Let’s get physical!

by Julia Paulette Hollenbery, author of The Healing Power of Pleasure

We have all moved through the global event of the pandemic—intense shock, fear, and confusion. We are now finding ourselves reemerging after this big collective and individual process.

Where do you find yourself now? What has or hasn’t changed? Have you evolved at all?

We rose up, out, and into complicated new ideas and possible solutions, triggered old, unsafe traumas, and created panicky new ones. The news made us all feel anxious. The limitations of the lockdown were both physical deprivation and physical containment.

As we begin to settle and reassemble ourselves again, it seems that many people are waking up, perhaps for the first time, to the importance of our physical embodied life.

Embracing our physicality is a major paradigm shift in perception.

We were used to thinking of ourselves as problem solvers, finding analysis, strategies, assumptions, and conclusions. We thought what and how we thought was what mattered.

Before lockdown, we were all happily online for many hours of the day. Online for work, distraction, and entertainment. Online for shopping, dating, and exercising. We were all seduced by the shiny, moving, capable modern devices.

And during the lockdowns, with our freedom of options curtailed, we adapted to many hours on screens. The online trend intensified and reached a climactic peak—a substantial turning point in our experience and tolerance of disembodied life.

Screens and technology are wonderful—energy and emotions can be transmitted in addition to content and information. But they absolutely have their limitations.

Now, as we open up, people are realizing how important it is to be physical, in person, in a way that they might not have really noticed before the months of being trapped.

Essentially, many of us have gained a new appreciation for being physically healthy. We have a renewed gratitude for literally being able to breathe—the fundamental function for being alive—and being able to do so without effort or pain. We realize how important it is to be able to smell, not just our food and drink, but to be able to smell the subtle smells that signal attraction, trust, and danger. And the ease to be able to be energetically active.

There is a fresh recognition of how important other people are to us. How good it is to be in the physical company of other human beings. To look into their eyes and see the many small details of how they move, dress, talk, eat. To watch a smile spreading across a face. To sense the vital importance of touch with others, whether it’s a full-on hug, hand holding, or an occasional shoulder brush. Touch negotiates and transmits many of our communications and connections. The importance of a real coffee or a meal together. The colorful sight and shared experience. A hard flat-screen just can’t substitute for that.

And all of the social rituals about who speaks first, and about what, and when. The different conversational dance of meeting one or several people out there in embodied life.

There is also a new understanding of the importance of physical movement, the pleasure of stretching or moving in space—the release, peace, and exhilaration of physical exercise again.

Before the pandemic, we could rest in our mental-rational arrogance. We knew ourselves and others from our analysis, assumptions, and conclusions. Now it is incontrovertible to realize we are physical creatures with physical needs in a physical world.

This is, I think, a major paradigm shift in thinking, an identity shift, a change in orientation. Now we know our physicality is an essential component in our well-being and contentment.

The old pre-pandemic way was disembodied, disconnected, and unsensual. Now, in our collective enthusiasm, hunger, and joy to reconnect in person, we bring our newly awakened sensitivity to the sensual.

This is a step toward greater inclusion of all of who we are—toward self-love, self-care, and self-acceptance. It’s a step toward more personal responsibility and alignment.

It is a recognition of more reality. We are social and physical creatures. We are our bodies.

From this vantage point, it is obvious that care, respect, and kindness for all others are essential, for all other sensitive, sensual, and feeling beings in our world and the world. Life is physical, not rational—an experience, not an answer.

After all the loss and deprivation, the fears and frustration, we are all aware that we want more pleasure in our life. Pleasure takes place in the body. Pleasure is the essential nourishment we need for happy relationships, productive work, and vibrant health.

Now is the time we can start to build a different future world, based on positive physical “pleasureableness” as our foundation, rather than suffering, shopping, and shiny devices. Let’s make the most of this cultural reset to create a world and lifestyle that we really deserve.

PRACTICES FOR EMBODIMENT

Becoming embodied increases our stability, balance, flow, and grace. It enables us to hold steady in ourselves when all around is chaos. It is the foundation of a good life. The more we practice listening to ourselves, to our bodies, the more it becomes a natural everyday way of life.

At the simplest level, move your body regularly. Choose an exercise or sport class that you enjoy and do it. Even five minutes a day stretching or fifteen minutes walking, running, or dancing will release stress and viscerally improve your life experience.

The body is our own personal home, for pleasure, wisdom, and intimate interaction with the world. David Abram, philosopher and ecologist, says, “Other animals, in a constant and mostly unmediated relation with their sensory surroundings, think with the whole of their bodies.”

The following exercises begin the process of increasing whole-body sensuality.

Sensing practice

This is a simple exercise to bring mind and body together. Attend to your body by slowly sensing one body part at a time. Sense your right arm for a few minutes and then sense your right leg; move across to sense your left leg and then your left arm; sense your pelvis, belly, and lower back; chest and upper back; and head. Follow this order or invent another for yourself. Does anything change? Do you feel a pleasing warmth?

Tense and let go

Often we think we are relaxed without realizing quite how much tension we are holding. The following is a great exercise found in schools of bodywork, psychotherapy and healing.

First, try increasing tension in one part of your body, like a hand, slowly clenching and then releasing it. Then you can try slowly clenching and raising both shoulders, holding and then releasing them.

Next, tense any part of the body, such as an arm, leg, back or your face. A part with a particular sensation or no particular sensation. Slowly build the tension while continuing to breathe. Hold the tension at the peak; then release at once with some big breaths. Sense your body.

Is there any movement that wants to be made? Enjoy the relaxation!

You can also amplify emotional tension, such as anger, frustration or shyness. Notice what you are feeling, dare to really feel it, and to exaggerate it. Keep breathing steadily. Make the body shape of the feeling as clearly as you can. Slowly intensify the shape and the feeling, more and more intense, then suddenly release, taking big breaths, allowing a new freedom of movement and sensation.

Shake to release

Animals in the wild shake to release intense fear after being chased by a predator. Human conditioning teaches us not to show our shakiness, but maintaining tension traps fear and shock in the body. You can experiment with or without music, encouraging bounces and shakes of different tempos and sizes through the knees and hips, shaking for release and relaxation.

You can find more practices (50 of them!) to increase pleasure, sensuality, and the innate joy of being in my book The Healing Power of Pleasure.