Finding our way home to our Embodied Ground

Grounded in the body, guided by inner wisdom and returning to the steadiness within. Quality #4 in The True Self Series.

What is your relationship like with your body?

Do you give it attention? Listen to its signals?

Can you feel your body, or do you often find yourself distracting or disconnecting from it?

Why focus on the body at all?

There is a certain kind of strength we long for, an experience of stability, presence and unwavering trust in life and existence itself, a sense of safety in fact, that can only be found with deep connection to the body. The inner ground that holds us steady in the midst of life’s inevitable storms.

But despite the fact that we are all born with somatic intelligence, and the innate ability to feel, sense, respond and self organise toward wellbeing, so many of us have lost this ability.

Early Life and wounding

For many of us, in early life, the body, once a safe haven for feelings, emotions, sensations etc. became a place of vigilance, tension or numbness.

In an environment that was traumatic, unpredictable, neglectful, unsafe or demanding, the messages the body would give us, in the form of emotion, intuition or sensation, were too overwhelming or dangerous to feel. They would threaten our attachment and security.

And so to survive we adapted by:

• Shutting down our emotional life

• Dissociating, numbing or leaving the body.

• Living from the neck up - lost in our thoughts, scanning, analysing, overthinking

• Ignoring cues like hunger, pain, thirst or fatigue

• Performing the appearance of safety rather than feeling it

• Suppressing sensation to avoid overwhelm and vulnerability

These adaptations were brilliant survival strategies.

They protected us when we had no choice… but over time, we lost a sense of being at home with ourselves, instead feeling disconnected from the body, and the living presence of who we truly are.

Coming home to Embodied Ground requires that we gently reawaken the capacity to feel all that we have been suppressing, and reconnect with qualities that were lost or abandoned in that process.

Steps to reawakening feeling

How Trauma Lives in the Body

Trauma, whether from single events or chronic early environments, is not just a psychological imprint; it becomes stored in the body as survival stress. Manifesting as patterns of contracted energy, chronic tension, illness, or what some traditions call samskaras, the latent imprints of the past.

Over time, to avoid the pain and vulnerability held in these unresolved patterns, we begin to orient ourselves around them.

Our beliefs, perceptions, emotional responses, even aspects of our personality and identity, unconsciously organise around these somatic imprints, all in an effort to protect us from feeling what was once too overwhelming to bear.

Feeling can come to represent danger, because stored survival stress lies just beneath the surface of sensation. As a result, we orient away from sensing, prioritising numbing, disconnecting, avoiding and retreating into the mind, in an attempt to not feel what is stored in the body.

This disconnection, while once protective, becomes a barrier to embodiment, presence and connection with the True Self.

Healing Begins with Safety

Healing requires restoring safety first, so that the body can slowly, safely begin to unwind these stored patterns and return to its natural flow of energy and aliveness.

Safety is the soil in which reconnection can grow.

This is nervous system work. Without a regulated nervous system, we don’t feel safe. And if we don’t feel safe, we will always protect ourselves from feeling.

When the nervous system feels stable and supported, the capacity to sense, feel, and be present begins to reawaken naturally.

Without a foundation of safety, attempts to reconnect can feel overwhelming, or even re-traumatising.

All pathways back to the body have to be built upon the pillars of safety and gentle regulation.

Pathways to reawakening: The science of reconnection.

How we sense our body

Our capacity to feel, to sense the internal state of our body, our perception of what is happening inside us, happens through a function called interoception.

Interoceptors are sensory receptors distributed throughout the body in the fascia, internal organs, skin and muscles, blood vessels, lymphatic system, endocrine glands, central nervous system, hypothalamus and the eyes and ears.

Think of how you feel temperature, or the quiet awareness that tells you when you’re thirsty, hungry or need to go to the bathroom, when you feel frightened.. like the clenching in your gut before an important conversation. These are all a function of interoception.

In the context of coming home to Embodied Ground, and ultimately your True Self, interoception is absolutely central. Without it we can’t really feel ourselves.

It is the very mechanism that facilitates healing from the inside out, versus just cognitively thinking about healing.

How does interoception work?

When interoceptors detect changes in the body's internal environment, they send signals to the a part of the brain called the insula, which processes the information to help the body interpret how it is feeling physically.

The insula plays a huge role in self awareness and its function is paramount to our ability to feel a state of presence.

It is responsible for how we detect physical sensations, and how we interpret them emotionally, informing our perception of ourselves and the world.

For example, a feeling of tightness in the chest may be linked to anxiety, while sensations of warmth might signal comfort or relaxation.

The problem is that interoceptive capacity can become impaired.

What disrupts interoception?

When we experience chronic stress or trauma, as a means to protect from overwhelming feelings or physical sensations, the insula’s ability to process and connect to bodily sensations can become compromised.

It can become overactive, signalling heightened bodily sensations or discomfort leading to hypersensitivity where subtle changes in the body can be perceived as threats,

Or it can function in a way that blocks or dampens interoceptive signals, leading to emotional numbing or a feeling of detachment/disconnection from the body.

When it comes to our connection with the quality of Embodied Ground, we need to optimise the functioning of the insula and interoception.

How to activate the insula and interoception

Interoception is activated when we are feeling safe and regulated.

This is when the insula’s ability to process and integrate bodily sensations is optimised.

Interoception is what helps people reclaim their ‘sense’ of self and restore connection between mind and body.

Practices like embodied mindfulness, slow mindful movement, breathing, sensation tracking and all that happens in somatic therapy are all methods that help activate the insula, and re-establish interoceptive awareness.

By guiding the person to begin to notice sensation (warmth, tingling, tightness etc.), connect it with emotion (fear, anxiety, anger etc.) and physical states, we reawaken the insula’s capacity to process this information, helping foster embodied awareness, a sense of safety within the body and a deeper connection to both the present moment and our emotional experience.

This is how we slowly develop a more balanced and harmonious relationship with the body.

In essence, the insula is the neural gateway to feeling like we inhabit our body. Reawakening this process is the most transformative piece on the pathway of coming home to your True Self.

And… it is not all about science…

Beyond the science, certain inner qualities also nourish our return to Embodied Ground

8 core qualities that shape Embodied Ground

To fully awaken Embodied Ground we need a foundation of trust, self awareness, curiosity, peace, boundaries and containment, courage, will and attunement. These are all qualities that we need to cultivate within ourselves to find our way home.

• Trust invites us to soften into life itself. Trusting that it is safe to feel and inhabit our body, direct experience and our life, without guarding or hesitation.

• Self-awareness deepens our inner connection, enabling us to know ourselves intimately, rather than living at a distance from our truth.

• Curiosity allows us to explore, examine and meet ourselves with the openness, receptivity and jon-judgement necessary that allows truth to emerge.

• Peace invites us to bring regulation to our nervous system. Creating inner quiet and resilience in our physiology.

• Boundaries and containment provide a clear sense of where we end and the world begins, allowing us to feel ourselves fully without leaking into, or being overwhelmed by our surroundings.

• Courage empowers us to inhabit our body fully and to take up space without apology.

• Will give us the steadfast commitment to stay with ourselves, work through our somatic imprints, survival stress, trauma etc. anchored through discomfort or fear, aligned with what is real within.

• Attunement offers a sensitive, responsive listening to our internal landscape, fostering deeper relationship with ourselves.

Together with safety and the science of interoception, these qualities create the ground for the natural state of presence, an awake ‘felt sense’ of being, that arises when we land in Embodied Ground, inhabiting the body fully, restoring our embodied sovereignty.

It is said that presence, is in fact, the absence of trauma.

Not something we strive to create or achieve, but rather, the true nature that exists beneath the conditioning that clouded it.

Without presence, without embodiment, we become untethered, caught in the loops of mental identification or emotional reactivity.

But when Embodied Ground is alive in us, presence becomes our home, effortless, awake, and deeply real.

This is my body. My body belongs to me. I belong to the myself and the world.

Why this matters

In many traditions there is a temptation to bypass the body, to leave it behind in search of transcendence, enlightenment or some idea of freedom. But what is actually required of us, is to ground our consciousness within it.

The body in not an obstacle. It is the pathway to presence.

When we inhabit ourselves fully,

• We live in direct contact with ourselves

• We feel the stillness within

• We access aliveness without overwhelm

• We live in direct relationship with the world around us

• We are connected to our inner knowing and guidance

• We reconnect to safety, belonging and love from the inside out

• We stop trying to fix ourselves and instead trust the unfolding intelligence within

• We allow healing to unfold organically, moment by moment

• We feel as though we are already home, already held, already whole.
  

If you have spent years looking for safety, peace, belonging or presence outside of yourself, this is your invitation to come home.

• Through slowing down and getting to know your unique nervous system.

• Through attuning to your inner world and learning to trust your body and all that it is asking of you, to trust life and the call you have to go deeper.

• Through growing the courage to feel, and applying the will to know yourself deeply, to meet yourself in places that are scary, and stay with your direct experience, even when it is hard.

• To listen to the inner voice that say yes or no, and honour your boundaries and truth.

• And to return to the body.
  

Home, is a felt sense.

It is nothing that is outside of you, but rather, how you feel in your own skin.

Home is already here, you just need to stay with yourself for long enough to feel it.

Warmly,
Maraya

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Some questions for reflection;

• What does ‘embodied ground’ mean to me today? How does it feel in my body?

• What does safety feel like in my body? Do I have a sense of safety and if so, how do I know when it’s present?

• In what ways have I learned to leave myself?
  

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