The short answer is potential (or spirit as I call it) in form.
Musing on my own Embodiment high on Hallet Peak, RMNP, CO
We humans have a body but also ARE a body. A body of work, a body of knowledge and emotions and understanding and experience. A body of love and compassion. It’s this expanded body that is often seen as our greatest asset and certainly the greatest value in our lives subjectively. The Embodiment Intensive is the program I have created to nurture and develop my own embodiment.
The physical body is important and directly relates to our quality of life, personal power and sovereignty. Many people consider the body a necessary vehicle for their brains. A healthy, well understood and cared for physical body is then an easy and effective vehicle to haul that 8 pound mass of gray matter around so it can order coffee and read email.
While that is true, a deeply presenced, cultivated and intelligent body can also do and be wondrous things. Like Phillipe Petit who spent a glorious, clandestine and ecstatic 45 minutes on a high wire between the World Trade Center towers before getting shut down by the police. Or George Lowe and Chris Jones on the harrowing first ascent of the North Face of North Twin in the Canadian Rockies (epic, look it up). Or beings like Neem Karoli Baba whose mere presence in in the room, on Earth fundamentally changes things. Changes people. Still.
This is embodiment. It’s an evolutionary process and in all the millennia of human experience we have never found the limit. Embodiment relates to the power of our muscles and our spiritual presence as well as our immune systems, nervous systems and capacity to love. It also relates to our job skills, finances, family and social relationships. Most importantly though, it is an expression of our relationship with ourselves. It can look like an Olympic athlete or a wheelchair bound physicist. The important thing is that the fundamental relationship with self and the alignment of all aspects of life radiating out like golden rays of sunlight illuminating everything we touch.
Anyone with a leadership role in the world, in particular transformational leaders - people that dedicate themselves to the support of the evolutionary process - have fundamental requirements of self care and personal development. In the Embodiment intensive we explore this frontier of our relationships with ourselves and the self care that comes of it, in a small group with the intent to grow not only ourselves but also to contribute this growth to the collective for the greater good.
It takes a village as the saying goes, the support and witnessing and inspiration of the group is pivotal for a healthy and deeply rewarding experience. We humans can’t typically see ourselves, rather we see the from created in space through the reflection of others. In the Embodiment Intensive groups the explicit support and witnessing helps us see our greatness and our humanity so we can as well as outgrow ourselves grow into our Selves. It turns out we all have dark places and bright places and ridiculously transparent ways of hiding from ourselves and the world. Also, somehow in all of this growth it becomes fun and funny and irreverent and joyful as well. The community grows and we always look forward to it in spite of (and also because of) the sense of impending change it brings.
Everything has a body, IS a body. The Embodiment Intensive is the embodiment of Evolution. I can speak from years of personal experience that contact with this program in any way has a profound catalytic effect on my own growth and well being. It is a wild, wonderful alchemical conflagration of evolutionary energy. In this context I find the most important thing to keep in mind is to be gentle with the process. The results are disproportionate to the changes. The wave of energy generated by the collective (not just the particular group, but the entirety of the collective experience) is profound. There is also a direct relationship between the energy or contact with this body of evolution and our own experience of it as a catalyst. We get out of it what we put into it. Be careful what you wish for. You’ll get it, be certain it’s what you want.
Sometimes I give this process vast amounts of room in my life to unfold into. I clear my calendar and shelve all my projects so I can simply be in the mystery unfolding. Other times I use it as an evolutionary springboard and apply it to the development of a particular aspect of my Embodiment. It’s a balance of the masculine and feminine or Design and Divine as I call it. You choose what is most helpful to you each time. Last session I used the EI to facilitate the complete upgrade of my financial system. It was (and continues to be) a profoundly transformational experience.
So yes, the Embodiment Intensive is a dietary cleanse. Or rather, has a cleanse as a fundamental component. But clearly this is more, much more available. For me it’s always going deeper and broader and bringing more and more inward so it may be shared outward.
This program is the cornerstone of my own personal evolutionary practice and I take the ride Spring and Fall every year. It maintains and improves my health, skills, capacities and relationships in all ways, all aspects and all levels of experience. This is my commitment to myself and to the collective. This is how I serve and offer leadership.