Beginning The Journey of Embodied Leadership.
How to discover the qualities of the embodied Self so you can find an unshakable sense of purpose that will fuel a life long process of transformation and growth.
“To have heartfelt and gratifying relationships with our fellow humans, as well as with the other creatures and places of the world, we must proceed first and foremost, by way of full-bodied feeling… To be fully human we must fully feel.”
—Bill Plotkin, Wild Mind, A Field Guide To The Human Psyche
You and I survived to get here.
Along the way, we developed protective parts of ourselves. These protective parts now manage our lives and relationships and are intimately connected to how past events have shaped our nervous system.
How protective parts of us are formed.
As children and young adults, we often unconsciously learn to protect ourselves by living in our heads. The process of survival takes us out of the body. Our attention is constantly scanning the environment around our bodies, looking for cues of threat or safety.
We will explore this process through the lens of the nervous system later in this pillar article. For now, we will focus on how managerial, protective parts of us are formed and how these parts are intimately and directly connected to the body.
Note for later: One of the most important skills for connecting to your body is your inner scanning sense, which is called interoception. The external and motor sense is exteroception, and the process that launches a cascade of embodied events that lead from sensation to emotion to feeling, thoughts, behaviors, and ways of seeing the world (perception) is called neuroception. We will learn more about these as we practice together in this living newsletter.
Learning to return to the body regularly and responsively when challenged and tested allows the maturation, growth, and transformation process to unfold. The body is the only place where we can learn skills to reshape our automatic and unconscious protective patterns and, in doing so, discover the qualities of our embodied Self.
To thrive and live fulfilling lives, we must learn to be in our bodies and to constantly return to them after being challenged and tested. Living our lives through our heads and intellectual experience of the world disconnects us from what psychologist Daniel Kahneman, author of the book Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow, calls our system 2 thinking. System 2 thinking is the form of thinking that when accessed, allows us to reshape our unconscious, reactive, and intuitive system 1 thinking.
What I believe he left out of this book was how important embodied skills are to perform these responsible and adaptable actions in life, work, and relationships. You categorically and physically can not do this in your head. If you are, you are not doing it.
I’m intentionally planting seeds here for different ways to explore the same integrated process of embodied leadership. I want to lay the foundation for exploring how embodied leadership is integral and essential to your growth and development.
Back to the question, how did these protective parts form in the first place?
A child's world is governed by two opposing forces: authenticity and attachment, also known as the need to self-differentiate and the need to belong. These polarizing forces on a child shape the formation of our managerial parts during childhood and early adolescence.
As Gabor Mate says in “The Myth of Normal.” When in doubt, to survive, a child will be inauthentic to stay attached because the risk of not being attached is to risk death. This happens automatically. Parents, communities, and society at large do not need to abuse, shun, or actively intend for this to happen, even though, in some cases, they do.
For example, stop being so smart, Sally; toughen up, Billy. Boys need to be strong, and girls should be sweet, right? All that has to happen is that the child learns to stay attached. They must be a certain way and are, therefore, safe and valued through an adaptive process. This is how the person we think we are begins to shape.
How protective parts block us from becoming our whole selves.
When we enter adulthood, we have more agency and high-stack relationships, careers, businesses, teams, and loved ones. We start to discover real riffs and gaps that begin to open in our daily lives.
Richard Schwartz, author of “No Bad Parts,” says, “When you were young and experienced traumas or attachment injuries, you didn’t have enough body or mind to protect yourself. Your Self couldn’t protect your parts, so your parts lost trust in your Self as the inner leader,”
In these gaps, in this wound, lies the potential opening to grow and, in doing so, to find our gifts. Becoming conscious that you have protective parts of you that are hijacking your life, work, and relationships is just the beginning of an amazing journey of growth!
Many adults' lives, work, and relationships are, in fact, controlled by mature, reactive, protective parts that hijack and prevent them from living fulfilling lives.
Before we learn strategies to work with these parts so we can grow, let’s explore the idea that having one all-encompassing personality is a myth. This will open the door to discovering the qualities of the embodied Self. The embodied self is what we will discover and what your parts must learn to trust again.
The myth of monolithic personality vs. the multiplicity of self-concept.
You are a multiplicity of personalities, not a single all-encompassing identity. Depending on the situation, circumstances, and who or what you are relating to, different parts of you will be at play in the given moment.
In the wonderful book from our suggested reading list, “No Bad Parts” by Richard Schwartz, PhD, the author introduces this theme as “The Myth of Monthloythic Personality vs. The Multiplicity of Self Concept.”
Discovering that we are not a single all-encompassing Self and yet exist as a multiplicity of parts is the beginning of the journey to becoming a whole, generative adult and an embodied leader.
Once we reach this stage, we can begin to get to know these parts of us that are running our lives, work, and relationships, and the unblending process can begin. When we actively discover tools and skills to respond to these parts in ways that allow us to befriend, attend, and shape our responses in more creative, compassionate, courageous, purposeful, powerful, and present ways, we are unblending from the parts.
This reshaping process is a cycle that starts in the head, drops into the body, and then changes how we see and experience the world as the cycle repeats. This is a lifelong process, but the results start to show quickly!
Your own protective parts of you are what stand in the way of your growth and development. You find them by learning to notice the moments when you notice a lot of sensation. I call this a skill-seeking sensation. You want to train yourself to notice moments of high sensation as singles to begin your practice.
The three magic words to begin practicing.
Okay, so step 1: You are training yourself to seek sensation and to notice high-sensation moments as opportunities to practice.
Step 2: When these moments happen, you turn on your active scanning awareness and ask three questions. These questions are simple, but the space between them will expand for the rest of your life. The three questions are:
What am I feeling?
Where do I feel it on my body?
What does it need or want from me?
***I will provide advanced training on these questions, but what is most important to know is that your answers do not need to be normal feeling words; feeling is not verbal. It is sensational, and this process can initially be challenging for some people.
You might feel red in the face, heart beating, sweaty palms, disturbed, frustrated, angry, sad, depressed, protective, confused, anxious, stuck in your head, ruminating, overplanning, or challenged in whatever way that is unique to your life.
These questions are no joke. What is scary is that most adults can’t answer them. We can play many awesome tricks and games with these questions to help them become more rooted.
Remember: The problems in your life are your curriculum, and we each have our own. We will learn here together how to notice these trailheads and opening moments.
Then, we will learn how to use these moments to craft embodied stretches to train ourselves to respond creatively and adaptively. This will allow you to grow and discover parts of you that have been locked within, waiting to be released so you can shine in your wholeness.
My intention of embodied leadership with Chris Wilson is to show how integrated and connected neuroscience, somatic psychology, and spirituality are in a clear and concrete way that you can use to connect to your everyday life, relationships, and work.
If you read this article, you will find links to various articles and resources you can use to begin your embodied leadership journey.
If you’d like to practice together, consider joining our premium community. Each week, I will share a new stretch that you can use to experiment and cultivate your practice.
How to find the trailhead and opening moments in your life to practice and grow.
The tests and trials of our default life and relationships are our curriculum, and we each have our own.
These challenges trigger our automatic, unconscious reaction patterns the most. As we develop our embodied leadership skills, we discover that these opportunities become trailhead moments and turning points where we can respond with the new tools we have developed, opening the door for new experiences and greater capacity to connect, heal, and grow.
This form of training will teach you to prime yourself to notice the time, location, and frequency of these events and how to craft embodied stretches that will allow you to respond more empoweringly.
How do we find these trailheads and opening moments?
First, we recognize that they exist. Someone usually needs to point them out to you, and that’s what is happening here right now. If we were working together in coaching, this would be one of the first skills you would need to develop during the power phase. I’m letting you know that they exist and that it is your job to notice them. This is called priming. You are priming yourself to turn on your type 2 thinking, as Kahneman calls it, in Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow.
Second, you’ll need to develop a simple yet powerful embodied stretch to activate the process of entering the body, seeking sensation, and turning into your sense of interoception to interrupt your non-conscious, automatic reaction pattern.
The first and most important stretch that I want you to master is:
What am I feeling?
Where do I feel it in or on my body?
What does it need or want?
Warning to the unskilled (Yes, including me). These stretches may seem simple and easy to you when reading about them or when I talk about them in writing, on video, or on the podcast. They are not what you and I “think” they are. This is a trick of the mind called the Dunning-Kruger trap that you can learn about in Make It Stick, The Science of Successful Learning.
At our edge, we are always unskilled and unaware of it. Think about that! As my sense of interoception and ability to drop into my experience grow, I am always finding my own personal edge of experience. The Dunning-Kruger effect is the tendency for incompetent people to lack the skills to improve because they cannot distinguish between incompetence and competence. I’ll talk more about this, but one way to check yourself is to keep track of the cues that you use to judge your practice.
This is another reason why working with a coach, your peers and using tension in your body and mind as your guide, is so important. You are the only person who can report on your experience. If you are bad at this, it’s not because you lack the ability; you are simply poorly trained. So, keep at it. Keep dropping in and experimenting with different ways to seek senation, befriend and attend and poll yourself over time. This is another reason why I host our premium community chat.
Finally, step 3 is creating a container for your practice in your life that allows you to check in weekly on your intentions, actions, feedback, and reflections related to your stretches and trailhead moments.
This is what we learn to do in our embodied leadership program. For example, over each season—summer, spring, fall, and winter—we have four natural opportunities of three months each to check in and learn to craft these simple yet profound embodied stretches.
The power of these stretches is that they are rooted in your life (they are not goals or dreams). Because they will automatically recur without you trying, you will have automatic opportunities to practice your stretch. And if you don’t practice, you’ll learn to diagnose what is happening and to craft different stretches.
If you want another scientific perspective on this method, I suggest learning about The Tiny Habit Method, which relates to this practice in many ways. Both train you to create small behavior recipes that integrate into already existing routines at the trailing edge of your experience and to use celebration and embodied practice to water what you are creating so it will take root in your life with minimal effort.
Do you see how this relates to embodied practice being an allowing process, not trying, pushing, or striving that requires motivational force and a lot of energy?
Most people don’t mature; they just get older.
To transform and grow, you must learn to calm, soothe, and connect to the reactive patterns locked within your body and nervous system.
This is how leaders become nurturing, generative adults who can grow through each stage of life, work, and relationships.
Our transformation and realization are found not in trying to escape our lives but rather by learning to respond to the challenges in our lives. The way to truly do this is to bring our awareness out of our heads and into our bodies.
To exclude the body is to intellectualize our experience and explain it away. This is one reason why intellectualizing your problems will often only make you more tense, anxious, and blocked by limiting beliefs or thoughts that disconnect you from the world around you. Understanding this is only 20% of the battle. Understanding this intellectually does not mean you can perform and change; you must physically practice to transform.
This physical transformation happens by learning to drop into the body. Hence, embodied leadership. Most people live in their heads, trying their best to understand their problems.
When we learn to let go of the story in our heads, we find that the story is shaped by the state of the nervous system. Neurologically, stories follow the state of the body because 80% of the information sent to the brain is afferent sensory information, and only 20% is outgoing motor information.
When a person is trained to become aware of this, they can use the B.A.S.I.C. Method to befriend, attend to, and shape their automatic non-conscious reactions to challenges in their life, work, and relationships.
The story in your head follows the state of your body.
Neurologically, the body is constantly receiving information from the environment. The process of neuroception launches a cascade of embodied events that go from sensation > emotion > to feelings > thoughts > judgments and then > stories, beliefs, and actions.
When we learn to calm and soothe our nervous systems, we relate to our problems differently and see more clearly.
If you are like most people, you are unaware of this until someone teaches you and helps you enter your body. That is what is happening here. I am inviting you to drop in with me.
Coming into the body is not an idea or hope.
It is a physical demonstration performed by dropping into our raw, real, muddy lives and experiences that can only be felt in the body.
Our edge is where we learn to communicate with our environment, relationships, and communities. It can only be truly accessed through the body.
We will learn to notice sensational moments daily and use them as trailheads or openings. These trailheads are just like hiking trails, but they lead to pathways deeper into our bodies and, hence, deeper into our lives.
Your edges and trailheads to do this work are found in the sensational moments of your life that make you feel anxious, upset, and frustrated.
Why these types of moments? Because this is when your environment brings out a protective part of you. You’ll learn later how this allows the tending, mending, and befriending process to occur.
This is called unbending. You will learn how to access the qualities of the embodied Self, and later, I’ll share what is happening in your nervous system to allow this to occur.
Discovering the qualities of the embodied Self and the seat of awareness inside your body.
As we deepen our relationship with the body and become more skillful and responsive, we will find a seat of awareness that’s not only grounded but intimately connected to the environment, our lives, and our relationships.
This place or quality of experience has many different names that we will learn, and there are many different ways to describe what stands in the way of accessing this quality of experience that we will learn.
Moving past the guards & discovering beautiful monsters.
It’s often said that this place is guarded or blocked by something. It is. We will explore and learn about these things from different perspectives, all to learn how to get in.
One of my favorite ways to label what blocks us from accessing this inner space is first emotional residue. Once we are able to sufficiently get into or clear our emotional residue and begin to get to know our bodies, we discover something more form and function; these are protective parts and/or beautiful monsters.
We will explore and learn about beautiful monsters, too. I want you to know right now that as you get to know beautiful monsters, your experience of them changes. They begin to open, and you always learn the same thing.
I’ll tell you more about the story of the beautiful monsters another time, but I’ll share the ending now. As you get to know the beautiful monsters, each one eventually shares its wisdom with you, and they always end up saying the same thing.
“It is real, but not true.”
“It is real, but not true.”
“It is real, but not true.”
Later, we will learn about the neuroscience of what causes this to occur inside the nervous system and brain, and we will get to learn together how amazing this phrase is.
What’s important at this stage of the process is to know that what these protective parts and beautiful monsters are saying about the world is real - but it is not necessarily true. In the language of the nervous system, these parts have been shaped by traumatic and challenging events and they see the world in that way ONLY.
You are learning to be with them, to be less reactive to them, and to befriend them. What we discover from this process is that this work is an allowing process, that trying hard creates tension, wanting an experience to be different than it becomes a negative experience, but being able to be with an experience as it is in some way becomes a positive experience.
Discovering The B.A.S.I.C. Method
This work is filled with paradoxes to manage, not problems to solve. It becomes a process of befriending, attending, shaping, integrating, and connecting in and out into the world.
What I’m sharing here aligns with the B.A.S.I.C. method from Deb Dana and her work in Polyvagal Theory.
It’s as if we don’t need to try so hard. Embodied leadership opens our world and becomes a process of unfolding into who we really are.
“We find in the body an objective witness to our life that has no investment whatsoever in our skewed ego-versions of things. In addition, our Soma not only knows the truth of how it is with us, others, and the world, but it appreciates and, in a strange way, delights in everything. Even more, it wants to communicate this to us and provide mentoring. Our Soma is literally an infinite ocean of practical wisdom.”
What are you talking about? I am definitely in my body.
I live in this body every day. How could I not be in it? As we bring our awareness into the body, we find it riddled with sensation and tension just below our conscious awareness.
We have many words to describe this ocean of experience: Anxiety, Stress, Pain, Anger, Frustration, Trauma, Numbness, Joy, Ecstasy, Presence, Compassion, Tingly, Shame, Okness, Soreness, inflammation, a full belly after a big meal.
This process of bringing explicit awareness to implicit sensation in the body is, in fact, bringing the unconscious into conscious awareness. Neuroception sends sensory information bottom-up from sensation to emotion and creates our perception of how we see the world.
Neuroeption launches a cascade of embodied events that travel from the body to the brain, going from sensation to emotion, feeling, thought, mood, judgment, story, belief, and behavior, creating our perception of our reality.
The Nervous System Adapted To Look for Danger - It’s nervous 😬 ‼️
The system (your nervous system) is primed to look for cues of danger before cues of safety to survive. This is one of the reasons the gateway to transformation is said to be guarded by fear. Because anything new or unknown is in some way felt as a neuroception of threat. To thrive, we must consciously respond to and reshape cues for danger. This is again a direct example of how embodied leadership declares a brighter future.
This work is for the brave who are willing to be courageous. You need to be brave. Brave means to shield or to have bravado, but you can’t stay in that state; you must learn to flip into courage. Courage means opening one's heart to the possibility of being wounded or even killed.
See, another paradox to manage, not a problem to solve. This is what we call the bravery and courage cycle. Trauma and traumas are, in some way, the risk of truly living. There is a hidden gift to learning to go inward. It’s definitely challenging, but it’s like type two fun. It’s so much better than floating on the surface of your life.
Dropping Into The Body
As we drop out of the “map” or the thinking mind, we enter raw, real territory that can only be felt, not thought. We find we have been moving away from tension, subtly and overtly resisting, masking, or trying to suppress or repress what we are experiencing.
The profound impact of turning inward, moving toward, and actively learning to be with what we are experiencing must not go unnoticed. It will change your entire life experience.
This requires you to learn to befriend and to attend to what comes up along the trail. This is how you become a nurturing, generative adult. If you don’t learn to befriend and to attend, you adaptively become something else.
You will likely become brittle and hardened or an archetype of the loyal soldier, the wounded child, the addict, the escapist, the bliss head, the guru, the conformist, the victim, or prince or princess or rebel.
All of these archetypes exist in our collective consciousness as symbols of the various shadow aspects of contorted psyches; the whole nurtured adult psyche will maintain a more interconnected aspect of what Plotkin calls the 3D ego. This allows the individual to shape these shadow aspects in ways that allow them to access their gifts while being a natural, collaborative, supportive part of the community.
Discovering parts & beautiful monsters, the intention is to move toward wholing.
We have many different ways of being, and we get to wear many different parts and masks. The intention here is not to attempt to judge or to define the perfect collection or the way to be.
The intention here is to become your whole, beautiful, creative, compassionate, powerful, playful, magnificent self who can respond to the challenges in your life and make the world a better place by being in it.
How many adult-age children have never been taught how to do this? It’s no wonder they react and make the choices that they do.
“Coming into the body” is a lifelong journey inward.
This choice to drop out of our heads and into our bodies takes us on a physical journey, opening us to a lifelong process of generative transformation and human growth and development. To miss this turn and to live our lives above our shoulders, through our intellect, is to go in a different direction completely. The head finds differences and creates divides, while the body sees only connections and knows wisdom beyond words. We can emotionally, spiritually, and intellectually bypass without even knowing it. The best we can do is to commit to coming into the body and from this place opening, regularly checking to see if our practice is connecting us to the environment, with other people, and those that we are in community with and those that we do not understand.
Relaxing into wholeness & “the subtle joy of being.”
Wanting an experience to be different than it is is a negative experience; learning to be with an experience as it is is a positive experience. I will speak for myself and my limited capacity. The only word I can use to describe the totality of this experience is “awakening.” When I use that word, I do not use it lightly.
After 10 years of practice, I feel like I am just now realizing what masters mean when they say that the body is already awake. As I continued practicing, I realized that I was relaxing into a subtle joy of being that I hope others can experience.
This subtle joy of being is not an event, object, or mountaintop experience. It is a quality noticed in the space between. Reflecting on this direct experience at this moment brings tears to my eyes now and inspires me to be with you here today.
My sense is that this quality of being is accessed after we begin to integrate and connect to our protective parts and gain more access to Self and Self-resourcing skills.
As this happens over time, we begin to make choices in our lives from a more self-led place, and the physical environment of our social life can become less anxiety-driven as our protective parts, in turn, become less vigilant as they gain trust in Self. This is one of the reasons I think authors like Reginal A. Ray, who wrote The Practice of Pure Awareness and The Awakening Body, say this work becomes so natural it is supernatural.
As these parts of us begin to relax and become less vigilant, the stories and constant anxious flow of thoughts that came from these parts begin to fade. As this happens, it’s as if a space in our life opens, and at first, this can be scary or odd, and this might re-inspire these parts to become vigilant again.
Under the right conditions and guidance, each wave can help a person build a relationship with the more empty, vibrant, dark, light, unconditioned quality of being. As we learn to bring our attention to this space between the mental formations and realize it is felt (not thought) in the body, this space that was once empty becomes a sort of seat where awareness can drift or rest.
This has happened to me for only a few years, and I feel it’s important to say that. This is the edge of the opening in my practice right now. It’s also important for me to remind you and myself that this is not an event. This is a quality of being that is cultivated, just like a garden is cultivated. Under certain conditions, that garden will die, but I sense that the Self remembers it was there and, in some way, knows how to allow it to return. Maybe this is what insight is. I felt a shiver move through me as I wrote that.
Discovering Something To Experience, The internal pool of peace, the subtle joy of being.
Relaxing into this internal pool of peace, this unconditioned space, the primordial space, the yin space, the vast sensational landscape that moves and flows within my body has allowed me and others that I have worked with to experience a subtle joy of being or “something to experience.”
This something to experience, this internal pool of peace or the subtle joy of being, is not an emotion or even a thing to be labeled, held onto, or chased. It is something that can only be felt—it is sensational.
Here are two ways we might describe this quality of being from a Neuroscience and Polyvagal approach.
Neuroscience: three embodied states of awareness (ESA)
In the language of neuroscience and research on embodied states of awareness (ESA), this experience of the subtle joy of being and something to experience aligns with RESA or restorative embodied awareness states.
RESA is not simply relaxation. It’s marked by sustained awareness, spontaneous emergence, complete surrender, non-doing, and direct bodily experience. “The felt experience leads to a lasting sense of relief, often from realizing what we really feel about something, or from the experience of surrender into “not knowing” of whatever comes up” (Fogel 2012 pg. 41)
Polyvagal Theory: Glimmers & Glows
In the language of Polyvagal theory and Deb Dana's work, this experience might align with “glimmers” and “glows.” Glimmers are tiny moments of ventral vagal nervous system openings and transitions that happen spontaneously and go unnoticed by the untrained. I can train you to notice them, relax into them, and, in doing so, allow these glimmers to expand into glows.
An important and shared characteristic of all three of these states is that to be in them, we must not apply a method, be trying to attain it, or hold onto it. It is a quality of experience that emerges or is relaxed into, savored, appreciated, or to sonder once it is objectified or held. We are out of it. Then we remember working with a memory of it, yes, a beautiful memory, but still not the direct experience that can only be accessed in the body. This is much of what the book Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism is about and one of the reasons I am a proponent of embodied practice over intellectual understanding.
With these two examples, I’m pointing to something that I believe is accessible to many of us and that, once accessed, is the primary healing and restorative force found inside all of us.
My personal experience of discovering the subtle joy of being
From my own experience, I noticed that for five years, I began documenting and journaling to myself about this quality of subtle joy of being or something to experience. Still, it was out of reach of my understanding. I was surprised that I felt so good and often wondered what happened to my productivity and drive. But I wasn’t sinking into a depressive state. Rather, I was responsive and subtly joyful behind my day-to-day anxieties, challenges, and fears.
When I realized it wasn’t going away at first, I would judge it or try to tell myself, “Who cares?” or “So what, no one wants to hear about you being happy,” or “If you’re good, just be good and let that flow into whatever you are doing.” I would notice this suddenly while washing dishes, or I would be waiting at a stop sign watching someone cross the road slowly, or I’d hang up the phone after a meeting.
This sensational aliveness would tingle or move, and for maybe a few breaths, it would be as if my awareness could sequence and dance through my body. I even had moments where I thought something was wrong with my heart, and I would “pop” out of it and into my head.
It wasn’t happening intentionally. When I noticed it and tried to do something with it, it would change, and I’d eventually lose interest. Even now, I feel protective about writing about it because it is not something to hold onto ~ that is absolutely not it. But I’ve committed to learning how to talk about this because it’s been happening so long that I’d be ignoring the subject if I didn’t make space for it and share it.
I’m 40 years old. It took me about 10 years to cultivate what I would define as my practice. This was only beginning to peak out in my experience 5 years ago. I’m sure it happened unconsciously because glimmers are how the nervous system balances itself naturally. When it became more noticeable, I started talking about it with a few close confidants and a couple of therapists. But it took about three years for it to stick around for me to more formally begin to realize this was something.
Hence, I call it phrases like “something to experience,” “unconditioned space,” “subtle joy of being,” and “the primordial mirror. " A more clinical term might be “RESA—restorative embodied state of awareness.” The key factor here is I am not applying any practice, thinking about it, trying to access it, or holding onto it when it happens; it happens, or I notice it. I’m curious about it.
Over time, as we regularly return to the body through tests, trials, challenges, ups and downs, good days and bad, fearful moments and joys, we build a relationship with this dark, empty, vibrant space in the lower belly and body. With each drop in, it’s as if this relationship acts as a primordial mirror, allowing you to discern and trust more and more in your own Self.
Here is one way that I visualize how this quality of being has flourished in my direct experience. I do this by looking at my experience from four perspectives. First, I imagine the four steps of self-directed change.
Then, I imagine the emotional episode timeline that I first learned about ten years ago. When I visualize this in the context of my life and practice, I can see directly how learning to get out of my head and into my body has physically trained me to relax and respond to tension in more and more constructive ways. But in my experience, this gateway was blocked by fear, panic, anxiety, and disassociation. (I’ll share more about this in the next section)
Third, I think back to the root of my practice and what I first learned from Reginald A. Ray in the practice of pure awareness about nine years ago, about a year after my first panic attack. At first, this didn’t mean much to me, but looking back, I see that this is an integral component of embodied work that my sense was masterfully delivered. It’s the somatic earth-decent practice of falling into the earth, 12-fold lower belly breathing, and/or simply and directly building a felt sense that the ground, earth, and space around me and my body are here to support me. This is the core of how I was originally taught, and it showed me over ten years that I am deeply and wonderfully lucky to have been introduced to this work in this way now. This is why I am here today, ten years later, writing about this practice. The deeper I came into my body, the more I paradoxically felt fear and panic, and this practice was either somewhere in my perception or physically what I did to allow myself to move through the experience.
Lastly, or fourth, it is you, my fiance, my small group of friends Preston, Allegra, Bruno, Alicja, Jenny, Dave S., Mike M., Chris S., and others in our little crew in San Francisco, and all of the people I’ve practiced with and opened up to/with over the last ten years. I know that I am only part of a natural environment, and it would be a fantasy to pretend I did this on my own. But, and this is a BIG BUT. I don’t think this quality of being would be possible if I wasn’t trained to practice in this way. I say this because it’s a direct attribution to becoming Self-love or to having an intention to become your own primary caretaker who can care and soothe for your own parts and, in doing so, allow others to be your secondary caretaker.
My point here is to say that this quality of experience is possible in a normal person's real, raw, messy life. If I were to make a common comparison, I think everyone can run, jog, or finish a marathon. You can do this too. I don’t think I am uniquely qualified. So, now that we are aware of that, this quality of life experience is not only possible but likely possible for most people.
Let’s talk about what is in the way.
Fear, panic, trauma, shame, and disassociation are guards at the door
We don’t have to label the guards. The point is. We all have guards at the door, and the guards are in your body. They are not in your head. You can’t think or talk or fantasize your way out of this.
You can try, but it will not lead to this quality of long-lasting felt experience. In some way, that way of being will require energy and effort to maintain, and based on my experience and understanding of the nervous system, relational dynamics, and internal family systems. At some point, the problems in your life will act as your tormentors, continuously helping you find the place inside your body that needs your care and attention. Then you are just back here, starting with what is happening in your body.
At first, for many people and me, being open to what is happening in your body is a personal and subjective experience. It’s important to me not to pretend one way of responding or being is always healthy, wholing, or generative for me and everyone or everybody. I want to be clear that I am critical of my practice, and I want you to be critical of yours. Is what you do helping you feel more connected, grounded, resilient, compassionate, and whole? When in doubt. Slow down. What I am talking about here is learning to be with your experience of YOUR LIFE, not my life.
I bring this up because, in my opinion, too many people discover these tools that help them, and then they identify with them or spout only their benefits. The reality is this work has scared the shit out of me at times and caused me to back off, regroup, put my attention elsewhere, and ask for advice from my community and therapists.
Things come up. I know when I look back on the past 20 years of my life, even as my practice was beginning to take root in my default life—meaning not sitting on a meditation cushion—when I was in my daily default life, I would notice I was able to work with the moment, anxiety, arguments, and everyday life, and my life got profoundly better.
Even with this happening. Anxiety, panic attacks, and real fear moments caused me to psychologically and physically run away from my practice in a way. For example. There were times I questioned and got scared of the idea of what might be in my shadow. I had quite a few creepy moments where I wondered if I could trust myself or if I would lose control. The thought would pop into my head and drift away, but then later, in a breathwork session or somatic meditation, I would beget this creepy fear that I might lose my mind.
The number one thing I was trained to do was always come back to my body and to get out of the story in my head. To slow down and move at the pace of connection. More is not always better. I was trained to lay on the ground, breathe into the earth, and realize that the ground was there to support me. This is why it’s so important to me to always bring this work back to you: what activities, what actions, what practices, what people and places or things allow you to feel safe, connected, calm, present or open and nourished? My sense is this is something we are all learning to work with and to develop connections within our own bodies. Then, as we develop this quality of experience, we can open more and more as an allowing process.
I want to make sure that anyone who reads this knows that if they need help, please get it. There is never anything wrong with asking for help. The national suicide and crisis hotline is #988 via text message in the USA or 988lifeline.org.
Don’t sugarcoat this—this is not easy. Part of me would wish this on no one, but once you start, keep going.
Why am I sharing this now?
This was my real experience; real experiences are not fantastic stories of joy and sunshine. I think it’s important to share your real personal experience, especially if it was challenging for anyone beginning the journey inward.
We will talk more about this, too, but I notice from my clients and my practice that as we come into the body, we can often become more anxious and even begin to feel panic or things we have never felt before.
As a somatic therapist in training, I notice that many people in our society judge these experiences or actively attempt to remove or protect people from them. This can happen directly, indirectly, unconsciously, or without intentional meaning. It happens with medication and good intentions.
I am not judging the use of medication, but I am pointing to the power of this way of thinking and training to change your life experience.
In my experience, when we learn to work with what is happening in our day-to-day lives, we gain skills to work with more as we naturally develop and grow. This opens the door for a new relationship with our lives, who we think we are, and what we can open up to.
As Carl Jung says, “People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light but by making the darkness conscious. ~ Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 99.”
Let the Self do the work and get out of the way.
As Richard Schwartz, PhD, author of No Bad Parts, says, as we gain more access to the Self, the protective parts of us that manage our lives and relationships begin to relax.
As these parts relax and become less vigilant, our vision for our lives changes, too. I think it’s important to make the connection between those vigilant parts and anxiety, panic, and even panic attacks because it’s all connected through your body.
Whatever comes up along the way, we are learning to befriend, attend, and shape it.
And if you need another firm wholing statement that has been helpful for me too, here is what Michael Singer, spiritual guide and author of The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself, says: “I can handle this.”
“I can handle this.”
It is so important. You can. Sometimes, we will need help, so reach out. But if you reached out to me, I would not try to stop you from feeling the way that you are. I would do my best to sit with you in it and invite you to ask yourself, what are you feeling, where do you feel it, and what does it need from you?
We are all learning together for ourselves: “I can handle this.”
There are no bad parts, and the Self always knows what to do.
As we travel inward, we realize we don’t really know who we are. We are discovering who we are. Before we started practicing in this way, protective parts of us managed our lives and relationships. We needed these parts to feel safe and to be effective.
These parts are intimately connected to the tension within our bodies and the relationships we have in life. They are inspired and made vigilant by reactive patterns. Their primary goal is to keep us safe.
As we learn to come into the body, we get stopped by these parts like centuries at the beginning of a trailhead deeper. We must learn to befriend and attend to these guards until they trust us. The qualities of the embodied Self are accessed through this befriending, attending, shaping, integrating, and connecting process, called the B.A.S.I.C method.
We will learn more about accessing and conjuring the qualities of Self in Chapter 3. Without fear of oversimplifying, here is what I think is happening as we repeatedly learn to come into the body through the lens of what we will learn about in Chapter 3, Polyvagal Theory - The Autonomic Hierarchy and Accessing Embodies States of Awareness (ESA)
Reshaping Your Autonomic Nervous System
As we learn to respond to and reshape our autonomic nervous system cues for danger, we can cultivate glimmers of ventral vagal states. We often learn to do this in relationships through co-regulation and playful, powerful practice. This is an act of dynamic, loving kindness and fierce presence often accessed by letting go or falling from a DESA to a RESA state by mistake. In a ventral vagal state, we have access to our social engagement, tend and mend, rest and digest functions, and the felt qualities of Self-energy can manifest.
Everything I’m mentioning here is like breadcrumbs, little signs pointing in the direction of an experience.
The coaching and group circle containers are structured environments where we can learn to tap into these qualities and textures of being. Our practice becomes a routine of regularly dropping into and conjuring these qualities, priming ourselves to develop skills to respond with more resources in the space between sessions. The hours spent in group and individual sessions become a scaffolding and dojo. Our default life, work, and relationships become the higher-stakes environment where we practice.
Each season—summer, spring, fall, and winter—invites a new opportunity to return to our practice and answer the call of our life, work, and relationships. This embodied leadership training manual outlines a three-month seasonal process that you can follow to transform and grow.
The 8C’s and 5P’s of Self
From an internal family systems therapy perspective, the qualities of the Self are often described as the 8 Cs: compassion, curiosity, calmness, clarity, courage, connectedness, confidence, and creativity, and the 5 Ps: presence, patience, perspective, persistence, and playfulness.
Now, when we look at the context of embodied leadership training and what we are learning to do here, we are learning to self-resource and to become more whole humans. This means we are learning to generate these states of being from an internal locus of control or through co-regulation with people and things we interact with.
YOU CAN DO THIS - Feeling lost, confused, and overwhelmed is ok.
This is a practice, and it’s completely okay if you feel lost, frustrated, completely disconnected, or overwhelmed.
I am here to say that you can do this. You are the only person who can be trained to do this work, and we will start where you are.
This is the process of becoming a nurturing, generative adult who can befriend, attend, shape, integrate, and connect to their experience. You must learn to notice when you feel frustrated and use that as an opportunity to practice.
We need partners and community to learn together.
This is one reason why coaching and group work relationships are so important. I am acting as a co-regulating resource in your life. The leaders in your group also show up with the same intention. Together and alone, we are generating and cultivating moments in your week to access and drop into the state of being where self-energy qualities are present in and on our bodies. This is a self-discovery process.
Self Does The Real Work
This touching, accessing, and conjuring of the qualities of Self-energy present on and in your body is what, in my experience, is doing the work of generative healing, growth, and transformation. This is why I say this work is an allowing process. This is not coming top-down from me or any facilitator in this program. We are all in this together. This work is raw, real, and vulnerable, but it is the intimate, beautiful, creative work of becoming Self-love.
Discovering Your Unshakable Purpose
From witnessing my clients, training partners, and myself, I sense that when you realize that this commitment to regularly returning to the body is what gives you access to the qualities of Self, you automatically stubble on your Unshakable Purpose. This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
As the practices take root in your life, you will realize they allow you to feel more purposeful, powerful, and present. This opens the door for you to relax into your unshakable purpose. Your purpose simply is to keep doing this work because it allows you to grow, be less protective, and be more creative, collaborative, and powerful.
Isn’t that beautiful?
Here’s the trick.
You don’t need to try so hard. You don't need to believe me; I would rather you not. All you need to do is playfully and powerfully practice, and you will begin to flourish like a garden.
How do you practice? You learn to get into your body. The practices unfold from there once you discover how to find trailheads and openings inward.
This is why coming into the body is both the beginning and end of everything we do here. You will be called on to become more resourced as you learn to go into the body. As you become more resourced, you will gain access to the innate qualities of Self that will further empower you to relax, open, and connect to more of your life. This is the generative transformational growth spiral of embodied leadership training.
Later in this training, we will begin practicing in the default flow of our lives and relationships. Using the B.A.S.I.C method, you'll learn to respond to challenges and bounce back by shifting your awareness from the stories in your head to being present in your body. This cultivates the qualities of the Self and enables skillful action for success in life, work, and relationships.
Again, Don’t worry. If this feels scary or challenging, just know we will start where you are. You are the only person who can be trained. If you feel lost or unskilled, it just means you have not been trained yet.
You don’t have to try so hard; all you have to do is relax and begin to practice getting into your body. To leave out the body would be to repeat a pattern of disconnection, avoidance, addiction, trauma, or fear-based protection that will stagnate our growth and development as human beings and as leaders.
WARNING: This work will change you. It is the beginning of a lifelong seasonal process of growth and development that will allow you to become your whole self and a fully resourced leader.
We will move at your pace, not faster or slower. I’ve had many moments and periods of time in this work where I needed to slow down, regroup, or even feel scared of what I might uncover. As I share this with you today, I sense that all of these moments (even the ones I judged as unskillful) were moments leading me to learn to befriend and attend to my parts.
This is what it means to become a nurturing, generative adult and a fully resourced leader who is capable of stepping out into discomfort and skillfully and creatively responding and communicating with the world and people around them.
Most people see leadership as a quality that only a few possess. The leadership potential I am talking about is present inside of you, no matter how you identify or have been nurtured.
You are a leader. Our training always starts by returning to and coming into the body.
Let us begin.