Embodied Realization

Embodied Realization helps guide you to an experiential understanding of nonduality. This ever-developing set of practices is aimed at refining your attunement to the clear presence that is always already here. In these sessions, we cultivate embodied safety to fully inhabit the temple of your body, so you can come home to yourself.

The gift of being human means we have access to intellectual, emotional, vital, and energetic modes of awareness. Coming more fully into our own embodiment helps stabilize the realization of nonduality, the understanding of truth. We cultivate a felt sense of innate wholeness to embody a lived connection with all that is. We attune to the stillness underlying all movement, the silence behind all sounds, the quiet presence that is always already here.

 

Embodied Realization practices facilitate a deeper connection with and opening to a felt sense of the fundamental ground of being. This fundamental ground may be called Awareness, Consciousness, God, the Absolute, the Divine. It is shockingly simple (though not always easy) to realize this truth, this ground of being. It is, in fact, so simple that almost everyone misses it, looking for something that seems more significant, more exciting or attention-grabbing.

 

This ground is our essential nature. It is simple, clear presence, and it is possible for anyone to realize this, regardless of life circumstances or narratives or karma or anything else. Underneath every injury, trauma, or seemingly broken person lies an unbounded and unbreakable ground. Our essential nature cannot be injured or broken. We are whole. Our essential nature is unchanging, undamaged, unfragmented. Anyone can touch in to this realization.

 

Sometimes it happens spontaneously, through grace and seemingly almost by accident. As the saying goes, “Enlightenment is an accident, but spiritual practice can make one more accident-prone” (Suzuki Roshi). However, just touching this realization rarely does much: what is most beneficial and transformative is stabilizing that realization in an embodied way.

 

Part of how we stabilize involves opening to all that is, fully living the emotions and experiences of life without any need to grasp at certain experiences or reject others. Yes, preferences remain, as there is no need to erase or deny our personality and humanness; but alongside our preferences is an open acceptance. We stop fighting with reality. We set aside any identification with the contents of our awareness, such as thoughts, perceptions, feelings, etc. We relax some of our habitual ways of organizing the body and our lived experience.

 

This might include releasing habits and patterns, and exploring anxiety, tension, etc. to see what underlies it, in order to release these holds. It’s quite likely that as children and at other moments during life, we created holding patterns or behaviors, or even beliefs about ourselves, in order to survive. Our innate intelligence helped keep us alive, and sometimes we need to relearn new ways of being when our circumstances change.

 

Basically, Embodied Realization practices help make you more "accident-prone", more open to the flow of grace, more attuned to the fundamental ground of being. Simple meditations, attunement exercises, attention to the breath, and similar exercises are used to untie the knots we have innocently tied ourselves in. We come to be more able to let go of some of our rigid concepts of ourselves, concepts which block our experience of our fundamental nature. We practice being more open, more fully alive, less constricted, and more attuned to our essential nature.

 

Welcome home.