From Embodiment to Mystical Embodifulness

Integral Consciousness – Part 3

There is a lot of talk about embodiment these days, and for good reason. More and more, we are recognizing the inadequacy of living solely and primarily from our heads. Rather than seeking mental or imaginative flight—or release through spiritual escapism—we want to be more present in our bodies through various spiritual practices and activities with a more embodied focus.

The first movement of embodiment is often to incorporate practices using our physical bodies, such as movement, exercise, or dance. We can receive spiritual benefits from these forms, especially from practices that have the potential to bring us into a flow state where we feel a sense of freedom and wholeness. More mindful practices like yoga or tai chi incorporate an intentionally spiritual or mindful component. These are certainly steps in the right direction.

At the same time, in many of these practices there remains a subtle dualistic separation of body and mind (or body and spirit). They, for the most part, are not integrative. They might use the body to quiet the mind, or even let the mind serve the body for a time. But the separation remains. They do not actively invite the body into awareness from, not just awareness of. Invited into its own knowing and fully present being.

To really move beyond the imperialism of the mind I wrote about in part 2, we need someplace to go. We need somewhere to release into—not just a momentary escape and then right back into our heads. So not just a movement out of our heads, but an integration of our “mind” and consciousness into our whole body. In this way, we are not relegating material reality, our bodies, solely to the realm of the physical, but also the spiritual and mystical knowing and being. Prominent transpersonal psychologist, author, and professor Jorge Ferrer calls it “embodifulness.”

Embodifulness is the reincorporation of our full body through all its centers of knowing and being: the heart, the womb, the feet/body—and yes, the head too. It is rewelcoming a greater sense of whole-body attunement. To cultivate the knowing from, the being as our entire immanent, energetic manifestation in this incarnated form, here and now.

To begin this welcoming, this reintegration, we must first escape our objectification of the body.

Objectifying the Body

If we’re still under the rule of the mental empire, we’ll look down at our body from above as an object largely separate from our sense of self. This dissociation comes in many forms, spiritual and otherwise, but they all subtly regard the body as lesser or perhaps just in service to our real self—our mind/spirit/soul.

Ferrer writes in contrast, “Embodied spirituality regards the body as subject, as home of the complete human being, as a source of spiritual insight, as a microcosm of the universe and the mystery, and as pivotal for enduring spiritual transformation.”

The first step we would take is to humble our mind, recognizing that our bodies are vital not only to our physical being, but also to our spirituality, our understanding and interpreting of reality, and are our true home. We will not find enduring spiritual transformation if we are not living deeply from this solid foundation of grounded, incarnated life.

The interior realities of our body contain a multitude of energy, wisdom, intuition, and realization. As we begin to believe that, and then experience it, we move more and more into not only living with our bodies—but living from a greater sense of embody-fullness.

This will most likely seem unfamiliar at first, even as it is often accompanied by a sense of relief and returning home. It can be helpful to compare it to our understanding of practices of mindfulness, which are efforts to become more consciously aware and present within and from our minds. This approach has also been applied to heartfulness, and we have even recently explored wombfulness.

And now this is the practice of embodifulness. Cultivating a greater sense of awareness within and from our whole body—both in the four centers and the entire body.

Holistic Embodied Consciousness

Embodifulness can refer to both the relationship between our mind and our body, and the mind of the body (not just the brain). Let’s consider the relationship here first.

In our everyday, ordinary consciousness, we tend to think of our mind as a sort of “control center,” receiving messages or thoughts. If we include the body at all, we often use language that reflects this orientation: “My heart is telling me” or “my gut is telling me.”

Initially, we can learn to receive these messages: “my body is telling me….” And that’s a good first step, “receiving” knowing from your body. But we also will need to grow beyond that separation to truly integrate and experience this consciousness “not merely illuminated by the mind,” as Jean Gebser puts it.

Or another way to think of it: Do we ever say, “my head is telling me”?

In embodifulness, we are not listening to our bodies like a separate object, but as conscious organs of knowing. Nothing is telling “me” anything. I am simply knowing from and with my whole body. We sense “thoughts” from all of our centers just like the thoughts in our heads appear (We’ve just usually had a lot more practice with our head “thoughts” appearing, so we accept them more naturally).

Eventually, what we learn to know and sense won’t always need to be filtered up through the mind. Nearly all of us will have a strong tendency for “mental regulation,” which we have been taught as a methodology for self-control. But integration will require the mental structure to truly come alongside, to welcome, to share. For the body to fully participate, the mind must open, must allow, must be free.

Which is why we need a spiritual outlook and practices that not only get us into an awakened state in our bodies, but also cultivate a state of mind that is open to participating in the mystical reality and knowing of our whole body. You might call it opening to “the mind of the body," if that conceptualization is helpful for you.

To our head-minds, it might feel like sacrificing control. But in reality, we are broadening our sense of “mind” beyond just our head brain and giving equal footing to the full capacity of our incarnated being. This is living from the holistic and integrated state of embodifulness, that among its many benefits includes: “greater access to the generative power of immanent spiritual life” (Ferrer).

Teilhard de Chardin saw this as exactly what Jesus did, praying, “When you espoused matter . . . what you did was to absorb, concentrate, and make entirely your own, its unfathomable reserves of spiritual energies.”

This is what the incarnation can mean for an embodied, mystical Christianity. Participating in our own interfusion of the divine and the material, which Teilhard described as “The Diaphony of the Divine at the heart of a glowing Universe . . . the Divine radiating from the depths of blazing Matter.”

What would it look like for us to imitate Christ, to espouse the matter of our bodies, the earth, the universe? To tap into the unfathomable reserves of spiritual energies and take them on in our own fullness of Christ-like embodied incarnation?

Bodyfulness – Somatic Knowing

Embodifulness is the process of integrating our entire body and our centers of spiritual knowing into our sense of consciousness. Bodyfulness is the more specific practice within that as a process of somatic knowing. It is sensing from the whole body as a form of spiritual knowing, which we connect with the feet center in Whole-Body Mystical Awakening, as the knowing from Material Reality in an awakened state of consciousness.

Our entry state through the feet is grounding to material reality, which is a rooting process into the earth and our physical presence in our embodied incarnation.

Moving into the awakened state through our feet, our embodied incarnation comes alive in mystical participation through bodyfulness, the knowing of our bodies, which comes by awakening to our somatic “thoughts” that are present in every fiber of our material being, usually expressed as energetic sensations.

Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual partner Mirra Alfassa, known as The Mother, called this “The conscious awakening of the very cells of the organism.”

To learn to experience this bodyfulness more fully will come through focused practices and intention, with the mind opening to give space for this more subtle and bodily-sensory knowing. Beginning with physical sensations perhaps, but then further into the energetic subtle body.

This can also be practiced in an inter-relational form through a sense of incarnated entanglement, the interconnection among matter—both material and human. While we know this scientifically on the quantum level, we can experience a felt-sense of it on the mystical level. Intuitive healers often experience this bodily relational connection with others, sensing or feeling where people have illnesses in their bodies—even across great geographical distances.

In our WeSpace groups, we can learn the mystical language of praying for one another from this bodyfulness, sensing and connecting through the knowing of our bodies which may contain insight, wisdom, and even transmission that has the capacity to heal and transform one another.

This Is How We Evolve

This is going to take some work, isn’t it?

If we’ve spent our whole lives thinking that our mind is in charge, it’s not going to want to give up control so easily. Which is natural and, honestly, self-protecting. We can try to circumvent our doubts or questions, but to really release and allow, most of us will need some mental convincing—which is what I’ve tried to do a bit of here.

But no words will be able to substitute for the felt experience of reawakening to the latent consciousness and knowing that is usually still dormant within our bodies, longing to be reintegrated.

This is not a problem to be figured out, or solved with the mind. But a release. A rewelcoming that which we’ve been and known before. Embodifulness is a more natural state of being than our mental isolationism. We’ve been there before, and we can live into it again. To do is to embrace and honor the spiritual value of incarnation.

Incarnation is not a temporary inhibition to our ultimate spiritual reality, but a vital gift for the holistic way of living. Coming into the fulness of our embodied consciousness not only sets us free from the deficiencies of the mental structure of consciousness—but also is the only way to be able to go any further in our evolution.

This is the integration process that can set the stage for a real transformation into integral consciousness.

We have to grow down if we want to have any hope of growing up any further.