#23 What Is Embodiment, feel your feelings, boundaries, self-worth and trusting yourself

By connecting with our body wisdom, we can break free from self-sabotaging patterns, align ourselves with our authentic truth, and cultivate a sense of empowerment that flows into every aspect of our lives.

The way to do that is through embodiment.  

At least, embodiment is the best way that I know of to embrace your authentic self and come back to wholeness for a more vibrant and fulfilling life.

Join me in this episode where I share:

• The transformative practice of embodiment
• Exploring the “feminine” in feminine embodiment
• The 5 principles of tapping into the wisdom of your body
• One of my favourite embodiment practices for self-actualization

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About Tertia

I am a certified feminine embodiment coach and embodiment teacher.

In my private coaching and online programs, I teach you to drop from your head into your body so you can take your nervous system out of survive into thrive, clearing the way for you to live a life that fills you with joy and be guided by your inner knowing instead of outside influence.

I trust you found this episode helpful! It would mean the world to me if you could leave the show a rating and review on Apple Podcasts and share it with your friends. That will help me reach more people. If you have any questions about this episode, I'd love to hear from you, send me a message via the links above.

Transcript

So let's talk about what is embodiment. And often with these topics, it's easier to explain what embodiment is not. So, embodiment is not yoga, embodiment is not dancing. Embodiment is not tai chi. Embodiment is not meditation, embodiment is not mindfulness. And all of these that I've just shared with you has some aspect of embodiment to them. So they're not completely devoid or void of embodiment, but that's not what true embodiment, according to my definition is. So my definition of embodiment is to be in contact with the full experience of yourself. And my teacher, Jenna Ward, speaks of inhabiting ourselves. So to inhabit ourselves, to be deeply connected to the truth of who we are, that is really what embodiment is.
And embodiment is a practice. It's not something that you learn, you snap, you get it, and then all of a sudden this is how you are for the rest of your life. It's a daily devotion that we come to. It's a daily practice that we show up for. It's a skill that we learn so that we can start to orient ourselves to living in a, in a more fuller and a more richer way. So embodiment is about inhabiting more of yourself and it's orienting yourself to the feelings and the sensations and the currents of aliveness that flows through you. And it doesn't matter whether these currents of aliveness are constriction or whether it's a feeling of expansion. More importantly is about from moment to moment, checking in with yourself and with curiosity asking, what do you want to show me? Show me more, tell me more.
Let, let me see what it is that I need to know. What do you want me to have and to experience and to bring into my awareness? So often when we have these constrictions, either in thoughts or in feelings, what we do is we try to make sense of it, right? So we try to understand it thinking that if we understand it, uh, it will either magically disappear or the pain will become less, or it's gonna be easier to move around with. When we try to make sense of this, what happens is we get caught up in the story, and I'll talk a little bit more about this later on, but essentially we remove ourself from the feeling experience, and we go into the talking experience of whatever it is that we are going through. This is perhaps a beautiful way to explain what disembodiment means then, because even though we are embodied in the sense that we are inside a body, the embodiment that we experience is always on a scale.
And more often than not, when we are in the habit of always checking in only on the level of the mind, when we are in the habit of only narrating about what we are feeling, instead of being in the sense of what we are feeling when we are living our lives from here, instead of fully immersing ourselves in the fullness of the experience, we do become disembodied. And this is the problem with being disembodied. When we are disembodied in the way that I'm explaining it, where most of our awareness is caught up in our thoughts. We are either living in the past or we are living in the future. We are not really connected into the present time, the here and now awareness. What happens is our energy is mostly located here in the top third part of our body, and we lose connection with the rest of our body.
And now our experience of joy, our intuition, our experience of feeling fully satisfied and satiated by life, all of that can only be experienced through the body. You cannot experience fulfilment or pleasure or joy through your mind. You can think joy, but it's not really the true experience of it. And so when we are habituated to spend most of our energy up here in the area of our mind and we lose that connection with our body, we also lose the connection to our own life satisfaction. And so the way to feel more fulfilled, the way to feel more alive, the way to come back to wholeness and to step into the fullest and the most truest and the most actualized version of yourself, which can then go on to uplift the people in your life and uplift the world and the planet and everyone that you come into contact with.
In order to do that, the best way that I know of is through the practice of embodiment. So what is the feminine then in feminine embodiment? In my coaching, I center the feeling flowing aspect of our feminine essence. So this means that we invite in all of those things that our minds desire to avoid, like our shadows, the chaos, the unknown. Our minds love to know that things are definite. It loves that security. It wants us to have that predictability and the feminine and really being in contact with the truth of who we are, that's very unpredictable because we don't know what all the gifts and all the magic and all the nuances and possibilities that we have, we don't even know that that exists. So it's a very unknown area to go into once we start tapping into the the wonders that that we hold within.
And so we access these non-linear feminine gifts like creativity and pleasure and magnetism and feeling more fully alive through the act of embodiment. And so my own experience of embodiment, if I had to share with you how embodiment has changed my life, first of all, I don't have enough words to explain and I don't have the right words to, but what I do know is that the way that I'm moving through the world is changing. It's continuously changing. I'm still a student in the skill of embodiment. So it feels like my journey has only started and there's no specific end goal in insight because it's a journey and a practice that I continue to deepen into. And so my own life actualization journey is also continuing to unfold. What I know for a fact is that I've started honouring my internal yes and my internal no.
So this is really how I see we are able to tap into our own intuitive wisdom. Our bodies know what we need, our bodies know what is true for us, and our intuition is something that we can learn to really expand the muscle and build our skill in really becoming clear on how our intuition speaks to us. And then finding the courage to following up on that intuition. Another way in which embodiment has changed my life is that the relationship that I have with myself has completely changed. If I look back at the woman, the young woman, even the child that I used to be, where I was always looking for that external validation, where I was always feeling that there was something wrong with me and I had to fix myself or do better, and where I rejected these parts of me, which I felt made me unlovable, all of this has shifted for me.
And the connection and the acceptance and the self-love that I hold now is so precious to me. And I feel that a big part of my work is fueled by my desire for letting other women experience that too. I don't wanna sound like a Hallmark gift card, but it is transformational. The way that, when we change the relationship that we have with ourselves, when we change the way that we feel about ourselves, it changes everything. It changes the way that you parent, if you're a parent, it changes the way that you're a lover or a wife or a partner. It changes the way that you work. It changes the way that you express yourself. It changes the way that you hold yourself. Everything changes with this self-love and acceptance, that switch that happens within, it's helped me to become more expressive in asking for what it is that I need and for getting clear on what it is that I need.
Because again, so often when we are disembodied, when we tend to only spend our time on the level of the mind, either living in the past with regrets or living in the future, wishing things would be different or fleeing out of the body because we want to avoid the discomfort of being with ourselves. What we also lose touch with in that process is we don't know what we want. We don't know what's important to us anymore because we've, we've cut off that the feed that tells us what we desire and that tells us what makes us feel alive. And so ultimately, to me, becoming more embodied has meant that I'm feeling more satisfied. I'm experiencing more everyday pleasure, I'm experiencing more joy. And it doesn't mean that I don't have hardship. It doesn't mean that I have the discomfort. It doesn't mean that I still have dark days.
I have them, but I'm resourced to surf those waves and to not abandon myself and reject myself anymore, but really hold space for myself and compassion for myself. And because I can do that for myself, I can also do it for the other people in my life. So embodiment has been a huge transformative, life-changing skill that I've learned. And as you can probably hear from what I'm sharing with you, my heart yearns and I'm burning up on the inside to teach other women to have that as well. All right, so now I'd love to share with you five principles for tapping into the wisdom of your body. Number one, cultivating your sensitivity. Number two, learning the language of your body. Number three, embracing all aspects of yourself. Number four, trusting your inner guidance. And number five, living as the most truest version of yourself. Okay, so let's get into the first principle, cultivating sensitivity.
I recently read somewhere that we are more than our wounds. And as I read this, I just felt my whole body open and scream yes, because so often our pain bodies, our wounds, the unfortunate, uncomfortable and undesirable events that happened in our lives, which formed us and informs how we move through the world, right, to such a large extent, these can take over our essence. They can, we can assume that this is who we are. And so it's the filter through which we start viewing the world. It's the filter that we use for all of our interactions, for all of our communications and for the way that we express ourselves in. And so what we tend to do, and this contributes further to this whole cycle of disembodiment that I spoke about, is because what we are feeling feels wrong and we make that wrong.
We try to fix ourselves. And in the fixing comes the judgment, comes the rejection, comes the disembodiment, comes the avoidance of wanting to be or willing to be with whatever it is that we find within. We want to avoid that. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. That is completely normal to do that because we have not been taught, nobody's taught us how to be with the discomfort, how to be with those uncomfortable feelings. Instead, we live in a world that makes it very easy for us to distract ourselves. There's always some social media app that you can go into and you can lose track of time. There's always more work that you can add onto your to-do list. There's always another party that you can go to or something else that you can watch on tv. So there's always more that can take us away from actually being with the truth of what it is that we feeling and what we are sensing inside.
And so what happens is we end up becoming numb. The more we practice being in our minds, the stronger our sense of numbing ourselves become. And the problem with this, and I've spoken about this before, is our feelings don't exist in isolation. Our sensations and our experiences don't exist in isolation. So as we numb ourselves to feeling the more undesirable aspects within, unfortunately, and not on purpose, but what happens is we also numb ourselves to feeling the more pleasurable, desirable aspect of our existence and our experience. And so this embodiment not only keeps us away from the pain, but it also keeps us away from experiencing more pleasure. And so embodiment is what allows us to move through the pain and into wholeness.
And notice, I'm not saying embodiment allows us to fix the pain because we are not about fixing. Instead, we want to cultivate that sensitivity with self, that capacity to be with whatever it is that we are experiencing on the inside. And as something that I noticed myself as a highly sensitive woman, and perhaps if you also identify as highly sensitive, this might resonate with you. Sometimes it feels like we are feeling too much, we are feeling too much, and we don't know what to do with these feelings. And if this is you, I'd like to invite you to see your sensitivity, not as a hindrance, not as something that is painful and uncomfortable to be, but as a gift. Because just as much as you have learned up until now to tap into the pain through your sensitivity, you can turn to the other side of the coin and tap into your pleasure and tap into your wholeness.
You already have the skill of sensitivity. It's only now about focusing it in another direction, really pointing it and orienting yourself to the direction that's going to feel more supportive to you. When we become sensitive to our sensations and our feelings and our body and we learn to stay with them, that's a direct line into our nervous system. And when we are able to tap into our nervous system in this way, what happens is we begin to liberate all of the frozen tension that is stuck in there. And the frozen tension, it's not important that you need to know what it is and how it got there and who put it there, and why has it been there for so long and why won't it go away. But it might be helpful to name frozen tension as everything that keeps your life force energy stuck.
So whether that's societal conditioning, whether that's ancestral lineage stuff, whether it is uh, cultural conditioning, whether it's something that comes from your family systems, whether it is experiences that you had in your childhood, whether it's something that happened to you when you were in your teenager years, it doesn't really matter. Things like self sabotaging patterns and guilt and resentment and porous boundaries and feeling anger and frustration and hopelessness. All of these can be liberated not through using affirmations and by making a three step plan on how to, you know, pull yourself up by your bootstraps and get on in life. But by really developing that sensitivity to know how does this show up in my body? How is this resentment or the anger or the conditioned beliefs or the self-loathing or the judgment or the hopelessness, how is this alive inside of me? So that's the first principle of tapping into our body's wisdom.
It's to cultivate that sensitivity. So before I go on, if you're finding this helpful, then please let me know by hitting the like button. This way I get immediate feedback. It shows me that this content is helpful for you, and I will really appreciate that. Thank you very much. So let's move on now to the second principle. And the second is learning the language of your body. You have a unique constellation of feelings and sensations that are alive in your body that are specific to you. But most of us, again, because we haven't been taught otherwise, and because our world makes it easy for us to live only on the level of the mind and to disconnect from the feelings in our body, what happens is we are very good at talking about our feelings. So we have awareness of our feelings, especially if we've been on a personal development journey.
We have that self-awareness. We know what we are feeling and we can talk about what we are feeling. But there's a difference between talking about how disappointed you feel about what someone has done or about something that hasn't worked out. And being with the feeling of disappointment, really holding yourself with compassion and getting to know what is this constellation? How does disappointment feel in your body? How do you know that you are feeling disappointment? What sensations are there, what words are there? What feelings travel through your system? Okay, so we always come back to the body. If there's nothing else that you take away from this episode, it's to always come back to your body. You can't go wrong. I recently had some trees planted in our garden and I saw that they looked a little bit unhappy. So I sent a message to the tree lady who worked at the nursery that I got the trees from.
And I said, look, these things are looking a bit sad. What must I do? Must I spray them with something? And she said, as long as you give them 20 liters of water every second day, nothing can go wrong. And that reminds me of what I just said now. Always come back to your body. It doesn't matter what's going on, as long as you always come back to your body, as long as you always come back to yourself, nothing can go wrong. And the way that you can do that is through a formal practice, which is some of the practices that I teach my clients, or through an informal practice, by constantly checking in, developing that sensitivity that I spoke of earlier. When you begin to develop that sensitivity and you're noticing these currents of aliveness within you is to check in, ask what more can you show me what is here that I need to know or feel or sense?
And then what we can begin to do when we have this insight, when we have this knowledge, and we have the knowing, is you begin to orientate your life to that. You begin to base your choices and the way that you speak up and the things that you ask for. You use this as your north star so that it can guide you in the way that you move through the world. You become your own authority. And we do that by cultivating that sensitivity and by learning what is the unique constellation, the unique language of your body. Okay, I'd love to move on to the third principle now. And the third principle is to embrace all aspects of yourself. So the themes of self-judgment, self-abandonment, self-sabotage, all of these themes to me, they say, I do not embrace all of who I am. There are parts of myself that I reject.
And this is true for me because I've seen it in my own life. I've seen in my own life how the rejection of those certain parts of myself that I feel shame for, that I feel guilt for, that I wish wasn't so. How that causes me to reject myself, to put myself down so that I can make other people feel less uncomfortable, or that I can make other people feel better about themselves. You might see this when we are not able to hold our boundaries, where we give in, where we have thoughts and conversations in our head, in our mind that says, I don't deserve this. Uh, nothing is ever going to change. How can I expect anything to be different to the way that it is? We also see this in the way that we can be so hard on ourselves. We push ourselves so hard, we expect so much of ourselves.
We have these perfectionist tendencies. And even in our yearning to self-actualize, even in our yearning to become better versions, better versions of who we are, we hold this goal at the end that says, it's only going to be okay once I'm here. I have to be me perfectly. I have to do me perfectly, I have to be perfectly embodied. I have to be perfect in everything that I do. And in that moment, I know that I will have arrived and that I will be safe, and that everything is going to be okay. And this is a disembodiment narrative. So if you find that there is even a small spark or a seedling of this type of conversation or thinking in you, then I invite you to take it out and stomp on it. Go and investigate and explore the tethers of that in your body because it is not true.
That's a disembodiment fantasy that we hold onto. That means that no matter what we do, we will never be enough. So we find ourselves by going into our own darkness, we have to go into our own depths, not to go and change what we are feeling, not to go and fix what we are feeling, not to go and you know, dust off the shadows that are there, but we go into our own depths so that we can claim all of who we are. So that we can gather all parts of ourselves that we have rejected because of what we've been told by our family or by our society, or by the culture that we grew up in. We go and reclaim all parts of ourselves. We bring all parts of ourselves back into our embrace. So now let's move on to the fourth principle.
And the fourth principle is deepening the trust that you have with yourself or learning to trust yourself if that trust is not already there. And don't be surprised or feel shame if there's no trust, because again, most of us do not trust ourselves. We look to outside authorities to tell us how we should think, what we should do, and who we should be. And it might not be so extreme, like you're probably not waiting for people to tell you all the time who you should show up as, but it's in the little things, the way that we ignore what we often feel feels right or feels wrong. Just if you take a moment here and reflect a little bit on how often have you had experiences where your body told you something feels right and something feels wrong, and how good are you, or how skilled rather not good, how skilled or how practised are you in following that guidance from your body? Many, many, many years ago when I was still working in the corporate world, I can remember hearing about a colleague of mine who resigned and she was going to start her own life coaching practice. And I can remember, I still remember I was sitting outside and the sun was shining. It was a beautiful day, and I heard about her. And when I heard how she was gonna start her own practice, she was following her dream, she was going to become a life coach inside, all of a sudden and quite unexpectedly

this big yearning and longing and yes happened inside my body. And up until that point, I didn't even know that I wanted to be a coach. It wasn't even on my radar. Today I'm so grateful that I listened to that calling. And it didn't happen overnight. I put like a whole masculine structure and planning in, and it took me about two years from when I first felt the call to finally start my own business. But I listened to the call of my body. And I also have many other times where I didn't do that, that I hold regret for, and that I've had to work with in my embodiment practice where my body was clearly saying, this is wrong. We don't want this. Do not. And yet I refused to listen. I ignored it, and I avoided it. And so when we are willing and desire to tap into the wisdom of our body, one of the consequences of that is that we learn to trust ourselves more.
We learn to trust our own decisions, and we don't base those decisions on a pro and con list, but we really use our North star, our inner guidance, supported with some facts because we can't just go on feeling alone. We also need some facts because we live in a world where things have to happen. We have to earn money, and we have to, you know, buy food and we have to do all of these things. It's part of being alive in the world. So we can't just always go on our feeling. We have to look at what's happening in our lives as well and see how we can bring these two together. But if we only always go on what's happening in our lives, we completely shut ourselves off to the possibility of anything else existing. And so we are always looking to other people to give us advice.
We are always looking at other people as to what should we do next. We don't know what to do. We feel stuck. Embodiment allows us to tap into that own inner wisdom. We can still ask others what they think, but that doesn't, that's not the end of it. All right? We've got some additional data to bring to the table. And when we do this, in my experience, what happens is we stop feeling afraid of that inner fire that burns inside of us. So often in our attempt to fit in or to always do the right thing or to be perfect, we dampen our own fire, we push it to the side. We feel shame for the desires that we have. And in the trusting of self, in the exploration of who we truly are, we're also building that fire again. We allow that inner wild woman to roar and express herself.
And we trust that who we are and the way that we move through this world, that is enough. And then the final principle that I wanna share with you is living as the most truest and the most authentic version of you. And this is not the you that you're going to be at the end of the line. This is the most truest and the most authentic version of who you are right now in this moment. Another disembodiment fallacy or linking to the disembodiment fallacy that I spoke about earlier is that we have to get somewhere. So our minds like that predictability. Our minds like to know where are we going to end. And embracing our feminine essence, stepping into those non-linear gifts that I spoke of is chaotic. It is uncomfortable, it is the unknown. But in that we discover our pleasure, we discover our sovereignty, we turn on our own internal magnetism to draw into our lives all of the people and the experiences that resonate with who we are because we love, accept, and know ourselves on such a deep level.
If we live as the fullest and the most truest version of ourselves, we can only do that if we feel safe enough to do so. We can only do that if we are honest with ourselves first about what's really going on here and how we really feel and what we really desire. And if we have the courage to take that honesty out and share that with the people in our lives, the people that are close to us, I see it as a ripple effect. So the more embodied I become, the more I begin to unravel my wounds, and the frozen tension that I hold, the more I'm able to show up in a different way and affect the lives of everyone that I am in contact with. So I'd love to share with you now an embodiment practice that's going to, if what I shared in this video, if you find that helpful, this embodiment practice is going to support you to begin to cultivate more of this woman.
So what I wanna share at this point is that it's very important for us not to try and design our lives on paper, make a list of our strengths and weaknesses, and draw up a five step action plan. The practice that I wanna offer you is a practice of dreaming. So I'd love for you to dream the woman that you want to become. Dream the woman who is not self judging, who is not self-sabotaging, who is not self abandoning. Dream the woman who is fully embodied in her sovereignty, who fully trusts her own inner knowing to guide her as she moves through the world. And then I'd invite you to dream, how does she move, this woman that you're dreaming? How does she move? How does she hold herself? What is her posture? What does her face do? What does her neck do? How does she dress?
What kinds of clothes does she wear? What are the thoughts that she thinks? How does she speak? How does she ask for what she needs? So go on and dream up all of these. And then once you've dreamt this up, you take one small step to become her. And this is the devotion, this is the practice. Every day you dream yourself into your becoming and you take, after you've dreamed her, you take that one step being her. This is such a powerful practice that's really gonna support you to actualize more fully.