A love note to your skin and senses ✿
“Embodiment” is a bit of a funny word, isn’t it? We all have bodies, so how could we not be in them?
But here’s the thing: having a body isn’t the same as fully inhabiting it. Communing with it, and communing with the world around you through it.
When was the last time you paused, even for one minute, to feel your skin? To meet the contours of your body with presence and love? To offer yourself a gentle squeeze or a stroke, letting your body know that you see it, acknowledge it. Not just by “doing” the things (eating well, exercising — although important), but by truly being with.
We live so much in our minds, we forget that our bodies are not machines we drag around. They are not separate from us.
We are our bodies.
Our bodies are us.
And yet, most of us only feel our bodies when they’re in pain.
When something really aches, or breaks down.
But embodiment means being with your body even when she’s not in crisis. It means staying close when things are neutral. When things are pretty okay. When you’re simply alive (because being alive in itself is magical as f*ck ✨)
And here’s something I wish more people knew:
Pleasure and sensuality aren’t always sexual. But they are absolutely essential for nervous system healing and embodiment.
Sensuality is your capacity to feel. To attune to sensation and presence.
This can look like…
✨ Feeling the sun warming your cheeks
✨ Smelling the scent drifting up from your coffee or tea
✨ Enjoying the sound of wind in the trees, or the sweet birdsong
✨ Feeling the sensation of your shirt gently brushing your skin
✨ Noticing the coolness of your fingers brushing the nape of your neck
These tiny sensual moments matter, especially when we consciously pay attention to them, even just a few times a day. Engaging with them regularly builds self-trust. They are the breadcrumbs back to embodiment. To experiencing and enjoying life through the vessel of your sacred body.
These small moments, when paid attention to with more regularity, teach your nervous system that it is safe enough to feel.
It reconnects you with the present moment… which is the only place the body can ever exist.
Let’s go one step deeper and talk about skin. Did you know your skin is one of your most potent pleasure organs?
Skin is a sacred, intelligent organ that literally wraps you in aliveness. Boasting an enormous amount of sensory receptors, skin allows you to connect with the world around you through FEELING.
Just under skin lives your superficial fascia: a silken layer of connective tissue that senses, responds, and holds your shape.
The two together hold the sacred boundary between you and everything else around you.
And for those of us who have experienced boundary ruptures, or have fawned, appeased, absorbed other’s emotions (perhaps even losing track of our own needs and bodies in the process), this boundary can feel elusive.
But when you touch your own skin with intention, something subtle, but powerful, begins to unfold.
You start to rebuild the felt sense of “this is me.”
This can guide your system towards an embodied sense of where YOU end and the world around you begins. And while that might seem like it would create more separation, in truth it opens up a doorway it creates MORE connection and intimacy with life, others, and your own experience.
More of an ability to feel, sense, and enjoy the world around you.
Feeling where you begin and end doesn’t build walls. It builds capacity.
Embodiment Practice:
Reclaiming Self-Touch
Step 1: Orient
- Take a few moments to settle, wherever you are
- Open up your vision and take in the space around you: the colours, shapes, textures, objects
Step 2: Stroking and Honouring
- Gently start to stroke the skin of one forearm with your fingertips (of the opposite hand)
- Let your touch be light, slow, and curious. Stroke up and down both sides of the one forearm. No goal, just exploring sensations.
- Option to say out loud to yourself “I am here, I am with you” a few times, softly, as if speaking to a loved one
Step 3: Feel the Impact
- Pause for a moment to simply be.
- What lingers in your body after that simple act of contact?
- Is there warmth? Echos of sensation? A sense of “I am here”?
Step 4: Return to Orientation
Notice where your body is in space.
What’s tethering you to the ground?
Notice the feeling of being held and supported by the chair or floor.
Look around you and take in some beauty.
This is embodiment.
Not a performance. Not something to “achieve.”
Just a returning, again and again, to this holy flesh. To this present moment. To what can be experienced right now, through your senses, through your skin.
A return to and reclamation of your own sacred aliveness.