There’s a word that keeps appearing in wellness circles, therapy spaces, and mindfulness communities: embodiment. Everyone seems to be talking about it. Be more embodied. Practice embodiment. Live an embodied life.
But what does it actually mean?
If you’ve ever felt confused by this term, you’re not alone. Embodiment has become one of those concepts that everyone references but few people can clearly explain. It’s treated as a spiritual achievement, a wellness goal, or a vague state of ‘being present in your body’—whatever that means.
The truth is simpler and more profound than most descriptions suggest. Embodiment isn’t mystical. It isn’t complicated. And it’s not something you need to strive for or achieve. Embodiment is the felt experience of actually being in your body—not thinking about your body, not managing your body from a distance, but inhabiting it.
It’s the difference between floating and landing. Between living in your head and living in your whole self. Between watching your life happen and actually living it.
As a somatic therapist working with clients across Ireland, the UK, and internationally through online sessions, I’ve guided hundreds of people through the experience of embodiment—and watched the confusion clear when they finally feel what it means rather than trying to understand it intellectually.
This article explores what embodiment actually is, why most of us live partially disembodied, what the neuroscience tells us, and most importantly—what it feels like when you land in your body after years of floating above it.
The Problem: Most People Don’t Actually Live IN Their Bodies
Here’s something that might sound strange at first: most people don’t actually live in their bodies. They live in their heads, slightly above or outside their physical experience, managing their body like a vehicle they’re driving rather than a home they’re inhabiting.
This isn’t a failing or a flaw—it’s the natural consequence of how modern life works. From early childhood, we’re trained to prioritize thinking over feeling. School rewards mental performance, not body awareness. Work values cognitive output, not somatic intelligence. We spend decades being told to ‘use our heads’ and ignore what our bodies are trying to tell us.
The result? Most people experience their bodies as objects to be observed, controlled, or fixed—not as the living, feeling, sensing home they actually are.
What Disembodiment Actually Looks Like
You might be disembodied if:
You’re constantly in your thoughts. Your awareness is concentrated behind your eyes, in your head, in the endless stream of mental activity. You think about your body occasionally, but you’re not in it.
You feel disconnected from physical sensations. Unless something hurts or demands attention, you’re barely aware of your body. You might realize hours later that you’ve been holding your breath, clenching your jaw, or tensing your shoulders.
You experience life as an observer. There’s a subtle sense of watching yourself go through experiences rather than fully living them. You’re slightly removed, slightly distant, even from moments that should be fully engaging.
Your body feels like a vehicle or tool. Something you use to get things done, but not something you actually are. You might even think of your body and your self as separate entities—’my body is tired’ rather than ‘I am tired.’
You can’t stay present in pleasant experiences. When something feels good—physically, emotionally, experientially—you immediately think about it, analyze it, or worry about losing it. You can’t simply be in it.
This partial dissociation from the body is so normalized in modern culture that most people don’t even realize they’re doing it. It’s not severe trauma-based dissociation (though that exists too). It’s the everyday habit of living from the neck up, leaving the rest of yourself unoccupied.
What Embodiment Actually Means: Beyond the Buzzwords
So if disembodiment is living in your head, what exactly is embodiment?
Embodiment is the felt experience of inhabiting your physical body completely. It’s your awareness living throughout your entire system—not just concentrated in your head. It’s feeling from the inside rather than thinking from the outside. It’s the shift from observer to inhabitant, from driver to home.
Let me be more specific, because embodiment gets described in vague, spiritual-sounding language that doesn’t help anyone understand what it actually is.
Embodiment Is Not:
Body awareness. You can be very aware of your body—noticing sensations, tracking symptoms, analyzing posture—while still being fundamentally disembodied. Awareness of your body and presence in your body are different things.
Relaxation. You can be deeply relaxed and completely disembodied. Embodiment isn’t about being calm; it’s about being present.
Physical fitness. Being in excellent physical condition has nothing to do with embodiment. Athletes can be profoundly disembodied, treating their body as a high-performance machine while never actually inhabiting it.
Mindfulness (exactly). While mindfulness practices can support embodiment, they’re not the same thing. You can be mindfully aware of thoughts and still live entirely in your head.
A permanent state you achieve. Embodiment isn’t something you get and keep. It’s a practice, a choice, a return you make again and again throughout your day.
Embodiment Is:
Feeling your body from the inside. Not observing it from your mind, but actually experiencing what it’s like to be your chest, your belly, your limbs, your breath. Internal felt experience, not external observation.
Your awareness distributed throughout your body. Instead of consciousness concentrated in your head, it’s spread through your entire system. You’re as present in your feet as you are in your thoughts.
Being here now, in flesh. It’s the sensation of landing in the present moment—not as a concept, but as a physical reality. You’re not thinking about now; you’re feeling now.
Inhabiting rather than operating. You’re not driving your body like a vehicle. You’re living in your body like it’s home. Because it is.
The integration of thinking and feeling. Embodiment doesn’t mean abandoning thought. It means your thinking arises from your whole self, not just your head. Somatic intelligence and mental intelligence working together.
The Neuroscience: Why Embodiment Matters More Than You Think
From a neuroscience perspective, embodiment isn’t just a nice idea—it’s fundamental to how your nervous system functions, how you process emotion, how you make decisions, and how you experience safety.
Your brain and body aren’t separate systems. They’re a unified nervous system in constant communication. Your body is sending information to your brain constantly—about your internal state, your safety, your needs, your emotional reality. This is called interoception: your brain’s sense of what’s happening inside your body.
When you’re embodied, you have access to this information. You can feel what your body is telling you. You know when you’re hungry, tired, stressed, safe, or in danger. You have somatic intelligence alongside mental intelligence.
When you’re disembodied—living primarily in your head—you lose access to this crucial information. You might not notice you’re hungry until you’re starving. You might miss early stress signals until you’re in full anxiety. You might override your body’s ‘no’ because you’re not listening to it.
The Vagus Nerve and Embodied Safety
One of the most important aspects of embodiment relates to your vagus nerve—the primary communication highway between your brain and body. The vagus nerve is central to your sense of safety, your social engagement system, and your ability to regulate your nervous system.
According to Polyvagal Theory (developed by Dr. Stephen Porges), your nervous system is constantly assessing safety based on information from your body. This happens below conscious awareness through a process called neuroception.
Here’s what’s crucial: if you’re not embodied, you’re not receiving clear information from your body about whether you’re actually safe or not. Your thinking brain might tell you you’re safe, but if you’re not in your body, your nervous system can’t verify that truth somatically.
This is why embodiment practices are so powerful for anxiety, trauma, and nervous system dysregulation. When you’re embodied, you can feel safety in your body—not just think about it. Your nervous system can actually register: ‘I’m here, I’m breathing, I’m okay right now.’
Disembodiment, by contrast, keeps you in your head where anxiety lives. Anxious thoughts loop endlessly when you’re not anchored in your body. Embodiment provides the anchor.
What Embodiment Actually Feels Like: The Lived Experience
Explaining embodiment is a bit like explaining what water tastes like—the description can only go so far. The real understanding comes from experience.
But I can offer some signposts, some descriptions from people who’ve moved from chronic disembodiment into embodied presence. These aren’t poetic metaphors; they’re literal descriptions of what people feel.
The Sensation of Landing
Perhaps the most common description is that embodiment feels like landing. Like you’ve been floating and you suddenly touch down. There’s a groundedness, a solidity, a sense of arrival.
People describe it as: ‘Oh. I’m here. I’m actually here.’
This landing sensation comes from awareness dropping from your head into your whole body. Instead of your consciousness hovering somewhere around your skull, it spreads throughout your chest, belly, limbs, feet. You occupy your full physical space.
One client described it perfectly: ‘I didn’t realize I’d been holding my breath for thirty years. Not literally, but… energetically? I was tensed up, braced, floating slightly above myself. And then I dropped into my body and it was like: oh, I can breathe. I can land. I can be here.’
Aliveness and Sensation
Embodiment brings aliveness. Not emotional high or excitement—just the simple aliveness of being in a body. Colors seem brighter. Sounds are clearer. Touch is more vivid. Your senses sharpen because you’re actually here to receive them.
There’s a quality of presence that’s hard to describe but immediately recognizable. Life feels more real, more direct, more lived rather than observed.
This isn’t because anything external changed. It’s because you’re finally here to experience it. You’ve moved from watching your life through a foggy window to actually standing in the room.
Safety and Home
Many people describe embodiment as feeling safe in a way they haven’t felt before. Or rather, feeling safety as a somatic reality rather than a mental concept.
When you’re in your head, you’re vulnerable—scattered, ungrounded, exposed. When you’re in your body, there’s a sense of protection, of being held, of being home. Your body becomes a refuge, not a burden.
This sense of home is profound. One of the ways we know we’re disembodied is the restless feeling that we’re not quite where we should be, that something’s missing. Embodiment resolves that. You’re not missing—you’re here. You’re home.
Quiet Mind
Here’s something interesting: when you’re fully embodied, your thinking mind quiets significantly. Not because you’re suppressing thoughts, but because you’re not exclusively in the realm where thoughts live.
Mental chatter happens in the head. When your awareness is distributed throughout your body—feeling your breath, sensing your weight, inhabiting your chest and belly—there’s simply less mental noise.
Thoughts still arise when needed, but they don’t dominate. You’re in your body, feeling, sensing, being—and the constant mental commentary fades into the background.
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EXPERIENCE EMBODIMENT: GUIDED PRACTICE
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How to Practice Embodiment: Practical Approaches from Somatic Therapy
Embodiment isn’t something you achieve once and maintain forever. It’s a practice—a choice you make moment to moment throughout your day. You’ll drift into your head (that’s normal, that’s human), and then you practice coming back.
From a somatic therapy perspective, embodiment practices work because they engage your attention directly with physical sensation rather than mental concepts. You’re not thinking about being present—you’re feeling your way into presence.
Start With Breath
Your breath is the most accessible doorway into embodiment. It’s always happening, it’s always physical, and you can feel it right now.
But here’s the key: don’t just notice your breath (that’s awareness). Feel your breath from the inside. What does it feel like to be your chest as it expands? What’s the sensation of your belly rising? What’s the texture of air moving through your throat?
Feel from the inside, not observe from the outside. That’s the shift into embodiment.
Feel Your Weight
Gravity is constantly pulling on your body. Right now, something is supporting your weight—a chair, the floor, your bed. Can you feel that contact? Can you feel your weight being held?
This practice—feeling your weight, feeling yourself being supported—is profoundly grounding. It brings your awareness down into your body and creates a felt sense of safety and stability.
Scan From Inside
Instead of mentally scanning your body from the outside (observing tension, cataloging symptoms), try inhabiting your body section by section. Drop your awareness into your chest. What’s it like in there? Then your belly. Then your legs.
You’re not looking at your body. You’re being your body. Feel the difference.
Move With Awareness
Movement is one of the most powerful embodiment practices. Not exercise (though that can be embodied too), but simple, slow, aware movement.
Walk and actually feel each foot touching the ground. Stretch and feel the sensation in your tissues. Move your arms and inhabit them as they move. Let movement be a felt experience, not an automatic action you do while thinking about something else.
Practice in Ordinary Moments
You don’t need special meditation time to practice embodiment. You can practice while washing dishes (feel the warm water, the texture of soap, your hands moving). While drinking coffee (taste it, feel the warmth, sense your hands around the cup). While showering, walking, sitting, talking.
Embodiment isn’t something you do separately from life. It’s how you live life—from your body, not just from your head.
Why This Matters: The Real-World Impact of Embodiment
Embodiment isn’t just a pleasant experience or a wellness trend. It fundamentally changes how you live, how you relate, how you make decisions, and how you experience your life.
Better Emotional Regulation
When you’re embodied, you can feel emotions as they arise in your body—before they overwhelm you. You notice the tightness in your chest that precedes anxiety. You feel the heat that signals anger building. You sense the heaviness of sadness.
This early awareness gives you choice. You can respond rather than react. You can regulate your nervous system before you’re flooded.
When you’re disembodied, emotions seem to come out of nowhere. You’re suddenly anxious, suddenly angry, suddenly overwhelmed—because you weren’t in your body to notice the early signals.
Clearer Decision-Making
Your body has intelligence that your thinking mind doesn’t access. You know this—you’ve felt it. The ‘gut feeling’ that tells you something’s wrong even when everything looks fine. The somatic ‘yes’ or ‘no’ that’s clearer than any pros-and-cons list.
When you’re embodied, you have access to this somatic intelligence. You can feel what’s right for you, not just think about what should be right. Your decisions come from your whole self, not just your analytical mind.
Deeper Relationships
Embodiment changes how you connect with others. When you’re present in your body, you’re actually present with another person—not floating in your head thinking about what to say next or analyzing the interaction.
You can feel the quality of connection. You sense when someone else is present or distracted. You notice your own body’s response to people and situations. You’re in relationship, not just thinking about relationship.
Reduced Anxiety
Anxiety is largely a head-based phenomenon. It’s the endless loop of worried thoughts, catastrophic predictions, and mental what-ifs. And it thrives when you’re disembodied.
Embodiment doesn’t make difficult emotions disappear, but it provides an anchor. When anxiety arises, you can drop into your body—feel your feet on the ground, feel your breath moving, feel your weight being supported. You can feel that right now, in this moment, you’re okay.
This doesn’t solve everything, but it breaks the cycle of anxiety feeding on itself in your head. You’re here, in your body, in reality—not lost in mental catastrophe.
Actually Living Your Life
Perhaps most importantly: when you’re embodied, you’re actually living your life instead of watching it happen from inside your head.
You’re here for the good moments—you can feel joy, pleasure, love, beauty. You’re present for the difficult moments—you can hold grief, pain, fear without dissociating from them. You’re in your experiences, not observing them from a distance.
This is what it means to be alive. Not just existing, not just functioning, but being fully here for the messy, beautiful, painful, joyful reality of being human in a body.
Coming Home: Embodiment as Return, Not Achievement
If there’s one thing I want you to understand about embodiment, it’s this: you’re not trying to become something you’re not. You’re returning to something you already are.
You were born embodied. Watch any infant—they are completely in their bodies, living through sensation and feeling. They don’t think about being present. They just are present.
Somewhere along the way, you learned to leave. Maybe it wasn’t safe to be in your body. Maybe thinking was valued over feeling. Maybe you had experiences that made your body seem like a dangerous place to be. Maybe you just absorbed the cultural message that living in your head is normal, even superior.
But your body has been here the whole time, waiting for you. Home has been here the whole time. You just forgot the way back.
Embodiment practices—whether through guided meditation, somatic therapy, movement practices, or simple daily awareness—are just reminders of the way home. They help you land in the body you’ve been floating above. They help you feel what you’ve been thinking about. They help you be here.
From my work as a somatic therapist with clients across Ireland, throughout the UK, and around the world through online sessions, I’ve witnessed this return again and again. The moment someone finally lands in their body after years of floating. The relief, the aliveness, the sense of ‘oh, here I am.’ The simple recognition: I’m home.
This is available to you. Not as something to achieve or strive for, but as something to remember. Your body is here. It’s been here the whole time. All you have to do is come home.
About the Author
Abi Beri is an IPHM-accredited Integrative Holistic Therapist and Somatic Therapist specializing in embodiment practices, trauma-informed somatic healing, and nervous system regulation. With training in Somatic Experiencing, Hakomi Method, and family constellation work, Abi helps clients move from thinking about their bodies to actually inhabiting them.
Based in Ireland, Abi works with clients throughout Ireland, the United Kingdom, and internationally through online sessions. His approach integrates neuroscience, somatic psychology, and practical embodiment practices to help people land in their bodies and live from their whole selves.
For somatic therapy sessions, embodiment coaching, or holistic healing work:
🌐 www.somatictherapyireland.com
🌐 www.blissfulevolution.com
🌐 www.familyconstellationseurope.com
📧 info@blissfulevolution.com
📱 +353 83 356 9588
Available for in-person sessions in Dublin, Naas, and Newbridge, Ireland, as well as online video sessions for clients worldwide.
