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During my daily meditation sessions, I’ve been sitting with my awareness fully immersed in the physical sensations throughout my body, bringing as much presence as I can into the body itself. Whenever my attention wanders, I bring it back to what I’m feeling in my body.

I’m finding this helpful on multiple levels. It helps me move through the discomforts held in my body while engaging the body-mind’s innate healing intelligence and restoring balance and equilibrium. As I stay with these discomforts and other bodily sensations, I sometimes sense a comforting presence arising from within. When that happens, I feel more alive, more integrated, and connected to not only my body, but something far greater than myself.

While sitting in meditation, I’ve been gaining insights, accessing memories, and connecting the dots at a deeper level. Impressions from years ago resurface — times when I struggled with attachment issues, and patterns of abandonment. Alongside these come recollections of many individuals I’ve worked with who have struggled with similar themes.

Disconnection Exists on a Spectrum

Many people aren’t even familiar with the term dissociation. And among those who are, most think it only refers to more obvious experiences like depersonalization, derealization, out-of-body states during accidents or medical trauma, or the kind of dissociation associated with severe abuse and other childhood trauma. If they’re not feeling unreal, detached from their identity, or watching themselves from the outside, they assume they’re fully present and connected.

But disconnection exists on a broad spectrum. Many people go through life far more disconnected from their bodies and emotions than they realize. Because it’s so common, they assume it’s normal.

A person can be high functioning, responsible, and outwardly successful, and still be largely living up in their head. They think, analyze, plan, and worry, but rarely pause to feel what’s happening inside their body. They may struggle to name their emotions, sense their needs, or recognize their limits. They stay busy, distracted, and externally focused. Over time, this becomes their baseline.

This isn’t a character flaw. It’s often an adaptation.

Living in Our Heads

Many of us learned early in life that it wasn’t safe, welcomed, or practical to feel everything we were experiencing. Emotions were dismissed, ignored, or overwhelming. So we adapted. We learned to override what we felt and rely more on thinking, doing, and pushing through.

You could think of our emotional and cognitive capacities as bandwidths of awareness. When certain emotions or realities feel overwhelming, we narrow those bandwidths. Parts of our experience get walled off. Those parts don’t disappear — they simply go out of awareness.

The result is a kind of internal fragmentation. Not necessarily severe psychopathology, such as Dissociative Identity Disorder, but a fragmentation of experience, where parts of us learned to disconnect in order to cope. Not all of us is fully here, fully integrated, fully embodied. While many of us look composed on the outside, we’re still carrying a great deal inside that has never been processed.

When parts of us are cut off from awareness, they are not interacting or integrating with the rest of us, or at least not in a healthy way. As a result, we are less present, less whole, and less functional.

How This Shows Up in Love

This disconnection often becomes most visible in our relationships.

Those of us who struggle with unrequited love, abandonment patterns, or obsessive attachment are often less anchored in our bodies than we realize. When we’re disconnected from our inner signals, we miss the quiet cues that something isn’t right.

We override our intuition.
We rationalize red flags.
We cling to potential instead of reality.

Letting go can feel unbearable, not just emotionally but in the body. The deeply wounded parts of us interpret loss as a threat to survival. So the mind fixates, replays, hopes, and searches for resolution.

We can stay strung out on someone who isn’t a real match for months or years, not because we’re foolish, broken or defective, but because something deeper is unresolved.

I’ve lived this myself. There were times when I held on far too long to women who were not a good fit, not truly aligned. I couldn’t let go and move on. Looking back, I can see that part of me was very disconnected from my embodied knowing. I wasted years of my life caught in those cycles.

What Contributes to This Disconnection

There are many influences.

Trauma

Trauma is one of the most significant. We experience trauma at different points in our lives, yet most of us are not thoroughly processing or healing these experiences. What we are unable to digest continues to live inside us, creating a profound internal disconnect.

Trauma is not just the event itself, but what remains unprocessed in our bodies.

Suppressed Emotions

Many of us move through life avoiding, distracting ourselves from, or suppressing what we feel. Over time, this takes a toll.

When we suppress emotions or avoid realities we don’t want to face, our emotional bandwidth constricts. The associated parts of us become less accessible and less integrated.

This often goes hand in hand with diminished emotional granularity, the ability to distinguish between specific emotions rather than just feeling “good” or “bad.”

We also lose self-coherence, where thoughts, feelings, and actions align with our deeper values. When that alignment is missing, our overall functioning suffers.

Information and Digital Overload

Many of us are flooded with input like never before. Digital media, social platforms, and 24-hour news cycles create a constant stream of stimulation.

We are ingesting far more information, opinion, and emotionally charged drama, TikToks, reels, and other rapid-fire digital content, than we can realistically assimilate or digest. This sensory overwhelm often leads to numbing or shutting down. Over time, it reduces interoception, our ability to sense what’s happening inside our own bodies.

This can contribute to a diminished awareness of both self and others.

Substances and Medications

Caffeine can pull awareness into the mind and away from the body. It may reduce subtle body awareness while increasing arousal and, for some people, heightening anxiety.

Alcohol, cannabis, and other recreational drugs often contribute to dissociation.

Antidepressants and other psychotropic medications can provide stability for some, yet for many they also blunt affect, making it harder to register and digest our emotional responses.

The substances we ingest can create layers of distance from the body and from emotional and lived experience.

Grounding Into Our Bodies and Into Life

While training with Chinese Master Shifu Li Tai Liang, he shared a Taoist perspective that says not all of us fully inhabit the physical body, that parts of our soul are not fully here in the body with us. For this reason, in the internal arts rooted in Taoism, great emphasis is placed on intensive daily repetition of the forms and internal practices, to continually develop one’s body and mind while bringing more of the soul into the body. Through this ongoing discipline, one evolves to ever higher levels of development.

Cultivating embodied presence has many facets.

Healing and growth begin as we bring more of our awareness into our bodies and learn to work effectively with our emotional responses. So many of us try to solve everything in our heads, yet real change often happens when we become more present to what we are actually feeling.

Teach yourself to meet life head on. That means facing what life brings you, the issues concerning you, the challenges in front of you, as best you can.

Life will evoke emotional responses. When it does, notice what you’re feeling. Notice where those feelings and sensations live in your body.

Center your awareness in the depth of those feelings and sensations. Breathe softly and deeply. Stay with what arises and follow the sensations as they move through their natural progression. When we stop running from our experience and how we feel in response to it and begin to stay with it, we become more embodied, more resilient, and we grow.

Cleaning up our lifestyle also matters. Becoming more mindful of the foods we ingest can make a real difference. Reducing, or when possible eliminating, refined sugar and other highly processed foods helps many people feel more stable and clear. The same can be true when reducing caffeine, alcohol, and other recreational drugs, all of which can pull us away from our bodies and diminish our awareness.

It also helps to reduce the amount of time you're spending consuming digital media on your devices.

Rather than texting endlessly, pick up the phone and call. When possible, meet in person. Have the conversations that matter. Spend more time out in the world, going places, doing things, and being actively engaged with the people around you.

Getting adequate sleep is also crucial. When we’re chronically tired, it’s much harder to stay present with ourselves and our emotions, and to engage with other people and the world around us.

Physical activity also helps bring us into the body. Play, sports, yoga, martial arts, and other forms of movement connect us with sensation, rhythm, breath, and the people we’re interacting with. They teach us that we are not just thinking beings, but embodied ones.

Engaging in meaningful work that you find fulfilling is also important, and even better if it’s work that helps other people, animals, or the planet, especially those in need.

Therapeutic interventions that help you get into your body and process your lived experiences and emotional responses are crucial, because they facilitate aspects of healing that are difficult, if not impossible, to move through on your own. For me, deep tissue bodywork, sessions with gifted healers, and the vision quest have enabled me to become far more embodied, to digest my lived experiences and the emotions tied to them, and to develop the capacities I need to be more highly functional.

All of these are ways of bringing more of you into your body, into your life, and into relationship with what you are actually experiencing. From this place, healing becomes possible.

Why This Matters for Love

The more we reconnect with our bodies and work effectively with our emotional responses, the clearer our inner signals become.

We sense misalignment sooner.
We recognize when something doesn’t feel right.
We’re less likely to override ourselves.
We’re more capable of letting go when something truly isn’t working.

Embodiment doesn’t make heartbreak and the many other challenges we face disappear, but it increases our capacity to move through it. Instead of endlessly analyzing and obsessing, we digest the emotional residue of our lived experiences.

It’s this digestion that makes healing possible.

An Open Invitation

Throughout your days and nights, I invite you to notice when you’re in your head.
Notice when you’re disconnected from your feelings.
Notice when your body is signaling something you’d rather ignore.

Cultivating embodied presence is an ongoing process. The more we return to ourselves in this way, the more clarity and freedom we have in our relationships and in our lives.

Many of us have spent years disconnecting from parts of ourselves. The good news is that, over time, we can bring more of ourselves into our bodies and show up more fully present in our lives.

And when we do, our capacity for love, discernment, and genuine connection grows.

The individual sessions I facilitate are one of the most powerful means available for becoming more fully embodied. Message or call me at (332) 333-5155. You can also go to benoofana.com, teachmetomeditate.com, or healmyheartache.com to learn more.

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