How does it feel to be relaxed?

Embodiment series, part 1

When I ask my clients: “How do you tell that your body is relaxed?”, they are sometimes confused. “Do you mean, how I like to relax?”

No, I am asking how it feels to be relaxed. I’m asking about the sensations in your body.  Does your breath slow down? Do your shoulders drop? Does your jaw loosen? Or is it the forehead muscles that relax even though you didn’t realize they were up and scrunched up until this moment?

Of course, it is a bit of a trick question, one can only begin to answer if they have some idea what it feels like to be relaxed in the first place. And let’s face it, many of us grapple with that. We struggle to describe sensations and feelings in our own bodies. We spend most of our lives locked in our brains and focused on thinking and reasoning, not sensing and feeling our bodies.

In Western culture, children aren’t taught and encouraged to listen to their bodies. They are conditioned early on that feeding happens at specific times - not because they’re hungry but because it’s lunchtime. When we decide, we often weigh the obvious tangible pros and cons but rarely question how it feels in our bodies if we choose option A or B. Unlike many other cultures, we don’t use dance to communicate or to express ourselves, not on a grander scale. We have a hard time describing how we feel in our bodies because there is a major disconnect between how we view our thinking self and how we view and appreciate our bodies. For many people, even noticing when and how they relax may be a challenge.

The term embodiment captures this idea that our thoughts and mental processes are not just located in the brain but are shaped by our bodies and physical interactions with the world. In phenomenology, embodiment is actually central to understanding how we experience the world. Thinkers like Maurice Merleau-Ponty argue that our bodily experience is fundamental to how we perceive reality. When we enter a room, we get not just a visual or abstract idea of the space, we sense it, we clock the temperature, and how we interact with that space.

In neuroscience, Lisa Feldman Barrett writes extensively about how emotions are made and that the body is where the building process begins. It’s hard to overstate the importance of body awareness.

Many of my clients come from the tech world and they tend to be overthinkers. The lack of body awareness is a serious issue: without paying attention to our bodies, we may miss the warning signs that the body generates or misinterpret what it tells us.

Luckily, there are many techniques and strategies to lean into what we now call embodiment. Just like anything else, if we pay attention and practice, it becomes easier over time. 

I serve as an example of somebody who spent the majority of her life squarely in her brain, completely disassociated from all the other organs. I credit meditation, therapy, and yoga with a major shift in my relationship to my body.

Here’s how I got out of my head:

First, I had to learn to notice and interpret what I was experiencing. I started doing a ‘body scan’ regularly. A body scan is a fancy way of saying that you train yourself to pay attention to your body. Think about a scanner that moves around your body and tells you the condition and state of each body part, except that scanner is your attention. Some practitioners recommend starting with the head and going down the shoulders, chest, abdomen, etc., all the way to the feet. Some prefer going the other way around, starting on the ground and moving upward. You may be seated, lying on the ground, or standing up. The position and direction of the body scan is less important than whether you do it at all. I am a big fan of atomic habits, so I started doing my body scan when I first wake up.

I’d sit on the edge of the bed with my feet firmly planted on the floor, noticing how I feel. When I first started and needed to establish this practice and strengthen the observing habit, I would do it again around midday and once in the evening. It takes just a couple of minutes.

I found that people who struggle with a severe body disassociation may benefit from asking specific questions such as:   

o   What sensations do I notice in this part of my body?

o   Is there tension, relaxation, coolness or warmth, tingling or numbness?

o   Are there areas where I don’t feel anything?

o   Does the sensation change as I breathe? 

o   Can I notice the boundary between places where I sense something and places where I don’t?

When we practice body awareness and embodiment, it helps to give ourselves grace and be patient. Especially, if you’re new to this and your body disassociation is strong. Remember, it helps to observe the sensations without labeling them as good or bad. The hardest part is often simply staying in the present moment. So when you notice your mind wandering off, just gently bring your attention back to your body. Also, only notice the physical sensations right now, don’t think about what happened to your knees two years ago or what you’re fearing in the future.

As practice deepens, you will notice increasingly subtle feelings. And, as you get more used to the insight from your organs, joints or muscles, you might realize that certain body parts connect to various emotional states. Notice it, don’t judge it. The scanning is not when you want to unpack any of that. Register it, then move on. But be prepared that some body parts may consistently trigger certain emotional reactions, and you want to be aware of that. And return to it in a different context.

The other thing that really helped me on my path to embodiment was learning to gauge the sensations on a scale. I like to use the 1-5 measure, where 1 represents ‘subtle’ or ‘barely noticeable’ and 5 is ‘intense’.

Eventually, you’ll fine-tune into the messages the body sends. And it will dramatically improve your life. I’ve had that experience myself and I’ve seen it in my clients.

Once we learn how to pay attention to the subtle signals in our bodies, we treat it better in return: A healthy diet is much easier for those who are in sync with their bodies, workouts become less dangerous because we sense the warning signs earlier. Because we are more in tune with our bodies, we become more intuitive. We become more aware of our reactions to other people and various spaces and environments.

We all carry on and around ourselves a tremendous amount of information – from pheromones and different scents to hormonal levels that the scientists are only beginning to measure and interpret.

Instinctively, our bodies do respond to these nuggets of intel. Just because you don’t understand why or how doesn’t mean it’s not happening. So the next time you must make a decision, weigh your pros and cons but also, add a moment to sit with either choice and notice how it feels in your body if you went with one option over the other. When you feel tired, notice where in your body you sense this. And when you get to relax, notice where and how it feels in your body.

So next time you’re hanging out on a chaise long by the pool or walking through a field, you can confidently say: yes, my jaw is not clenched, my eyebrows are resting, and I feel a warm, steady flow of silver energy moving through my body as I breathe. I’m totally relaxed. And it is glorious.