Embodiment is a buzzword today… no doubt about it. But like any buzzword, at a certain point, it is used so often, so routinely, that no one stops to ask what it really means.
I understand embodiment in a very deep way because I began my life deeply disembodied, not really ‘here’, and have spent my life trying to change this.
And so I can tell you that being embodied is not the equivalent of doing grounding exercises, though they certainly might help a person feel more embodied.
It is about a willingness, a profound willingness, to allow attention or awareness to rest in the tissue of the body.
Awareness rested in tissue creating the perception that these arms are mine, and these legs are mine. Arms and legs and everything else connected, and together it is me.
And it is safe for me to be.
This sense of integration and this sense of safety have not been my experience in this lifetime, though I truly wish they had been.
Yet I am not alone, the person who is not embodied is not a rarity. Quite the opposite, it is becoming more and more common that children entering this world are not fully embodied, that their attention is floating around, but not in, the body.
How does this happen?
and
How can we change it?
These are the questions I will consider in this article.
1977 — “Permanently and totally disabled” at 26
When I was labeled permanently and totally disabled as a result of extreme chemical sensitivity, the situation was dire.
I weighed less than 32 kgs (70 lbs) and I could not have anything of modern-day life (plastic, synthetics, pens even paper) near me without becoming ill. I lived in a ‘bubble’ — a room with nothing in it except two chairs and a lamp. My immune system had come to recognize virtually everything in the modern world as a threat. I guess you could say that, whether I knew it consciously or not, I perceived the world as profoundly unsafe, and had no choice but to pull away from it.
One day I asked my double board-certified doctor.
“What caused this, Paula?” as I pointed to my outrageously sensitive body.
She replied with one word,
“Everything!”
With her answer, she simply threw out the presumption of the material/medical world — that a condition has one cause: a virus, a bacteria, a cancer cell, etc.
She adopted the energetic model of life: that everything is energy, everything is flow, and therefore EVERYTHING is connected.
So when we pose the question -“ What causes a child to enter the world with her attention floating above her body, and so not able to feel herself present in her body?”, I know it is important not to look for one specific material cause.
There could be countless factors, including, the mother’s diet, electromagnetic exposures, a divorce, and traumatic world events that would explain why a child in utero did not feel safe to allow her attention to rest in her body.
At the same time, the professional literature that addresses the disembodied child always points to one causal factor as being of great — very great — significance:
and that is the quality of the connection between the mother and her child in utero.
In short, we are talking about love.
Now, this is where things get tricky, and I know this from having worked with babies in utero for over thirty years. In this article, I will focus on my own story first.
1950 — My life in utero
It was March 1950 when I was conceived. My mother had waited four years for me and was desperate to give birth to a healthy child. Her doctor advised bedrest for most of the pregnancy, and, just as importantly, recommended she smoke a lot to stay calm. It was easy for my mother to follow this last bit of advice. She loved to smoke!
And for anyone who is wondering how is it possible that a doctor would recommend smoking to a pregnant woman, take a look at these YouTube ads from the 1950s.
My mother’s doctor also recommended at least ‘two stiff drinks’ a night. So mother was told to rest/stay still to avoid losing me and to smoke and drink freely so that she could stay relaxed.
How could she possibly move beyond her fear and find a heartfelt connection to me?
She didn’t.
Did she want to? YES!
Could she? NO!
And what happened to me?
I Froze.
And what happened to the love she so much wanted to give me?
It froze.
And, in somatic (body-oriented) therapy, frozen love is understood to be hate.
The Schizoid/ Leaving Patterns, The Freeze, and The Stone
First mentioned in the ’30s by Wilhelm Reich, a student of Sigmund Feud, the Schizoid (Schizoid meaning Latin for ‘split’) pattern describes the child who, for whatever reason, experienced a non-loving response from the mother while in utero.
In an attempt, to hold everything together (meaning, not die or go crazy), the child retreats from bodily life and essentially splits the body from the brain. And this is seen in the felt sense of little energy in the limbs of the body, and clearly seen in the eyes that seem to simultaneously convey a sense of great shock and a sense of great aloneness/emptiness.
Maryanne’s eyes — 1957 (age 7)
Cover the smile and you will see the shock, particularly in the right eye, and you will see the vacancy in the left.
And below you will see the compression between the head and neck. The Frozen person tries to restrict energy flowing from the body into the head (brain) so that she does not have to cognize/recognize that her body is here.
Maryanne’s whole body photo — 1957 (age 7)
The Leaving Pattern
More recently, Steven Kessler, in his book, The Five Personality Patterns, writes of The Leaving Pattern. This is the same pattern as the Schizoid Pattern, but with a more accessible name.
Kessler refers to ‘The Rejected Child’, ‘The Hated Child’, and explains that the response of the rejected/hated child is to vacate the body. This gesture of leaving creates a sense of ‘Lights On, No one Home’, a phrase that many ‘Leavers’ identify with easily. In other words, the Leaver acts as if she is here, but she just does not feel here.
Cory Sea, a somatic psychologist, has written extensively about the actual physical changes that occur in those who leave their bodies. Some of these changes include:
a brick-like sensation in the occiput (base of the skull) thus perpetuating the split between body and brain
low energy (coldness) in the hands and feet
a very tight diaphragm
a sense of numbness in the spine
Sea adds another term to the list of titles, referring to this pattern as ‘The Freeze’, and the individual, as the ‘frozen person’.
And the Stone?
One day a client of mine, so keen to have a baby, so overjoyed to have finally conceived, wrote me in distress when she was several months pregnant, saying, “I feel no connection to this child. I feel like I am carrying a stone.”
Why, when she wanted this child so very much, could she not feel anything for him?
The answer was not hard to find.
When my client was in utero, she did not feel a connection with her own mother. She even remembers feeling so lost and alone. And why could her own mother, who, like my client, was so excited to be pregnant, did not open her heart to the child she wanted? Because, if she did open her heart, and allow more energy to flow through her body, her body would pull back first, as a response to remembering what it is like for her to be in the womb. The freeze needs to be felt first before it can be released.
And here, so clearly — seeming, at times, to be almost inevitable — is intergenerational trauma. The grandmother could not connect with her daughter, and the daughter could not feel a connection with her son.
It did not take long to help my client feel the freezing that was unintentionally happening in her body, and, in feeling it, to release it. And as the frozen fear left her body, a rush of love came in its place.
The love that had always been there, but could not move through her because as it did, it would trigger the memory of her own pre-birth experience.
And a link in the chain of intergenerational trauma was broken right before our eyes!
At the same time, it was so obvious to us both that tissue stores trauma, and that trauma can pass from generation to generation.
Yet, we must ask:
How do we help someone who has already vacated her body, whose mother did not have the opportunity to release her fear of extending love to her unborn child?
This is the answer I received when I asked this question many years ago.
“You’re looking at two years, once a week, minimum…”
I heard the somatic therapist’s words, but I had no idea why whatever was wrong with me would take 104 hours, minimum, to fix?
Now, years later, I know why.
When a child leaves her body before she is born, there remains a profound and deep hole.
Where there should be a sense of aliveness in the tissue, there is some degree of deadness. Where there should be a sense of connection with one’s own body, and with others, there is emptiness.
All of us who know that we have left our bodies, to one degree or another, can attest to a profound aloneness, notwithstanding how many friends we may have.
But the deadness, the emptiness, the aloneness can all remain imperceptible to the untrained eye. The person who has disconnected long ago generally looks quite ‘normal’ acts the same, too. In fact, those who fall into this pattern are often bright, animated, and engaging.
We do not look like we are ‘out of it’.
But we are.
And, in the quiet moments, there is great sorrow, a hole that seems impossible to fill.
But it can fill.
I know.
It may take more than 104 hours, it may take less, but the hole does get filled. Gently, awareness is coaxed back down to the tissue, and slowly it is revealed that the world of now is not the same as the world before birth.
The individual has resources — connection to the ground, to one’s core, a capacity to set boundaries, and, most of all, the courage to receive simple energetic connection, at the least, and, love, at the most from others… from animals, humans, nature and the Divine, Itself.
The two-year message I was given is not appropriate anymore. There are so many tools, not available in the ’70s, that effectively help anyone who wants to come home to her body.
And so we are grateful for the ‘buzz’ around embodiment because this buzz has produced many powerful tools and practitioners who know how to use them.
But what about all those years of disconnection?
Are they wasted? Should they be viewed with deep regret? Or what happens to someone who never heals this wound?
I have had to answer this question. I have had to consider whether ‘not being fully here’ has meant my life was somehow wasted.
Well, to me, being frozen, to whatever degree, does not and cannot ever, make a dent in the power of love.
In other words, the intention to give and receive love is more powerful than the capacity of attention to rest fully in the tissue during the gestures of giving and of receiving.
The intention has to be more powerful. Otherwise, we are saying the state of the body — the mere, mortal body — is more significant than the power of love, a force that can never be destroyed and is eternally powerful.
I wish I had been ‘all here’ in this lifetime.
But, at the same time, I have loved.
And this is true of all of my clients. And with this awareness, we can find peace. And as the love we give and receive touches the frozen tissue of our bodies, the fear — the great fear that we have known from the very beginning of life — starts to dissolve. And, as it does, the tissue relaxes, and attention finds its way into it.
We heal. We are here, more and more.
And we understand how important it is to guarantee this love — and so this embodiment — to every single child who comes into the world.
Help us help children come embodied into this world! Spread the word!
Maryanne Sea, MSW, developed her intuition when she was challenged by Environmental Illness, and needed to live away from the world for years at a time. As she recovered, she began to call upon her intuition to help others. For thirty years, she has worked with babies before birth to help each child come into the world loved and embodied. She is the author of Love is the Healer, the story of her recovery from Environmental Illness, and her new book, “Grab that Sperm”: The Diary of a Birth Intuitive will be available later in 2022.
If you are interested in reading Maryanne's whole story, you can order the above book on amazon and for readers in the US also here: bookbaby.com.