![Q&A [Pt. 1/3] — What Is Embodiment and Why Does It Matter in Men’s Work?](https://img.transistor.fm/qhL_nlnJ9-N2-PAiGhrvrSGoesDo-tmYJZCh6Z4XujU/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:800/h:800/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS82ZWQ5/MTBlMzY0NzBlMTQz/YTAzZTFiZjY5ZWJi/ZGUxOS5wbmc.webp)
Welcome back to The Circle, the podcast where we go all in on men's work, embodiment practices, personal growth from our queer perspective. If you're enjoying the show, please be sure to rate, like, and subscribe. And you can also leave us a review to help get the word out to more people. If you have a question about anything you've heard us talk about, please send us a message. We'd love to hear from you.
Eric Bomyea:Speaking of messages and speaking of questions, since launching this show, we've gotten a lot of them from listeners all over the world. The big ones is this. What do you mean when you say men's embodiment? Behind that, what does it mean to be a man? What is a queer man?
Eric Bomyea:And then what does embodied masculinity actually mean? And then how does men's intuition play a role in all that? These are really great questions and it's a lot to unpack. So we're gonna break it down over the next several weeks in a three part miniseries where in each episode, we'll focus on one piece. We'll keep it short, sharp, and from our lived experience.
Eric Bomyea:Tim, are you ready to go all in? I'm ready. Let's do this then. So welcome to the first episode of our three part Q and A series. In this part, we're asking what is embodiment and why does it matter in men's work?
Eric Bomyea:So we're going to start simple. What do you mean when you say embodiment?
Timothy Bish:Embodiment, as I understand it, is a conscious practice of starting to understand the communication that exists with our own physical body. When we think about any experience that we have, there is the cascade of things that happen. Right? So something happens to you. You have an idea about that.
Timothy Bish:You have a belief about that, and your nervous system is aware of it, your endocrine system is aware of it, and there can be any number of things sort of happening. And we can get information from our body to help us understand, like, what is moving through us and and what we should be paying attention to. Well, we can only get that information if we are attuned to it. So the example I might use is someone who gets really upset. They get frustrated or angry, and they can feel the heat, and they can feel that, like, jittery, shaky, on the verge thing.
Timothy Bish:But if you have no conversation with that sensation, with that experience, then you're likely gonna not know how to work with it skillfully. And so, typically, that would be the moment when, oh, this kind of big experience is happening to me. I don't know how to work
Eric Bomyea:with it.
Timothy Bish:It erupts much like a volcano and will come out in whatever way it comes out. And oftentimes, it'll come out in a way that is detrimental to our long term term goal, our desire, our purpose. It may not be in service to the relationships that we want. Embodiment and embodiment practice is going in and starting to understand these things so that when we experience them, which we will, which everyone will. So anyone listening, you you will experience your emotions in a physical way.
Timothy Bish:That information can help you. Oh, I'm feeling this thing. What can I do about this thing so that I can then behave more mindfully, more consciously, make some choices? That is the un like, sort of the ongoing unraveling conversation of embodiment practice. And I get more and more information and become more and more nuanced in my understanding of what it is I'm feeling so that when I am feeling and in particular, when I'm feeling wrathful, angry, frustrated, super withdrawn, do I have things to work with that so then I can get greater clarity about what's actually happening and how I want to be?
Eric Bomyea:Thank you for that answer. I think that that brings a lot of clarity. One of the things that I did hear you say is a mindfulness to your embodied experience. So I'm curious now, how is embodiment different and how is it similar to mindfulness and meditation?
Timothy Bish:I believe embodiment is a very unapologetic attempt at understanding a source of wisdom for us, which is our physical body. I was thinking about this earlier today where, you know, when we learn to drive a car when you're 15 or 16, you get your learner's permit, you take lessons or you go to school. Like, you know, there's a class sometimes, like, I learned from my parents, but you have to practice. You have to understand how to drive the vehicle you're driving. Why would our life be different?
Timothy Bish:We are living in this physical vehicle. It is the vehicle for our human experience, and yet sometimes we want to entirely deny it. Imagine driving a car or flying a plane and thinking, I'm going to ignore the control panel because that's what's been culturally sort of, you know, rewarded or or we haven't been modeled it or whatever, you would think that's crazy. When I'm driving a car, I need to know how fast I'm going. I need to know how much gasoline I have.
Timothy Bish:I need to know what gear I'm in. I need to be able to see my all the things. And yet with our bodies, we're like, oh, I have this feeling of sadness that no one's ever given me context for, and it's like gnawing at me. Nying at me is even funny because you might even not know that. You might just know, like, I'm having a feeling, and I don't know what to do with it.
Timothy Bish:And you're like, we should know what to do with it. And if we don't know, the thing is about, like, emotions and feelings and sensations is that they don't go away because we ignore them. It's a little bit like a crack in the window. You're like, you can pretend it's not there, but what you ultimately need to do is address the the problem. And in our lived experience, it's the same thing.
Timothy Bish:So we are we are moving through this experience in these vehicles, and embodiment is an attempt, a practice to understand
Eric Bomyea:its language and what it can offer us. Beautifully said. And on the analogy, metaphor of the vehicle and the crack, so if we're ignoring the crack, it could eventually get bigger and develop into something else. And so we talked a little bit about that wrathful expression. So the crack of anger or irritation gets a little bit bigger, bigger, bigger, then all of a sudden it shatters into a moment of really unskillful demonstration of anger in some sort of wrathful way.
Eric Bomyea:What are some of the other common ways that if we are disembodied or disconnected from our bodies that we could be missing other things? And what are
Timothy Bish:some of those examples? What are some ways that we commonly ignore our embodied experience? Yes. I think we see this a lot. I am feeling sad.
Timothy Bish:I don't know what to do with that feeling, so I fall into, like, something that might look like depression. I sleep too much. I eat too much. I stay home. I drink too much.
Timothy Bish:I there's so many different ways where I don't know what to do with this feeling. And, like, we go back to the idea, the feeling isn't going anywhere. It might change and shift around, but until we address it or or kind of start to work with it, it'll it'll be present. So you're eating too much. You're drinking too much.
Timothy Bish:You're sleeping too much. You're you're not doing things you want to be doing. Any number of these things could be an example of, oh, you're that is an attempt somehow to manage a feeling you don't know how to work with. An embodiment practice is creating situations, safe, conscious situations in which we can start to experiment with how to work with some of these sensations. So in an embodiment practice, we will oftentimes be in a challenging posture.
Timothy Bish:One of them that we all know is, you know, chi generator or, you know, sometimes something called ego eradicator, things that push us to an edge, not unlike yoga. The purpose of that being, well, when I get to my edge and I feel really pushed, I feel really uncomfortable, can I practice not collapsing in that moment? Can I practice not becoming a reaction in that moment? But that's a skill that we have to practice. And so I like the image that I've used many times, you know, the gold medalist who has that gold medal winning performance, they've probably done the skill that they did excellently many times not so.
Timothy Bish:And it was you you had to have the opportunity to I I tried it once. I went too far. I tried it the second time. I didn't go far enough. You like and you start to learn, well, emotions and sensations and our human experience are not that different.
Timothy Bish:I have to keep going back to sharpen my ability to understand my experience and how
Eric Bomyea:I how I meet people. And if somebody wanted to try embodiment today, where would you start them?
Timothy Bish:Well, I might refer them to some resources to to a person who understood the the practices. But, you know, a lot of things are embodiment practice. So if you go to yoga, for example, because everyone knows you're you and I are both yoga teachers, it is a great way to start to have an experience of your body, an experience of your body in a safe space where you can start to feel things and get a little pushed. If you hold warrior two for 15 breaths, you might start to feel, oh, I'm having an experience in my front quadricep or I'm having experience in, like, my feet. And that just just being curious what experience am I having and where do I tend to go?
Timothy Bish:What's happening and where do I tend to go with what's happening are already powerful starts of this practice. Because if every time you experience frustration, you go to lashing out, that's important to know. Because is lashing out serving you? Based on my experience, almost certainly not. And then what might be of greater service?
Timothy Bish:Beautiful. I think
Eric Bomyea:that is a wonderful recommendation for folks. And with that, I'm feeling that we've given our listeners a broad overview and answered the first question of what is embodiment and why does it matter. And so with that being the top level question, is there anything else you'd like to add, or are you feeling complete?
Timothy Bish:My shamanic therapist kind of boils stuff down all the time to, you know, what what is the crux of men's work? Feel your feelings. And that sounds really simple, but it's like because your feelings aren't gonna go away, just like the laws of physics are not gonna go away. Right? Then embedded in that is become skillful about feeling your feelings and understand what they mean.
Timothy Bish:And so it can sound a little silly. It can sound a little, you know, yogis on the mountain with the crystals. But the sensations you have in your body when you are nervous, when you are scared, when you are sad, when you are angry, when you are delighted, when you are in love, these are all important. And I guess the final thing I would say is I just saw this video about limerence. Like, can you differentiate between limerence and love?
Timothy Bish:I suspect there might be a slightly different physical sensation connected to the two of them. And wouldn't it be powerful if we could tap into that? If we could understand it? If we could be begin to recognize it. I'm interested in that.
Timothy Bish:Are you also? I hope so. Mhmm.
Eric Bomyea:Beautiful. Well, maybe part four. I don't know what the word limerence means, so I think that's that's that's for another episode. But I think what I'm getting at what I'm understanding is that there is a sensational difference between things and learning to understand what those differences are and help us to navigate certain things in our lives.
Timothy Bish:Yeah. I let's define that word in the episode about that word.
Eric Bomyea:How about that? Sounds good. How about that?
Timothy Bish:Yeah. The important thing here is that there could be clues that we are receiving from our body that could help us navigate challenging situations if only we had the willingness and the capacity to hear them.
Eric Bomyea:So with that, thank you all for tuning in to this first part of this three part series. And if you want to explore this more for yourself, please head on over to myembodiment.com where you can practice with us via breath work, meditation, movement practices to start to help you get into your body a little bit more. See you there.