Our Bodies Are Worlds

Last time, we talked about how desire is life force; it’s a current that moves through us.

Desire can often feel like it’s coming from outside us, a force bigger than us, that threatens the illusion of control we have over our lives. This can make desire very scary to our rational brains.

My understanding of desire, and why I am not scared to work with it, comes from expanding how I see myself, until I’m big enough that I can see this life force as a part of me. At least for a time, I can set aside a view of myself as a small being whose only job is to keep myself safe, and see myself as connected to the bigger forces of the world, not separate from them.

I talk about this in Episode 3 of the Creative Encounters podcast! You can listen to it on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

I was inspired for this episode by listening to an episode of The Emerald Podcast called “No One Gets Out Alive,” in which the host talks about the Tibetan view of death.

I’m going to quote from my paraphrased notes:

“For Tibetans, at the moment of death, the internal becomes externalized. Psychic patterning that was inside us now is a universe, and rises up to meet us as gods and demons and landscapes. At death, we navigate ourselves as universe. All the unresolved ripples in our psyche are given bodies.

What would it look like if this happened? Who would inhabit your universe?”

…

“Embodiment also means expanding the boundaries of what the body is. At death, we become expanded and in everything. Embodiment is both being in the body and flying out of the limited body into the great body; practicing an embodied vastness. True embodiment also recognizes the death body, the place where our body is infinite.”

This resonated so much with how I’ve come to understand and explore my own psychic landscape. I love this idea of seeing the body as a world, and the parts that inhabit it as beings. When I’ve worked with my internal parts in therapeutic settings, I’ve struggled with modalities that limit what these parts can mean or how they can express (I go off on this quite a bit in the podcast).

Seeing the body and the self as an entire world or universe FULL of possibilities not limited by the structure of a modality feels much more right to me. It fits with the exploration of my subconscious that I’ve done on my own, that eventually led to desire sessions. In these explorations, I dive into the world of my body, see it as a landscape in which anything can arise, and meet and relate to whatever comes up.

This way of working is about seeing the body as an intelligent ecosystem; things aren’t there by mistake. It allows me to have deep curiosity about whatever I find, which leads to acceptance, which leads to true change.

I’ve noticed from doing this work that as our inner landscape changes, our outer landscape changes. Working with our inner landscape helps us see the rhymes between inner and outer. Things in the inner landscape move much more quickly, so working with it allows us to feel our power and how much we can shift things. It changes the locus of where we put our attention if we’re looking to change things in our lives.

This podcast episode is the first in a series all about desire—how I work with it in sessions, how to relate to desire internally, what it means to express desire out in the world, and how I see desire as related to the mission of Creative Encounters.

If you’ve been considering working with me in a Desire Session, I highly recommend listening; it’ll give you a good idea of how I work. If you’re ready to dive in, you can book a session with me or a free call to learn more:

Till next time!