Embodied Yoga
Allowing the timeless charge of rock to seep into the resonance of bone.
Expand your Capacity to Meet and be Met
What is embodied yogA?
Embodied yoga is a practice of awakening to the divine as it lives within you. To respond to what is alive and in alignment with reality. To expand your capacity to meet and be met.
When we say embodied yoga, we don't just mean adopting a somatic approach to asana—though this is a part of it. We don’t just mean awareness of the heart-body-mind in meditation and practice—though this is part of it. We mean becoming intimate with all of your experience, so that you become a vessel for expressing the singular consciousness which longs to know itself as and through you.
Drinking in the forest, the mountain, the quality of the moment.
Embodying the Cosmic Play of Spanda
THE PRACTICE OF EMBODIED YOGA
Embodied yoga is a playful, curious and sacred practice of allowing life to be lived. We can choose to participate in embodiment anywhere and everywhere by simply responding to what is alive in the present moment.
An essential part of this experience is in the forgetting of it. That’s the dance between concealment and revelation—contraction and expansion—which within the tradition of Non-Dual Shaiva Tantra, we call spanda. This is the creative force at the centre of the cosmos that is ever rippling and constricting.
When you become an embodied practitioner, you can learn how to meet spanda again and again. Spanda is in the hot charge of strength that arises in bakasana, crow pose. It’s in the holding field of savasana, as you drift into rest. It’s in the space between steady breaths and it's also in the quick inhale of anxiety. Spanda is neither good nor bad. It’s simply the flavour of awareness in each moment, experienced subjectively.
Practicing embodied yoga means attuning your capacity to meet, to yield, into whatever you are being presented with. To recognise where you are within the spiral of spanda and know that each moment is part of the endless, shifting dance of the cosmos.
Explore our online practices to support your capacity to yield moment by moment.
Yoga is a felt sense connection to space, other and environment.
Meeting Life Through the Body
Samāveśa Embodied Yoga Trainings
During Samāveśa embodied yoga trainings, we are constantly sitting with the inquiry: what is embodiment? What does it feel like to explore embodied terrains? This could mean touching into the different experiences of dropping into your cells, into your fascia or into the depths of your bone marrow.
Want to know more about our embodied yoga trainings? Explore the offerings here.
To embody means to listen deeply. When we explore the body’s landscapes—our bones, blood, and organs—we find new truths. Here’s what Samāveśa Facilitator Georgie had to offer from her intimate experience of meeting her kidneys in an embodiment practice:
In the red canyon
Bathed in Hibiscus light
A crimson serpent
Slides and winds
Drawing water
Drawing blood
Through the landscape
When you touch into these different inner aspects of your physical experience, you peel back more and more truths of what it means to fully inhabit your body. When you can lovingly invite the brilliance of your mind to step aside, you allow more of your embodied wisdom to float to the forefront of your awareness.
Embodied yoga widens your capacity to embrace life as you begin to recognise that each and every part of you is a living breathing miracle. This is often an experience of yogic awakening and rapture. Samāveśa translates as perpetually immersing yourself in this quality of reality.
Tantra and embodied yoga is the practice of becoming intimate with all of life.
The Endless Samāveśa
Tantra as Embodied Practice
In the Tantric view, there is no yoga that is not embodied. There is nothing which is not an expression of the singular divine consciousness. This is the intelligence which throbs in the nucleus of every cell in your body and also ripples out into the macrocosm of the whole.
Yoga is the practice of embodying the essence of what you are, with an ever widening awareness of this truth. You learn to meet more of life through every breath, every movement and every sensation. This is as much in the expanse of climbing to the top of a mountain as it is in the contraction you experience when someone puts you down.
Tantra is a householder tradition and it asks us to keep our feet on the ground. At Samāveśa School of Tantra, Somatics and Embodied Yoga, we are of the earth and we honour the earth and the feminine wisdom. These are the essential roots of embodied yoga and what we long to invite more and more beings into the arms of. If you want to know more about the school and what we offer, please get in touch.
The practice of embodied yoga is not separate from your life—it is life itself. How will you meet it today?
Do you long to know more about embodiment and how it relates to Tantric teachings? Join our mailing list for love letters which are devoted to exploring these questions.
BECOME A CERTIFIED EMBODIED YOGA FACILITATOR with Samāveśa School of Tantra, Somatics and Embodied Yoga:
The Alchemy of Embodied Philosophy
An Endless Becoming
PRACTICE EMBODIED YOGA WITH US Samāveśa School of Tantra, Somatics and Embodied Yoga
Embodied Yoga Retreats
Online Embodied Yoga Practices
From the Tantric perspective, there is no yoga that is not embodied.