Principles of Reconstruction: Embodiment
“We need a new, global spirituality - an organic spirituality that belongs innately to all of us, as the children of earth. A genuine spirituality that utterly refutes the moralistic, manipulative patriarchal systems, the mechanistic religions that seek to divide us - that control and oppress us by successfully dividing us. We need a spirituality that acknowledges our earthly roots as evolutionary and sexual beings, just as we need an ontology that acknowledges earth as a conscious and spiritual being. We need this organic, global spirituality because we are ready to evolve as a globally conscious species.”
The fear of becoming deeply embodied is one of the things that keeps us trapped inside old religious templates for life.
Embodiment is no joke. I get it. To be really at home inside our own energy inside our own bodies is to come into the holy of holies. It feels like it might kill us, the thrill and the beauty and the awe of the whole thing.
But I’m getting ahead of myself….
Deconstruction, which I’ve already written two other essays on, is the path which supports us to finally let go of dangerous and toxic theological systems which keep us looping in fear and control narratives all the while promising that God loves us. I talk to a lot of people on their deconstruction journey, and while it is a deeply unsettling one full of grief and loss and pain as we let the old order slip away, for many folks, the ‘void’ between worlds is also terrifying. There is a big difference between “I no longer believe in hell” and “I now believe this new thing instead.” Belief systems are important to the human soul. They give us a sense of how to make meaning, align us with our purpose and when practiced with discipline can bring about profound healing, transformation and the kind of connection to God we always craved. For many of us who were raised in Christian traditions, it can be easy to identify as ‘not that anymore’, but trickier to say what we now are…or who we are becoming, and this can be really unsettling.
I wanted to write something about reconstruction, because that is the conversation I’m on this planet to have, its part of my archetypal blueprint. So I thought I would unfold here a little bit about how I do it with people one on one, in spiritual direction or healing sessions.
Let’s start with first principles:
Learning to be embodied spiritually is the foundation of a healthy spiritual practice. The work needed to become embodied can often trigger a huge amount of trauma healing that needs to happen in a safe space with highly qualified folks who know how to hold a firm container. Rage and fear are common markers of this stage.
Learning how to trust heart-intelligence and move away from intellectualising only becomes possible once we start to become embodied. This part is where we begin the ego death and let go of the need for conscious control and understand that we are invited to surrender into connection, that connection cannot be forced.
Trusting that we have already been given everything we need to connect with God / Source / Spirit and taking back the power we gave over others where we externalised our own internal priest / priestess archetypal energy is the final task, and will deliver us into a place of mastery eventually.
These three principles are not linear, they work concurrently with each other, and it is possible to quantum leap through some and get stuck on others. For example, if you are a person who has a lot of sexual abuse or trauma stored in your body and you dissociate quickly during embodiment, you may struggle to move into the ego-death and trust the process and arrive inside of mastery until you have worked hard at healing that trauma. EMDR, Somatic Experiencing Therapy and Gestalt talk therapy are all excellent tools to support you to move through trauma.
Because of the principle of grace, sometimes we are allowed to release and heal from stored trauma while we sleep, and sometimes, we are allowed to have another transmute stored trauma for us and release it on our behalf.
In this discussion on reconstruction, my assumption is that if you are reading this, you are a person who wants to have a spiritual practice / connection to God, but that doing it through your old mechanisms of church / bible study / praise and worship isn’t getting it done for you anymore. Plenty of people deconstruct and then move into other identities, like atheism, or embrace other religious frameworks which feel like a closer match for their truth. There is no ‘one way’ to reconstruct a spiritual practice. But what I can tell you, is if you are a person who feels compelled by the Christological pattern, who believes that Jesus was perhaps, onto something - these principles may help you.
Contrary to what many might think, I have not thrown the baby out with the bath water when it comes to my own faith. I have retained what is useful and precious and have dismissed centuries of cultural overlay, geopolitical narrative, colonialism, misogyny and capitalism. If you are in a ‘throw the baby out with the bath water’ stage, this piece is not going to help you, and you have all my wholehearted support for you to do the journey you need to do. But in order for me to discuss embodiment, I’m going to have to return to Jesus, because he just makes all this make sense to me.
Before Jesus was, the Christ was. The Christ Consciousness is the blueprint for all of creation, and we know from the words to an early Christological hymn that the earliest followers of The Way understood that Jesus was the image of the invisible Godself, the Incarnated one. The Christ and Jesus, could then be seen as two distinct iterations of the same God-energy. (Richard Rohr discusses this at length in his book The Universal Christ). They are one and the same during the incarnation, but before Jesus was born, The Christ existed. As Jesus was born, The Christ experienced embodiment (or incarnation / en-flesh-ment) and then after Jesus was finished needing a body, The Christ returned to purely Spirit form, and was no longer embodied.
What can we learn from Jesus about this?
Well, firstly, God is a massive fan of bodies. I wrote another piece about that a couple years ago, which you can read here if you like. We are spiritual beings having a human experience, and not the other way around. Embodiment was part of the plan, we are here to understand how to harness Divine energy inside human skin and we all have slightly different ways that will work for us. Broadly speaking, these can be understood as archetypal blueprints. (See Caroline Myss’s work in this space for more.) Our human / divine connection point is the body, which can be understood as a crucible where alchemy takes place. Alchemy is the mechanism by which the Kingdom of Love arrives in the moment, here and now around us. Our bodies are the key vehicle for the Kingdom of Love springing up around us, and allowing them to become a portal for this was modelled to us by Mary, the mother of Jesus. To circle back to my initial assertion, we are terrified of allowing this to happen because we worry that it is not safe to do so. We have been sold a lie that the religious template will keep us safe. Problem is, it doesn’t.
The question then, which we all must wrestle with if we want to reconstruct a deeply embodied (and therefore enlivened, real, switched on, magnetic and authentic) spirituality is this one:
”Is it safe for me to be my whole Divine and my whole Human self inside this skin I’m in? Will I be loved, will I be seen and known, will my wounds ever heal? Will I ever begin to feel at home here in my own energy signature?”
Spoiler alert, we learn from the Christological pattern that in fact, it is NOT safe to become embodied. We learn, if we are really going to take the Bible seriously (and not literally) that embodiment of our full Divine power will result in betrayal, exile and crucifixion before it delivers us into the dark night of the soul. Or the three days in the belly of the whale. Or into the tomb. It is not until this death has finished its work in us, that we can understand resurrection power is possible, and that this is the template we are working with if we decide we want to be followers of the Ancient Way. That is our deep fear. We fear we will die.
We will.
Of course.
And we will not have the hope of resurrection.
Because this is how it is supposed to go.
And then one day, just like that, we will emerge fresh and new from the tomb and be ready to be in our bodies in a brand new way.
This, my friend, is what it means to live inside of the same power that raised Christ from the dead.
Our other fear, of course, which is what we were gaslit into thinking by toxic church dogma, is that our bodies are shameful, dirty, a receptacle of unbridled desire, uncontrollable illness, traumatic dysfunction, and other people’s secret perversions, fantasies or hateful projections. We learn to be Absolutely Terrified of being inside our bodies, because quite simply, embodiment feels scary.
I bet that’s how Jesus felt. I bet he wrestled with how to be his whole Divine self (however he understood that to be), whilst being embodied. Incarnated. Enfleshed. I bet it freaked him right out. When I began to work with embodiment, I studied ancient Gnostic texts to understand how the earliest hodge-podge religious communities dedicated to The Way of the Christ had come to understand their own bodies. The Cathars in particular were body-bosses, and my archetypal community has its genesis in their traditions, and so I found it very helpful to work with their writings. They understood the body to be a literal temple, and had rites and sacraments which embraced erotic energy as inherently holy. Because it is. To become embodied is to embrace all of our energetic power housed in the body. The power to heal, regenerate, to speak, move, feel the full spectrum of human emotions, touch, to love and be loved, to create life and birth it, to embrace illness and be taught by it, to understand the finite limitations of embodiment, and finally to move gracefully into death.
The way to move into embodiment is to do it slowly. To take small risks, then retreat back into dissociation and assess for damage. It’s fine to advance and retreat into and out of embodiment, its like a Fibonacci sequence, it unfurls gracefully over time and cannot be hurried. There are a number of helpful truths to meditate on and use as signposts to anchor this process, here are some that I found helpful:
I always travel with my own power, it cannot be separated from me. I am strong and safe in my body and my body belongs to me.
I will honour and listen to my body’s cues and will stop overriding them.
I will listen to how my body invites me into pleasure, and honour her as a sentient Other who has graciously allowed my utterly Divine soul to dwell within her.
Because I am now ready to learn from pleasure, I will be able to release pain held in the body. In the heart, in the joints, in the nervous system, in the physical and subtle bodies. I thank the pain for being a teacher, and bless it and release it.
I will treat my body with reverent honour, and give her rest, food, sleep, movement, pleasure, hydration, fresh-air, relaxation and peace. I will use all 5 of my senses to support and nourish my body.
I will not allow another to transgress into my body space without my permission. I am capable of making good decisions about how to share and steward my body energy intelligently and with appropriate honour.
I have no more fear of death or pain or separation because I am ready to trust that the same power that raised Christ from the dead now inhabits my skin, and I trust all of its cycles and where the energy will take me. I can trust the rhythm and cadence of my own life, because I am safe inside that power.
When we begin embodiment, it is normal for us to experience deep disgust, fear, rage, hatred and a huge amount of discomfort. This is natural, and is part of the process of letting go of capitalist theologies which brainwashed us into believing our bodies did not belong to ourselves. I call this ‘energetic whiplash’. The punishing and toxic belief that is being challenged is that our bodies belonged to our parents / spouse / church / community and were there to be used and abused as desecrated altars on which the Kingdom of Empire was built. Making room to shift these really painful energies through your body (where they have been housed as cellular memory) is a key part of the work of this stage. I’m not going to sugar-coat it, this part is difficult. It involves purging, on purpose, and with deliberate care. Here is how I do it, how it was taught to me by the Spirit.
I sit cross legged on the floor, and do a short 5 minute meditation to fully arrive inside my body if I’ve been a bit floaty or ungrounded. (This used to happen a lot early on for me). Then I place one hand on my belly, breathing into it to make it soft. Then I place another on my heart. Breathe into it, make it soft.
With intention, I surround myself with the light of the Spirit, and enclose the space I’m in spiritually to create a powerful container for healing and release. Once I am content that the space is sealed, I then deliberately turn my compassionate gaze to the body, and ask her where the discomfort is, where the pain sits. As it begins to make it self known, I visualise it like a wave, beginning to move up and out of me. I consciously release it out of my energy field, and work with the cycles of waves until it is over. Usually this purging / releasing happens through deep and painful sobbing, be warned. Yelling, primal screaming, and any other kind of vocalising supports the movement of stuck rage and pain out of the body. Nausea or even vomiting can happen. Some people find this terrifying to do alone, so they prefer to do it in an accompanied manner. I prefer to do it alone. It is not important for your brain to understand this process, it is animalistic and primal and not to be analysed or understood. When it is over, I rest, hydrate, sit with Spirit and usually say “that’s enough for now thanks very much.”
This is spiritual alchemy, transmutation. This is how we shift through deep layers of ancestral and our own trauma and pain, and allow it to be seen and witnessed and then shifted and processed. I try and plan these times for when I don’t have any plans for the next 24 hours, because sleep and rest is essential after this kind of work to support integration of the healing. It is also possible to practice this kind of alchemy and transmutation through ecstatic dance, through meditation, through harnessing erotic energy with a trusted other and healing through sexual intimacy, or through other people doing energy work on us where they actually transmute and heal it for us. The key is, it has to be powerful, it has to be connected to Divine energy, and it has to be very, very safe and contained because it is sacred work.
In my next piece, I will address letting go of the addiction to intellectualising and moving into surrender.
Until then, go very gently with yourself and that beautiful body you’ve been gifted with.