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I am not a yogi.

(Note: there are a lot of good reasons forwhite people not to teach yogaor identify with what western yoga culture has become. I'm sharing my experiences with embodiment practices and won't be overly careful about the semantics of my journey, but I wanted to acknowledge this up top.)

I remember the first time I felt fully embodied during a yoga class. It was a Friday of the first week of leave I took from my first job out of grad school. I had been struggling with all the signs of burnout, including feeling guilty for it, and my supervisor finally stepped in and encouraged me to take a step back. A friend invited me to a yoga class and I agreed to go.

I had been to yoga classes before. Growing up in Seattle, I actually took "yoga" as a gym class in high school. (Let me be clear: this class had nothing to do with yoga. From what I remember [which is very little] it was a stretching class where we did some mat work and sometimes walked around the track outside.) I attended some yoga classes offered to students while I was in college, more in grad school (the social work school was in the same building as the gym), and a handful of times with friends and family at various studios. 

When I went to classes, I would always go with friends and always with an internal dialogue that went something like this: "This isn't really my thing, ha ha, just trying it out, just gonna be over here not being very good at this thing that people seem really into. Yeah, I'm not very strong so we'll see how this goes but also I'm not going to try that hard, ha, no one will mind if I just go into child's pose every time I'm too tired, right? Okay, cool."

I had predetermined I was not suited for this thing and spent 90% of classes in my head, judging myself or preemptively giving up on my capacity to hold a pose. So I didn't show up in my body in class. Not really.

Which is why I remember the first time I did.

I made the decision to stay with myself, even after holding a pose wasn't comfortable anymore. I gave myself permission to sweat, to try, and to feel the difficulty. I pulled my attention inward and focused on my own body, not the perceived judgments from others (which were really self-judgments).

It felt empowering. I felt capable and grounded, pleasantly tired and satisfied.

Over the past few days, I've been having some stomach issues, and even through the discomfort, I am sitting with the teaching from one of my mentors: The safest place to be is in your body.

Many of us learn to leave our bodies when we are very young - to dissociate from the discomfort and keep moving forward. Sometimes we are trained out of our bodies by well-meaning teachers or guardians telling us about our needs ("You can't be hungry, it's not lunchtime!") and other times it's out of a survival need to protect ourselves, like not being able to get away from a situation which, if fully experienced, would cause total overwhelm.

The body holds so much, which is why it can be important to do body work, breathwork, or trauma work with a somatic practitioner. But even if there isn't a full shut-down of the body, all of us miss a lot of our body's signals.

Our bodies are always in motion, completing various digestive processes, oxygenation, and so many other movements, all on their own. But very often we are not truly inhabiting ourselves. We're rarely in contact with the felt senses of our bodies, fully present to this moment, here and now.

And therefore we miss out on a LOT of information, gleaned through what the Enneagram framework teaches as the Body Center of Intelligence.

The language of the body is sensation, and it's a deep intelligence that gives us the kinesthetic abilities necessary for us to navigate the physical world. Our body is where we are grounded in the present moment and it is also the seat of our power and what carries out the actions we take.

Our relationship with our bodies affects our sense of worth and belonging in the world. Our bodies give us a sense of our personal boundaries. And they house all of our instincts.

Our bodies are doing a heck of a lot of things all of the time, and it's great that we don't have to consciously decide to breathe or send blood through our veins and all the other unconscious processes. But how often do we have reverence for it?

I have often taken for granted all my body does and then gotten angry at it for getting sick or not being able to do more. But what would happen if, instead of separating ourselves from our bodies, we embraced them as extremely intelligent, even if we don't speak the same language?

My Enneagram type in particular has a complicated relationship with the Body center of intelligence, but really, I think we have all been trained out of experiencing so much of what our bodies have to say. This is why practice reconnecting to the body is necessary.

And that's exactly where we'll start in my 8-week Applied Enneagram Group Coaching program.

I look forward to practicing with you!

Applied Enneagram Group Coaching

With Love,
~Caryn

For Reflection

Take these questions to your journal, your next deep conversation, your therapist, coach or counselor, or simply ponder them throughout the upcoming week.

• What are your first thoughts when you think about your body?

• What helps you feel safe in your body?

• What are some of the things you are most grateful for when it comes to your body?

• When was the last time you showed up, fully present in your body with no distractions? What happened?

What's Next??

THANK YOU to everyone who came to my Enneagram Panel Series over the last 18 weeks!! The last panel was my biggest turnout and I received feedback from one of my mentors at The Narrative Enneagram. I love sharing what I know and learning from others all about this powerful system, which is why...

I'M LAUNCHING A PODCAST! My friend, Lee Milligan, is also trained through The Narrative Enneagram and we're launching a brand new podcast all about the Enneagram as a framework, all the types, personal stories, action steps for growth, and so much more!

"The safest place to be is in your body." (Based on teachings by Nita Bryant)