Embodiment is a natural, living process of perceiving and responding to our selves and our worlds. All the other creatures on the planet live this way continuously. Thanks to our beautifully creative human prefrontal cortices, we are able to imagine that which does not exist. This is so helpful in science, art, and technology. However, the downside is that we have tremendous expectations, which engenders both hope and fear, biases about what should be happening. When reality does not agree with us, we have the ability to pretend to ourselves, to create a virtual reality. In order to do this, we repress, suppress, and interrupt natural biological processes and do so to the extent that we interfere with our health and well-being on all levels—physical, psychological, interpersonal, and social. We are able to wreak havoc on our lives, our communities, and our planet. What’s a human to do?

By practicing listening to our sensations and allowing sensational awareness to re-start any biological processes that have been inhibited to an unhealthy degree, we can begin to reclaim our innate capacity for health and well-being, again on all levels.

In this lecture, Susan will begin with the Buddha’s first foundation of mindfulness: mindfulness of body. We will continue with neuroscientific evidence that increased awareness of sensation decreases thinking. We will briefly engage with Susan’s Embodiment Practice—letting go of cortical control of the breath, feeling sensation, and giving sensations permission to move and breathe and sound in their own way. Finally we will look out how we as contemporary humans can reawaken our own embodiment and integrate that in modern human life. Susan aloso will lead an Interactive Workshop on Oct. 27  and an iPause Guided Practice on Nov. 2.

Susan Aposhyan, MA, LPC, has spent 45 years in private practice as a psychotherapist and has trained helping professionals internationally in her work, Body-Mind Psychotherapy. She is the author of three books:  Natural Intelligence: Body-Mind Integration and Human Development (1999), Body-Mind Psychotherapy (Norton, 2004), and Heart Open, Body Awake: Four Steps to Embodied Spirituality (2021). She is teaching her unique integration of psychological wellness, embodiment, and embodied meditation primarily online in Embodiment Gatherings. Currently the Body-Mind Psychotherapy curriculum is available through recordings online through her website.