March 2025 | Disembodiment

WritingSomatics

Jan 1

Written By MOSA

NOTE: This was originally published as part of my newsletter in March 2025. Subscribe to my newsletter to receive the next Om Letter direct to your inbox once a month.

A still life set up of see-through fruits sits on a white table cloth.

In yoga, as in life, it is difficult to perceive the whole when we attend to only one side of the coin. After writing last month’s newsletter on embodiment, I felt the need to offer a counterweight - to explore not embodiment itself, but rather what happens when we lose touch with it.

While writing I was reminded of the well-trodden Zen proverb “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.” There are endless possibilities when interpreting this proverb, but most commonly it is thought to mean that enlightenment is not separate from our day-to-day lives. Within the context of embodiment however, another interpretation presented itself: before enlightenment, move your body; after enlightenment, move your body.

A large iridescent bubble floats through the sky.

Within the world that once birthed this proverb our bodies worked hard to keep us alive. Now we simply bump up the thermostat and run the tap. Alongside this incrementally increasing everyday sedentariness we’ve created technologies capable of matching (sometimes even bettering) our ability to problem-solve and communicate.

This blossoming artificial intelligence is able to pull at our attention when we turn to the real world, real people, our senses, our bodies for too long. Naturally, each us of us has at times felt out of touch with our own body as a result of this relationship with greater convenience and extended cognition.

A see-through shell sits on wet, yellow-brown sand at a beach.

Those of us who have sat down to meditate will know that the thinking mind has its own gravitational pull - it draws us in, in a way that can feel beyond the limits of our control. So once we find ourselves on a train of thought it can be hard to put on the brakes and get off. In these moments we lose touch with the sensory field of the present moment - losing track of the sounds, scents, tastes and physical sensations that ground us into the ‘here and now.’ This in turn enables our mind to abscond into the ‘there and then.’

In my own experience as a meditation and somatic practitioner, this absorption in mental activity lies at the heart of disembodiment: a state of being in which we lose touch with the perceptual present moment. In the long term this mental self-stimulation can become so second nature to us that we forget there is another way to exist. When we lose our capacity for somatic attention (our ability to sense our body) what follows is a kind of ‘numbing.’

This numbness dulls our felt sense of the body, as well as the warning signs it sends when we’re approaching injury, or have quite simply been sitting for too long. It equally impacts our ability to interocept (our capacity to sense the processes, feelings and experiences of the interior body), which recent studies have found to negatively impact our ability to identify and regulate our emotional states.

Our bodies have access to their own non-conceptual intelligence, through feeling and present tense experiences, which is often overlooked or devalued. When we lose contact with the body, we lose our ability to connect to a kind of wisdom that a disembodied cognition alone would never be able to access or interpret (think of your gut feeling for instance). Embedded within our body’s DNA are the stories of our ancestry, both immediate and distant - the epigenetics of our great-grandparents, as well as that of our fellow winged, pawed and water-based evolutionary forebears. To become disembodied is to lose access to a treasure trove of innate intelligence and experiences held by our own body.

With love,

OM x