Happy Sunday!

Last month, we explored the power of ritual—those intentional acts that bring us into the present, reconnect us with what matters, and remind us of the joy of being. Rituals, when chosen with care, can be portals into presence rather than chains of compulsion. This month, Mindy takes us deeper into the body itself. If ritual helps us remember, embodiment asks us to listen—to trust the signals of breath, movement, and sensation rather than filtering everything through the mind.

For Mindy, the journey toward embodiment hasn’t been linear. Like many of us, she grew up learning to prioritize intellect over intuition, function over feeling. But over time, through dance, drumming, and presence, she’s been discovering a different way of inhabiting herself—one where the body is not an afterthought but a source of wisdom, pleasure, and truth.

What does it mean to not just think about being present but to be present? To move and feel without judgment? To reclaim the body as a place of connection, not critique? Mindy’s reflections this month explore all of this and more.

Let’s dive in.

—David/Gonzo

My Journey to Embodiment & Presence

I wasn’t very old, around 7 or so, when I became aware of feeling self-conscious and critical of my body and wishing it looked differently than it did. Additionally, I was a bright and eager child, so school became a place where I could feel good about myself and learn to value the talents of my mind. As the years went on, I fell into the habit of treating my body as an inconvenience mostly. When I was most aware of it, it was painful, so it was preferable to experience life mainly through mental constructs. There were sports and activities I didn’t try because I knew I wouldn’t like how my body looked in the uniforms or costumes. My body felt like a liability, something that kept me from enjoying my life. Going through four pregnancies (including a twin pregnancy) and nursing over a span of a decade and a half gave me an appreciation for my body’s capability and functionality, but it still didn’t result in a lot of enjoyment or real connection with it. It’s really been only in the last few years that I’ve been able to embark on a journey of embodiment. Embodiment is more than just “being in your body”; it’s about trusting it, listening to it, and feeling without filtering everything through the mind. I want to share some of what that journey has included.

My Brain as Gatekeeper

Looking back, I can see that in order to change my relationship with my body, I first had to convince my brain. It had pretty much ruled the System of Me as far back as I could remember, controlling what activities I did, what I wore, and interpreting the feelings and sensations of my body to suit its own narrative. Several years back I read The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. In this book, acclaimed psychiatrist and researcher Bessel van der Kolk emphasizes the importance of addressing trauma through therapies that focus on body awareness and reconnecting with physical sensations to facilitate healing. Just engaging the mind by thinking through and talking through the traumatic experiences paled in effectiveness to working with the body AND the mind. To deal with the uncomfortable feelings in the body, so many of us disconnect and abandon the body then retreat to the relative comfort of the mind. Our bodies don’t have a chance to complete the stress cycle and end up holding that trapped energy, guarding and tensing in a protective stance, which can turn into chronic pain, digestive issues, sleep disturbances, and difficulty regulating emotions. Interestingly, I read this book shortly after reading the admittedly more “woo” book The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer, and it was incredibly powerful to see the scientific evidence backing up some of these “spiritual” teachings. We’ve got to wake up and be willing to face what we haven’t faced. To stop living only in our head, ruled by stories created from our past and fears about the future. 

Bodies Want to Move

Anyone who lives with or has spent much time around animals has seen an animal display a case of the zoomies. If you haven’t seen it, go on YouTube and search for your animal of choice plus zoomies and you’re in for a treat. Every dog we’ve had has had their own unique twist on zoomies. And the past couple of months we’ve been delighted by our house pigeon Sweet Pea’s take on zoomies–flying up and down and making tight turns, all around the kitchen and family room! (Wouldn’t flying be amazing?!) At a family reunion a few years ago, I turned on some music and my great-niece (age 3 at the time) started dancing as toddlers are so prone to doing. I and several other family members created a game of imitating her dance moves, and it was so much fun. Watching her move her body so freely, and also watching my family members imitate her movements with enthusiasm and laughter as it required abandoning self-conscious monitoring was truly delightful. It turned out to be quite a workout as well. This was the same summer that David and I attended a multi-day EDM (electronic dance music) festival and I discovered just how magical it can be to let go of worrying about what you look like and just move your body. (Turns out it just seems silly to feel self conscious when you’re surrounded by thousands of people just enjoying themselves and dancing their hearts out.) That experience hooked me on dancing, and it’s been a very regular part of my life since then. It wasn’t that I’d never enjoyed dancing before–I’d done some country line dancing and swing dancing over the years, David and I took a ballroom class together when we were newlyweds, and I’ve enjoyed playing Just Dance on the Wii since it came out. But those types of dancing have set moves and feel like the brain is still calling the shots, a sort of “Alright, body, I’m going to allow you to move within these parameters. And I’ll be judging you so try not to mess up.”  In contrast, dancing to EDM felt like the music reached into my body and pulled movement out of me. It only required that I let go of thinking and give into feeling. With minimal lyrics in so many of the songs, my brain had little to grab hold of. And it felt so good.

Another avenue of movement I discovered within the past few years is drumming. Our first Christmas after we bought a house, David surprised me with a gorgeous set of red conga and bongo drums. I’d wanted some forever. Over the years, they got played on periodically by me and the children, but mostly they were a colorful, beautiful addition to our music room. After participating in ceremonies/retreats that combined psychedelics with music and rhythm, I found that I absolutely loved the rhythm and sensation of drumming. Similar to dancing, it was something that felt so fully in my body that my mind would just take a backseat. I’ve collected songs into a playlist and on occasion just play them on my speaker and drum along for twenty minutes or more. I love it. Dancing and drumming have both become portals into presence–moving without thinking, feeling rhythm without analyzing it or feeling self-critical.

Living in the Present, Holding the Past

From both my own experience and the research I’ve read, I have concluded that our bodies exist only in the present. They don’t make up stories like our brains. But, like van der Kolk explores in his book, our bodies carry imprints from the past. I think we can see this in animals. As far as we know, animals lack the capacity to craft narratives, but it’s easy to see the imprints and “memories” that they carry in their bodies. They respond and react to very subtle cues in their environments. I remember walking my dog Daisy around the neighborhood and a dog on the other side of a fence startled both of us with a loud explosive burst of barking. For years after, when we’d walk that route, she’d step off the sidewalk and go a few feet into the road to put more distance between her and that fence. Similarly, my dog Phoebe recognizes the cues that mean a walk is imminent, so I have to make sure she doesn’t see me with a fanny pack on if we aren’t about to head out on a walk. 

Old tensions, stored energies, and trauma responses shape how we move and feel. Sensations that trickle up from our bodies often go unrecognized by our conscious minds, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t affected by them. As I’ve learned to notice these sensations and greet them with curiosity, I’ve learned a lot about what old burdens I’m still carrying. If I notice a response from something happening now, a “trigger,” I can ask myself what this feeling reminds me of. Triggers aren’t just mental patterns, they are physical patterns, embedded in muscle tension, breath, posture. Often the answer to my question is something that happened long ago. Once I recognize this stored pattern, I can work with it in some way. Often that just means noticing it every time it comes up and responding with compassion, then deciding how I want to respond. After coming to an awareness of what I’ve been carrying, it seems almost spontaneously to begin to ease up. Allowing ourselves to feel old stuff that we didn’t feel at the time can feel really scary. Usually it hurts.  Sometimes it hurts a lot. But on the other side of the hurt, we are given such a wonderful gift. It feels powerful and freeing to have faced something that we’ve hidden away. We know ourselves better. We see ourselves more clearly. And by facing our own hurts, we grow in empathy for the hurts of others. 

Feeling Beyond the Story

Feelings aren’t just thoughts, though those of us who are disconnected from our body may experience them mostly that way. Feelings are bodily sensations that provoke thoughts. In the book Conscious Living, Gay Hendricks shares an exercise that can be done to help us become more practiced at noticing and engaging with our bodily sensations and feelings:

“Notice any feeling or body sensation. Right now I am tuning in to a feeling of fullness in my stomach, probably the result of the oat bran pancake I ate a half hour ago. As I let my awareness rest on the sensation, I feel more details of it. It is more to the left than to the right, and it is really not a solid sensation as it seemed at first. It is really made up of tiny waves. Let your attention rest on the sensation you have chosen, and really stay with it for a while. Find out what you can learn from it. Now I notice some guilt and fear. I am losing some weight in preparation for an upcoming television show, and I am scared that I have sabotaged my program. I take a deep breath and let the out-breath go with a whoosh. As my awareness deepens, I feel a warmth and spaciousness behind and beyond the surface sensations. The essence is there, the backdrop of everything. As I tune in to it, the sensation of fullness actually shifts, becomes more pleasant. I suspect it is because everything feels more at ease when welcomed into essence. To make the essence shift is to acknowledge a feeling or thought but not get caught in it and take it for real. How much happier human beings would be if we knew how to make this simple shift! If we knew how to see that our thoughts are just thoughts and that our feelings are just feelings, we would be better able to live consciously. We would see that ninety-nine times out of a hundred, our thoughts are merely reflections of the mood we happen to be in. They are not to be taken seriously as accurate reflections of reality. They are certainly not to be acted upon.”

As I have become more practiced at noticing what the actual sensations are in my body, I’ve become more capable of not letting my mind create a story that doesn’t seem to help the situation. To explore this idea a little more, I’d like to share a recent experience. 

In January I decided that I’d like to learn more about polyvagal theory.

I’d heard/seen it mentioned often, but I didn’t feel like I really knew exactly what it meant. So I listened to a couple of podcasts and they both mentioned the work of Deb Dana. I put her book Polyvagal Practices on hold at the library and dove in once it became available. She goes over the idea of the polyvagal ladder and I found the ladder to be helpful imagery for me to remember. This week David and I had a conversation about some of the struggles we have had with working through issues together because of challenges around communication. It’s hard for me not to feel like I bear responsibility for the bulk of our communication issues, because so often throughout our marriage my anxiety around communication has resulted in things not getting resolved or even discussed. I’ve long felt like I should be better at it than I am, and it turns out that shame doesn’t help pretty much ever. 

This week, armed with my new insights about the polyvagal ladder, I noticed early on that I was in a state of sympathetic activation. My system was not relaxed, it was scanning for threats and unfriendly cues. I withdrew my hand from David’s and I didn’t want to be physically close to him. I noticed these things, but also knew that I wanted to stay engaged. I didn’t want to end up in a state of dorsal vagal activation, or full shut down. So I engaged in mindful breathing and some soothing touch to help remind my nervous system that I was, in fact, safe. Additionally, I repeatedly thought the affirmation “I am safe. This is worth doing. The discomfort is worth it.”  I wasn’t able to get back to ventral vagal calm until we were done talking, but I ended up feeling good about how things had gone despite the difficulty and discomfort. And I was able to share the ladder metaphor and my experience with David, which helped him see my efforts to work with what was going on with me, which I think helped him see that my responses weren’t out of a desire to disconnect from him but rather to attend to my own needs so I could show up better. 

I know that my fear around this sort of important communication is old stuff from my childhood. And the years of our marriage where neither of us were very skilled at kind communication created further trauma there. It’s going to take time for me to help my body release those old patterns and experience communication as a place of safety. 

Embodiment as an Ongoing Practice

I don’t think there is any perfect state of embodiment to achieve. I’m really grateful for my brain and the way I think, most of the time. For me, embodiment is about being in touch with this wonderful vehicle I have with which to navigate the world and enjoy being alive. I feel grateful to have this meatsuit and find that it has a wisdom of its own, which at times seems incomprehensible to my mind. Sometimes I let my body lead, other times my mind, and sometimes they work really well in a sort of tag team, tandem effort. Embodiment for me is about continually choosing to feel, move, and trust my body.  I’m so grateful that I’ve found spaces where I can drop out of the mind’s incessant storytelling and chatter and into the raw, immediate experience of being alive. Allowing this body to play, discovering my own version of the zoomies, dancing, drumming, moving and existing in the sheer joy of it without needing it to be purposeful or have any larger goal has been wonderful. It feels good, and that’s enough. 

—Mindy

SOMETHING TO TRY

The best thing I saw  online this week was  a Thread of women sharing things they do to be more whimsical. As I’ve had ritual on my mind all month, I saw so many of the things they shared as mini rituals, small actions done or words said that brought their full focus to the present moment. As our plan for this newsletter was to share some of the rituals we’ve found enjoyable, I wanted to share some of my favorites from these internet strangers as well. Maybe you’ll be inspired, like I am, by people’s deliberate attempts to make their lives more joyful. 

“I hold "office hours" every Tuesday at a local coffee shop, which means I sit on the couch and order drinks for 4-5 hours while various friends and acquaintances visit me to yap abt books and gossip.”

“if I want to have negative thoughts about myself I have to think them in a cockney accent”

“Whenever I drop or f** something up when I'm alone I bow & say "and scene" instead of getting frustrated. I've done this for so long that I literally no longer get annoyed by my own mistakes & laughing is my first instinct anytime anything goes wrong lol”

“I like drinking water at night out of small wooden bowls. It makes me feel like I'm being nursed back to health by spirits.”

“I wash dishes by candlelight, listening to Medieval tavern music, and pretend I'm a tavern wench.”

“I say ‘can you hold this please’ when i set my purse on an inanimate object”

“I call my to do list my TA DA list and do jazz hands as I tick things off.”

“Whenever I buy something online and it asks ‘is this a gift?’ | write a little gift message to myself, usually along the lines of "you are awesome and deserve these little treats."

“I listen to french music in my headphones while I grocery shop. Makes it more romantic and less mundane feeling”

“When I leave the house I always tell my dog ‘no parties while I'm gone!’ And then laugh so he knows he is 100% allowed to throw parties if he wants.”

“I choose a Spotify playlist to add ambiance to every dinner. My kids think I'm nuts, but would you believe there are ALWAYS relevant options, from ‘Spaghetti Dinner’ and ‘White People Taco Night’ to ‘Pancakes for Dinner"‘ and “Stir Fry.’ Last night was ‘Parmesan Chicken.’”

“My boyfriend and I will have ‘goblin dinner’.. it usually consisting of leftovers and random heat and serve things we might have.”

“We also do ‘emotional support nacho’ nights when things have been particularly hard and stressful for weeks on end. I just make a massive tray of nachos with ALL the fixings.”

“We gather salsas, lots of napkins and drinks and put it on the coffee table. They really make things better, but it's more the experience than the food.”

"I say, 'Guards!' whenever I have a negative thought"

“I keep edible glitter in my desk drawer at work to make my drinks a little extra and it makes me feel like a fairy”

“I've named my air fryer Ben, and on the nights that he has to ‘make dinner;, when I sit down to eat, I say, ‘Thanks Ben, this looks delish!’”

“I have Alexa give me a round of applause whenever I need it to reaffirm that I'm on the right track.”

And some of my own rituals:

I love to light & burn incense in my room and spend some time with the items I’ve set up on my nightstand. Sometimes I will pull some oracle or tarot cards. Other times I’ll just take a few breaths. When I was attending the local buddhist sangha, I learned that incense is burned as an offering to Buddha, and I love thinking of the connection between this realm and the spirit realm (or whatever might be out there) while the incense burns.

I enjoy using flowers, dried or fresh, rocks, candles, crystals, and some of the small figurines I have to make a flatlay arrangement.  I may do this on a table, the floor, a placemat or tablecloth, or the stone “altar” we built in the backyard. I often do this as part of a full or new moon ritual, or to commemorate a special occasion. But sometimes I will just do it when I have some cut flowers that are about done, or if I see a nice bouquet on clearance at the grocery store. My friend Sue has a practice of gathering items on walks with her dog and making arrangements either on location or taking the items home and combining them with others she’s saved. I love her work.

I enjoy showering and then laying on the shakti mat for 20-30 minutes while listening to music. It often feels like I’m transported and is some of the best meditation I’ve had.

PARTING

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That’s all for this week! If you’re into this, share this newsletter with all your friends. Connecting with new subscribers is magical! 🧚🏻‍♀️

DISCLAIMER: This newsletter is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice.