! The same muscles and ligaments and bones moving in the same ways, the result of countless twists and turns of evolution. There is something I find really connecting in that. Running, jogging, walking – this upright movement on two legs – is a basic human capacity. It is one of the only types of exercise that doesn’t require equipment. Just the power of our bodies (powered by the same sun that has always been around to energise our planet!). I love these little ‘deep time’ thought experiments. ☀️
The point of all this is that it relates to our connection to our bodies. My own sense of connection to my body has grown from a little seed sown years ago and continues to be watered by inspiration from many wonderful people and practices. One of the people who has most inspired me, Sheryl Lisa Finn, a therapist living in Colorado, uses the phrase ‘we live in a neck-up culture’ to describe how we are disconnected from our bodies and living mostly in our heads. The brain – our most powerful tool – can also be a weakness; especially when feelings are hard to feel, we escape (often subconsciously and very cleverly to protect ourselves) by travelling up to our brains and attempting to fix things with it.
Connecting to our bodies is so important because our feelings need to be felt to be expressed rather than suppressed and ‘stuck’ in the body. The reason emotions are called feelings is because we literally feel them. They aren’t merely brain states but body states. Every emotion has a corresponding feeling in the body. Tight throat, a beating heart, a rush of adrenaline in the legs, a tightening jaw. We suppress because it can feel too hard to feel, but suppression can lead to emotions like anger or resentment and bodily symptoms like headaches, an irritable stomach, eczema, etc. Feeling our feelings means we honour and validate our experiences and make changes we may need to make in our lives.
The other reason that connecting to our bodies is so important is because it feels really good! You know when you are doing something and are fully embodied, you aren’t thinking or worrying? You’re sort of just floating along, unaware of anything but the activity you’re engrossed in. It’s pure connection. And connecting that way to our bodies, via positive experiences, or even neutral ones like recognising ‘I am hungry’, can help us, bit by bit, become more familiar with our entire internal landscape, including the more difficult sensations. ❤️
Some of my favourite ways to connect to my body and feel embodied (with some favourite things for you to check out) are:
🎨 Art: painting, photography, collage (Mixed Media Mantras by Kelly Rae Roberts).
💃🏼 Dance: just putting music on and dancing about, doesn’t have to be ‘good’! Dancing is human nature – a human universal – so there’s no such thing as can’t 🙂
🌳 Nature: walking amongst nature, noticing nature
🧘🏼♀️ Meditation: especially body scan meditation, feeling your tingly toes! A lovely talk by meditation teacher and psychologist Tara Brach about embodied presence. All of her meditations and podcast episodes are soothing and full of love.
👟 Exercise and stretching: any movement is good, walking, gardening, running, yoga
🐕 Being amongst animals
📚 Reading more about the wisdom of the body: one of the best books about connection to our bodies is probably The Myth of Normal or When The Body Says No, both by Gabor Maté. No Bad Parts is a book by Richard Schwartz about a therapy called Internal Family Systems that has you connect with your body and listen to what it wants to tell you.
❤️ Being amongst people who see your goodness and you see theirs
✨ Just listening: our bodies are talking to us all the time and we can learn to tune in (even things like eating when you’re hungry, going to the bathroom when you need it, not apologising for what you need, rather than suppressing those needs)
I’m really curious to hear how you connect to your body or experience a sense of being out of your head and really embodied in the present moment. As all the wisdom gurus told us many thousands of years ago, the present moment really is all we have – our minds are rarely in the present moment, but our bodies always are. As many times as we get pulled into the vortex of the mind, we can keep coming back to our bodies. It’s so hard (if anyone lives in their head, it’s me!) but we’ve all tasted the freedom in being embodied when you land in that place. As a note that I once saw posted to the inside of my friend’s shower said, be where your feet are. 👣