“Embodiment: Gateway from the Head to the Heart”
An exploration of embodiment as the foundation of intuition, mediumship and sacred movement
by Debra Skelton
Teacher, Sacred Movement for the Medium, Inner Quest Centre
Because our physicality houses the feeling heart, it is deeply linked to our intuitive ability. Embodiment simply means being in your body and viscerally paying attention to what it is telling you.
Feeling is experienced in the body. For instance, when you imagine your favourite meal, you may start to salivate, or when nervous, your heart rate may increase. And when you lose somebody close to you, where do you feel it? In the brain? No. In the body. It is the flesh that feels it.
Our native language is the body. When someone is deprived of the freedom of physical expression for whatever reason – religious suppression, illness, societal constriction – they eventually lose the fluency of their native tongue. Most of us have suffered some degree of deprivation in this way even to the point that, for some, feeling anything at all has become a scary experience. We’ve become dissociated from the body. We no longer trust its intelligence.
Yet, as mediums, how can we hope to fully connect with another being, living or dead, if we don’t recognize those feelings in ourselves or, at the very least, have some sensate empathy with them? For the medium, embodiment of one’s own being is the first step and the hardest to take; embodiment of another’s, the next. One cannot bypass the first. To be a medium is to be fearless.
Needless to say, I am not speaking of what I call “method mediumship”(1) wherein the practitioner allows themselves to be overcome by the emotions of the communicator; for then we forego the vital mediumistic faculty of observation, the one who watches.
What I’m interested in exploring is not what the student does, how inventive they are, or how beautiful it looks, but rather the harmonious blending between thought, feeling and spiritual impulse embodied physically in all that they do. This is quite a different thing than imposing a discipline on yourself. Many of you have studied things like dance, track and field, body-building, martial arts and so on, wherein the goal is the performative result – how much power can you generate, how fast can you run, how high can you jump. It’s generally all about measuring quantity.
In my capacity as teacher of sacred movement for the medium at the Inner Quest Centre, I try to set the scene for the discovery of the somatic or internal experience within the movement rather than the performative result. The aim is to bring the mind, heart, and soul imagination into physical play as equal partners so that the whole being becomes a vehicle of healing and mediumship; and equally importantly, to encourage an increase in the proportion of awakened, embodied moments in our everyday lives as intuitives and mediums.
“Embodiment can be seen as an ability to participate in knowing oneself as well as others. In this sense, enlightenment and embodiment and are on equal ground, and can only proceed as equals.”(2)
The sacredness of this work lies in our connectedness to the Spirit, manifested as intuition, and embodied in our visceral being. When we embody, we understand more deeply; when we understand more deeply, then we awaken to the nature of Self and may be fully responsive to the subtle desires of the voiceless.