I’ve just returned from the annual Psychotherapy Networker Conference – a gathering of 3600 therapists from around the United States, as well as other countries.  It’s one of those yearly rituals that brings friends together, allows us to learn from one another’s wisdom, and offers time for renewal and play along the way.

As happens each year, I was moved by the depth of skill and embodied presence of so many of the presenters.  During a particularly engaging and moving day with one person, I found myself contemplating the power of embodiment.  As this person guided an audience of several hundred people through singing, a community-action exercise, a guided meditation experience to touch the deep self, I marveled at how quickly the audience responded to her requests for us to join in what she wanted us to experience. 

All of this brought me back to my awareness of the power of embodiment:  when we express in the world what we live in ourselves, the world responds.  This presenter was able to engage everyone because she lives the qualities she asked us to share with her. 

As a psychotherapist who has been trained in a variety of approaches over the years, I have noticed that clients respond to those of us who live and breathe what we ask of our clients.  When I first learned to do hypnosis over 20 years ago, I discovered very quickly that if I had doubts about what I was doing, my clients would come up out of trance and be unable to respond to what I invited them to experience.  As my confidence grew and hypnosis became part of my skin and bones – as natural as breathing, I noticed that clients increasingly responded positively to the process.  The more I embodied it as part of my deep being, the more powerful the impact it had on my clients’ experience.  As I’ve learned other approaches, I’ve discovered the same thing – once they are in my bones, once I really live them, people respond to the invitation to engage in these healing processes with relative ease.

This all got me to thinking about how we shape the quality of our lives, in part, by the beliefs, styles of being, and energy we embody.  This week’s experiment invites you to pay attention to the qualities you embody and how they impact your world.  For example, if you embody an attitude of kindness, what actions follow from this internal stance and what do you receive from the world in response?  If you embody a sense of competitiveness, how does this flow out into your world and what does it bring back to you?  We can embody positive or negative qualities, energies, and intentions, so please allow yourself to be curious on all sides of the equation.  What qualities and expectations do you embody that serve your life constructively and what ones do you embody that detract from the quality of life you seek to have?

Once we become conscious of the energies and qualities we project into the world, we open up the possibility of choice – of deciding consciously what we want to empower and enhance and what we want to lessen and decrease.  This week’s experiment is an invitation to become more conscious in this way, so that you can actively engage the process of choice in terms of who and how you want to be in the world – what you want to emphasize and what you want to play down.

As with all these experiments, please leave judgment behind and bring along curiosity as your constant companion.  The goal here is to become more conscious of what nonverbal communications you send into the world and how what you embody impacts the quality of how the world responds to you.