Well, here we are again – deepening our exploration of embodiment.  I hope you’re enjoying the journey and that you are discovering things about yourself that enhance your capacity to live with ever-deepening awareness of how you move through your world.

For this week’s experiment, we’re going to continue our exploration of the process of embodiment.  By now, I hope you’ve had a chance to discover what quality you most want to bring into your life – one that you feel will enhance your expression of being the person you want to be.

What I invite you to add in this week is to become focused not only on the lived experience of the quality you seek to embody, but also to pay particular attention to the thoughts, states of mind, and emotional responses related to that quality.  For example, if you chose kindness as what you want to embody, notice the thoughts you may have that convey the essence of kindness.  If you don’t have spontaneous thoughts that embody kindness, allow yourself to spend some time generating statements that encompass the quality of kindness you seek to express in your everyday way of being.  Then, practice saying them to yourself as you go through your day.  The process may feel a bit mechanical, but generating new neural networks takes repetition.  It’s the “fake it ‘till you make it” idea – by repeating particular kinds of thoughts to yourself, you begin to actually take them in and make them your own.

An additional piece to the experiment this week is to become aware of what actions would accompany the quality you seek to embody.  For example, if you’ve chosen to become more centered and to embody a kind of grounded presence, you might give yourself a practice of stopping several times a day and doing a grounding exercise.  Or, if you’ve chosen to embody friendliness, notice what actions would bring that quality into your world.  You might generate a list of things you’d like to do and then notice your response as you follow through on the items on this list..

Again, all of this may feel mechanical to you and that’s not unusual when we’re building a skill, or generating a new way of being.  The important thing is to have ways you can play with and practice that bring the quality alive in you.  Over time, those places where we focus our attention and from which we act on a regular basis become our embodiments, whether we intend them to or not.  That’s why these experiments ask you to choose qualities that add constructively to your life, as we all have left-over, old stuff we embody that can work against a satisfying quality of life.

As with all the experiments, allow yourself to move through this one with curiosity as your constant companion.  The goal here is to give yourself an opportunity to build in qualities of being you want to express in your life, and to let go of those that you’ve outgrown or that don’t work for you anymore.