Coming Home to Our Bodies - Why?
Why come home to our bodies?
This is the questions I’ve found myself posing as I’ve been incorporating feedback from the October BodyHome group into the curriculum for a new 8-week BodyHome group coming soon.
I’m asking myself:
With everything going on in our world right now, why is this where I’m feeling called to put my energy right now?
I’ve discovered that I have strong and passionate answers to these questions.
Before I jump into all that, I want to acknowledge that coming home to our bodies is all about timing.
I know this not only through working with my clients, but also through my own personal experience.
To be completely honest, the first time I tried somatic/body-based therapy, I hated it. Similar to the first time I tried blues dancing. Both felt too loose and fluid and intimate. Both asked me to tune into deeper parts of myself that I had locked away for good reasons. Both scared me because I wasn’t ready to be fully in my body.
Until I was. When the timing was right I found blues dancing again (and met my now husband at a dance a year later!). I also returned to emotion focused and somatic therapy, finding a unique approach to these modalities that wasn’t just “where do you feel that in your body?” Coming home to my body transformed my life and my relationship with myself in so many ways, but only when I engaged in the process in my own timing.
Me experiencing the joy of blues dancing when the timing was right!
I’m sharing all this to remind all of us that embodiment and feeling at home in our bodies isn’t for all of us at all times. There are brilliant reasons for not being in our bodies, including past traumas, experiences of oppression or discrimination, nervous system dysregulation, and much more. Maybe you’re ready to return home to your body now and maybe you’re not. Regardless, I trust you. I trust your timing. There isn’t a right way to do this. This isn’t a right time.
There is only your right timing.
Where are you at in your relationship to feeling at home in your body?
Wherever you are in your relationship with your body I do think it’s helpful to consider the reasons one might want to come home to their body.
Here are my top three!
Befriending our bodies = befriending our emotions.
Changing the stories about our bodies means rejecting diet culture and patriarchal messaging, which not only transforms our lives but also radically changes our world.
Finding safety within our bodies means that we can feel at home anywhere.
Befriending our bodies and emotions.
Our emotions live in our bodies, expressed by our nervous system. Our emotions are our nervous system’s way of communicating to us about how we are experiencing and perceiving the world around us. When our emotions are overwhelming or we don’t know how to feel them fully we can end up disconnecting from our emotional experience and thus our bodies. Turning toward our emotions and our bodies provides us with access to the rich information our emotions are communicating to us. We can then tune into the full spectrum of experience including our true intuition, joy, pleasure, desires, boundaries, and so much more.
Changing the stories.
Diet culture and the patriarchal world culture would have us believe that making our emotions, bodies, and selves smaller is the way to get our needs met and stay safe in our world. I vehemently disagree. There are so many ways to meet our needs and feel safe. These oppressive systems are built to profit off of our discontent with ourselves not our joy. Rejecting these limiting narratives gives us space to bring our gifts, true power, and essential selves to the world. We can take up space. We can share our truth. We can change the world.
Finding safety within ourselves.
I now understand the foundation of somatic therapy as learning how to regulate our nervous systems which creates a sense of safety within ourselves. So many of us have experienced traumas (big-T large event traumas or small-t cumulative traumas) which means that at some point(s) our nervous systems were overwhelmed to the point of not being able to regulate or move through the full stress cycle. Thus, we end up holding unresolved emotional charge in our nervous systems. Of course we don’t want to turn inward or be with our bodies if all that overwhelm and pain is still in there. Learning to be with ourselves when the unresolved charge gets activated, process the traumas when we are ready, and build resources to create a sense of calm and safety in our nervous systems are empowering parts of the journey home to our bodies. Knowing that we can partner with our bodies/nervous systems to feel safe in any setting is liberating and empowering. And also changes our world because there is a ripple effect to those around us!
I could go on and on about why reconnecting with our bodies is important. For now I’m excited to share that these ideas have lit me up so much that I’m not only lining up an 8-week BodyHome group in Feb/March 2026 but also a spring BodyHome Retreat in the mountains of Colorado (stay tuned for more). Having space in community to explore these concepts and experientially create change is what I’m all about. If the timing feels right for you, check out these experiences for any body.
Per usual, I’d love to know what you think!
Why do you think we should reconnect to our bodies?
What do you think about the process of coming home to our bodies?
