The Body Domain
The body is the foundation of our awakening because it is the one place where all aspects of our being converge. It is not merely a vessel we use to carry our awareness through life, it is the ground through which awareness expresses, feels, and comes alive. So many spiritual traditions have emphasized transcendence, often encouraging disconnection from the body in the pursuit of higher states. But true awakening is not about leaving the body; it’s about fully inhabiting it. Every emotion, every impulse, every contraction and release lives in the body. When we drop into our felt sense, we contact the raw, unfiltered truth of our experience, our subjectivity. The body doesn’t lie. It reveals what we’ve avoided, what we’ve suppressed, and what longs to be seen and integrated. In this way, embodiment is not just supportive of awakening—it’s essential to it.
To become enlightened, we must come home to the body in a radical way. This means no longer treating the body as separate from spirit, but realizing that the body is spirit made flesh. Inhabiting the body totally allows us to ground non-dual realization into form, so that our awakening is not a fleeting experience or a transcendent escape, but a lived, stable reality. It’s in the body that we encounter our animal instincts, our vulnerabilities, and our strength. It’s where trauma lives, and where healing happens. Without embodiment, awakening can remain disembodied, abstract, or even dissociative. But when we fully return to the body, through breath, movement, sensation, presence, we allow enlightenment to descend into every cell of our being. We become whole, and our realization becomes something we live, moment by moment, in relationship with the world.