Om Letter

These monthly half-day retreats aim to create a space where we’re able to deepen our connection to ourselves through ‘embodiment practices’ such as somatic movement, Yin yoga and sound baths. Embodiment practices use the body as a tool for healing by increasing our self-awareness, self-regulation and self-acceptance. By gifting ourselves this intentional moment to pause each month we allow time to self-reflect, to gather momentum and often return to daily life with more focus.

Monthly Soma half-day retreats are offered on a sliding scale pricing:

£15 Supported | £35 Standard | £45 Supporter

Dear Subscriber First Name,

In yoga, as in life, it can be difficult to take in the full picture when we don’t look at both sides of a coin. So after writing last month’s newsletter, I felt the need to provide a counterweight to the idea of embodiment.

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.

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 created machines that are 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.

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 sense of becoming completely enveloped in the machinations of the mind is the essence 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 interferes with 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. However, when we lose 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