Embodiment: orientation toward the everyday.

Trauma often feels like not being at home in your own body — as if what you feel, or don’t feel, isn’t yours.

For example, when you react in a way that feels like someone else took over, as if something unfamiliar entered your system and responded for you. A moment where your behavior feels foreign, even to yourself. Or when you don’t feel anything at all — just blankness, indifference, a strange sense of void. As if sensation, emotion, and even meaning have gone quiet.

You don’t feel like yourself. Or you’re not even sure what you feel like.

To me, embodiment is slowly learning to meditate through the felt sense, through the body itself.

And by “meditate,” I don’t mean something separate from life. I mean a way of being — a continuous orientation to presence, especially in everyday situations.

Even when they’re hard. Especially when they are hard.

I’ve found that when things feel overwhelming — when anxiety takes over — bringing my attention to physical sensation can be a powerful way to regulate. Just noticing what is without attaching any meaning or judgment to it.

How the heart beats, how my fists tighten and arms are tense, how my skin tingles, or how my body temperature changes.

By turning attention to a concrete, physical sensation, you shift from being stuck in looping thoughts (or dissociative states) into a felt sense of here and now. This activates the parasympathetic nervous system, the branch responsible for calming, grounding, and restoring balance.

BUT this kind of inner awareness also reveals something other that is essential:

How does it feel to be you? How does it feel to be me?

The more we recognize what brings us closer to ourselves, the more our choices begin to shift. We start to move from that knowing, and little by little, our energy and purpose begin to align.

I’m currently exploring how yoga philosophy and trauma intersect — how they inform, challenge, and speak to one another. In some ways, I wonder if traditional yoga has always been about healing trauma, even if it wasn’t named that way. It’s something I’ll be writing more about in a future post.

However, choices aligning with our knowing of the self make me think of how, in the language of tantric wisdom, this is Śakti aligning with Dharma — our inner creative force flowing toward meaningful action.

As we reconnect with ourselves, we also begin to understand what we need, what we long for, and what we’re moving toward.

I’ll be writing more about how I came to trauma-sensitive yoga — and how, in that space, I felt a kind of freedom I had never experienced in a movement practice.

It was powerful, and honestly, it felt scary at first. Like waking something up that had been sleeping for a long time.

Feel free to comment, share your reflections, ask questions...I'd be more than happy to read.

/Anna