THE 10 REALMS OF EMBODIED LIVING
WELCOME, BEAUTY.
As a somatic healer and book coach for (neurospicy) women and femme writers, coaches, and creative entrepreneurs seeking self-liberation, I help my clients heal the wounds of their past that are creating barriers in their present, so that they can create the audacious visions for their future that are calling from their heart and soul. 🙏🏼
Having healed myself of (C)PTSD after childhood sexual assault, and as a somatic coach, healer, and teacher of embodiment for years, these 10 Realms of Embodied Living are the product of my decade-long study and practice into coming home to my body. They are now the pillars of my teachings in embodied healing and living, and the pillars of my business, WHOLE HOUSE. I’m so excited to share them with you!
Read all the way through or scroll to find what’s interesting to you right now. Save in your bookmarks for later. And if you feel something is missing, please let me know in the comments! ♡
1| Somatic Embodiment + Nervous System Regulation
For cultivating emotional, mental, and physical self-regulation, identifying and expressing innate personal boundaries, safely releasing trauma, connecting with inner wholeness and wisdom, thereby accessing and embodying inherent dignity, reorienting into the present, accessing deep self-knowledge and healthy self-regard, building EQ, cultivating healthy aggression (connection to personal power).
The foundational realm of Embodied Living is the practice of inhabiting—and safely regulating—your body.
We achieve this through somatic embodiment practices, which allow you to acquaint yourself and deepen into relationship with your soma. (Your soma is the system of systems (mental, physical, energetic, emotional, spiritual) that make up the complex human organism that is your whole body. Check out this post for more on the basics of the soma and somatics.)
Nervous system regulation (and healing) is a primary goal of somatic embodiment practices.
This is because a grounded, regulated nervous system is the non-negotiable foundation for safe somatic exploration. Our nervous system is the information superhighway of our bodies! It is what translates the bodily experiences of sensation into the information that we receive in our brains.
The health or dysregulation of our Central Nervous System is possibly the single most influential factor to our holistic wellbeing—not to mention our perception of reality. (Wanna read that again?) This is because our nervous system is impacted by our subconscious, rather than our conscious mind. Which means that the implicit (unconscious, repressed, “archived”) memories of our past, while we may not think about or even be aware of them, are actively informing how our Central Nervous System perceived reality in the present, especially in regards to what is or is not safe .
We’ll get into the larger implication of this in a future post, but for now suffice it to say that your nervous system’s improved health is the gateway to experiencing literally new realities for yourself beyond past paradigms of fear, anxiety, depression, and even physical illness.
2| Self-Parenting, Parts Work, + Integrating the Self
For forming healthy and secure attachment, supporting and nurturing attunement, and naturally establishing individuation.
The next natural ~ and magical! ~ outcome of safely inhabiting your regulated soma is often parts work, in which you meet a part of you (an individuated piece of your psyche) that’s been “frozen” in time in the wake of a deeply impactful or traumatic experience in your past.
You have many, many parts in your psyche (your mental body), which are able to communicate to you when you inhabit your physical body during somatic experiencing. Every one of them is younger than you are today (many, if not most, are children), and each has a “job” to do. These jobs have been identified and divided by Dr. Richard Schwartz, who coined a parts work modality called Internal Family Systems, into three categories: managers, protectors, and firefighters.
In other words, while we have grown up believing that a singular “I” am in charge of “my” destiny, in fact, a single human psyche is a vast family of past versions of ourselves, many of whom are wounded children, each reacting in healthy or unhealthy ways to experiences in the present based on remarkable lessons or experiences we’ve had in the past. When we are triggered, we are experiencing the reality that a part of us has been activated. When, as a result of being triggered, we make unhealthy, reckless, or dangerous choices, we are being overridden by a part. These parts are the little versions of us who didn’t have the strength or tools to to bear the difficulty, sorrow, or rejection that we experienced. 💔
Self-Parenting is the process of differentiating from our wounded parts so that instead of feeling what they feel and continuing to react or behave in response to it, we step back from the feeling as the capable adult that we are now and we love the hell out of that younger part who just needed love, comfort, and support in the past, but didn’t get it. When we do this, we alleviate the mental, emotional, physical, even spiritual pain of the part—and of ourselves!—and massive shifts in our wellbeing, behavioural patterns, relationships—our whole lives—occur.
The outcome of self-parenting our parts is self-integration: the bringing back together of our fragmented, hurt, and lonely parts into a coherent, loving, and supportive whole: a psyche that is at peace with itself, instead of at war.
3| Conscious Creative Self-Expression + Storytelling
For trauma release through radical self-expression, meaning and sense-making, articulation and deeper self-knowledge and self-actualization, communing with the unconscious (including fiction writing and dream journaling). Inner child expression, communion, and collaboration. And for self-advocacy and self-observation.
An integral aspect of somatic embodiment and parts work is the act of writing down what arises.
When you put hand to pen to paper, all kinds of incredible insights and transformations can occur in the process. Writing is the most direct and impactful way to record, process, integrate, and truly understand what is happening within us as we explore the remarkable and often alien territories of a truly embodied experience.
Beyond that, just as healing benefits immeasurably from the act of writing (or indeed, creating in any form), so writing and creating are acts of healing in and of themselves, often presenting us with jewels of insight and wisdom from our unconscious, or allowing us to process our emotions in a non-verbal way.
In addition to all this, being the one to articulate our story can be deeply healing, especially for those of us who have experienced assault, abuse, or other forms of power imbalance where we have not felt safe or allowed to advocate for ourselves, use our voice, or speak our truth.
There are many ways to use writing and creativity as a tool for healing and storytelling, including journalling, freewriting, automatic writing, Body Poetry, freedrawing, collage, and many many more.
4| Plant Medicine, Prayer, + SPIRITUALITY
For connection with something greater: a sense of belonging within life, community, and the cosmos; as an integral aspect of human wellbeing, as no matter what the belief, we must each have a spiritual life to be truly well! Or else we find ourselves feeling existentially alone and bleak af. Support in accessing new and elevated states like wonder and playfulness, as well as releasing/purging our darkest energies. As a potentially healthy and supportive alternative to pharmaceutical medication. For support in finding direction, maturation, motivation, and sense of purpose.
While this Realm is optional, for most a connection to Source/Spirit/God/Universe/the Divine is a natural outcome of connecting with the body and their mental, physical, spiritual, and emotional bodies coming into alignment with each other.
A past therapist of mine, who was an Indigenous elder, told me that teenagers who rebel, and adults who suffer the most, including with depression and suicidal ideation, largely suffer because they have no connection to Spirit. At the time, my own connection to spirituality was tenuous: I had long been angry at organized religion for the harms I perceived it had done, and for most of my life I conflated religion with spirituality.
A Personal Story . . .
It was my first experience with DMT that transformed my relationship to spirituality, and gave me the unshakeable belief that there is a divine force of intelligence moving through all things in the infinite universe—and that I was therefore not existentially alone in the way I had always felt. Since that time I’ve worked with many plant medicines, including psylocibin (mushrooms), THC (marijuana), san pedro, and DMT. I’ve done so both privately and in ceremony, in micro- and macrodoses, and found new lessons, healing, and clarity (for the most part) in each experience. I no longer experience depression, though I have never used prescription medication to address it; I ascribe this to the deep and multidimensional healing work I’ve done over the last eight years, of which sacred plant medicine has been an impactful element.
My spiritual connection is now my most cherished of all my life experiences. It’s brought me deep peace, relief, purpose, and fulfillment where so often I felt grief, betrayal, disillusionment, and confusion. I wish a deep, personal, and entirely unique connection to Source/Spirit/God/Universe/theDivine and by extension to our Mother Earth for everyone.
Please note: Psychedelics and sacred plant medicines are not for everyone. WHOLE HOUSE does not promote the mindless use or unintentional consumption of sacred plant medicines. If you choose to microdose or consume psychedelics, you are choosing to do so as a personal choice, from your own free will, and not based on any recommendation from any outside parties, including myself or WHOLE HOUSE.
5| Practical Resources + Tangible Tools
Books, apps, systems, courses, processes, routines, rituals, spells, and more support self-knowledge, self-care, self-support, and self-mastery. For co-collaboration with the “dysfunctional”/underdeveloped parts of our brains, psyches, and lived experiences/identities, outside wisdom, guidance, tools, and systems are invaluable. To support us in actualizing our goals, keeping our direction, and succeeding in our purpose.
Unsurprisingly, education through resources and support through established systems and tools is an integral part of learning about one’s self, somatically and otherwise.
But the ways you can learn and the tools at your disposal are close to infinite! Check out this standalone post for some of my favourite resources, systems, and tools for deepening self-knowledge and Embodied Living.
6| Grounding + Nature
For connection to OUR true nature, which is that we ARE nature. To experience the lessons she always has right here for us. To gain perspective, peace, access our intuition, gain regulation, find inspiration, wonder, and inner child pleasure as a child of the earth and the universe.
No resource on Embodied Living could be complete without honouring the role of grounding and Mama Earth on our wellbeing. Though we’ve collectively forgotten our interconnectedness with the natural world, we are nature. And any human being’s true nature stems from and depends entirely upon that premise.
Realm 6 is deeply entwined with Realm 4 (Plant Medicine, Prayer, and Spirituality). I believe this is because our Mother Planet is in and of itself an intelligent being: Planet Earth is alive in ways our rational Western overculture would scoff to hear of. And yet this is the truth alive in the Knowing of Indigenous cultures across the world—and indeed anyone who lives in an interrelationship with nature.
Whether you choose to believe in animism or not, the fact remains that spending time in nature and planting our feet on the earth have proven benefits for our mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual health and wellbeing. For one, spending time in the rhythms of nature immediately regulates our nervous system.
“Grounding or earthing refers to direct skin contact with the surface of the Earth, such as with bare feet or hands, or with various grounding systems. […] Experience and measurements show that sustained contact with the Earth yields sustained benefits.”
It is believed that grounding speeds the immune response and the healing of wounds, improves the quality of sleep, and lowers and even eradicates chronic inflammation and autoimmune disorders, as well as other stress-related illnesses including heart disease.
7| Interconnection + Community
To be witnessed, ideally by a source of unconditional love and support from a friend, family member (biological or chosen), community member, or at the least by a compassionate and safe health professional, is a critical component of healing. To be seen, heard, and understood. To be loved and accepted, not for what you do but who you inherently are. To experience attunement with your person, people, or tribe. To find co-regulation as well as a shared history, lived experience, and worldview that affirms and uplifts you, especially in times of hardship.
No woman is an island, and for those of us who’ve grown up hyper-independent, high-achieving, and probably very comfortable with the term “control freak,” learning to lean on and be truly loved and supported by our people is HUGE medicine.
As people in general and as reforming perfectionists especially, we heal most profoundly by being witnessed in our vulnerability and experiencing what it feels like to be received with full love and acceptance, even in the face of our “failures” and “flaws.” In fact, when we don’t allow the people in our lives to see our imperfection, we don’t allow them to see us. This is an incredibly lonely—and chronically stressful—way to live. And we don’t want that for you anymore.
It’s so so common to have learned as a child that parental love came at the condition of you having to behave in certain ways that repressed key aspects of yourself. But in adulthood, we get to rewrite the script: by deciding that nothing about you is wrong or unlovable (and showing yourself through parts work how true that really is); by choosing the family of friends, partner(s), and community we live our lives alongside; and by establishing boundaries that honour our emotional needs in all relationships, including those with our birth family.
8| Pleasure Practice + Consensual Intimacy
To connect with and explore your relationship to pleasure, worthiness, and goodness. To receive as well as take pleasure, and to rebuild a consensual relationship with your body when it may have been violated, coerced, or treated non-consensually in the past.
Somatics is inherently linked to sex and the sexual organs, not just because they are a part of our anatomy, and sex a natural and innate part of life, but because so many of us carry within us, consciously or unconsciously, memories of sexual impropriety and trauma.
For women especially, who as a gender have historically experienced generations of systemic subjugation at the hands of their male counterparts, even the youngest amongst us who have learned about consent rarely consider whether we are in a consensual relationship with ourselves. Learning to hear our body’s boundaries and honour them is a deeply healing process that builds trust between our mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual bodies.
Because your yoni, like other intelligent centres in your body like the heart and guts, is a sentient being. She remembers. And she protects: by numbing, dissociating, shutting down, clamming up, drying, swelling—what in somatics is collectively termed “genital armouring”. She remembers every time you said okay when you meant no; every time you did what someone else wanted to “just get it over with,” every time you pushed past or ignored or let it happen. This is not to lay blame at your feet; simply to say that while what’s past is not your fault, from hereon in you can be responsible for giving her and you what you have both always needed: a respectful, consensual, boundary-honouring experience of sex, intimacy, and sexual pleasure.
In general, collectively, under capitalism, we have a pretty warped relationship to pleasure, often based around pleasure being a reward for enduring pain or discomfort, rather than being a right we have regardless of our performance, just like unconditional love. Reconnecting with the intelligence of your body and learning to safely embrace pleasure for pleasure’s sake is yet another central Realm of Embodied Living.
9|Mysticism, Magic, + SERVICE
Divination. Unexplainable and stunningly beautiful spiritual and “magic” experiences. Openness to “illogical” gifts. Communication beyond the veil. Generational healing. Energy healing. Shamanic practices. Psychic abilities. Communing with beings on the other side. Your personal medicine (including your potential to become a healer) is often lying dormant here.
This Realm is more of an outcome of the experience of embodied living, which, if leaned into, can offer up some of the greatest gifts of the entire experience!
But as you cultivate your relationship to mysticism and magic, you become a mystic. You embody magic. And this can be deeply, deeply healing.
Not least because when you heal from the wounds of your past, just by doing so you become the medicine for someone else. No matter what you do for work in the world, or how you share your gifts with the world, your embodiment will influence, direct, and strengthen how you show up and serve in the world: as a mother, as a coach, as an entrepreneur or artist or author or activist or inventor or truck driver.
Embodiment is an art form. Being in your multidimensional soma (mental, emotional, physical, spiritual) enables you to see, hear, and understand things that you had no access to before. It allows you to consciously work with your psyche and your nervous system to overcome and accomplish things that may have felt impossible all your life. There is no limit—including the to reality you perceive of as real today—to what is possible for you, your life, and your dreams.
10| Money, wealth, + finances
To examine one’s relationship to money, wealth, and personal/business finances as a means to and an outcome of healing. Money is the primary “tangible” form energy exchange in human culture. It is a highly charged subject that activates many people’s wounds. A place to explore one’s relationship to life, intimacy, vulnerability, trust, and safety: money is one of the most potent forms of discomfort, growth, and evolution.
When it comes to self-liberation (the experience of having liberated yourself from the many stories, lies, and internalized “prisons” of thought and perception that keep us feeling small, powerless, and dissatisfied with our lives), which is the natural long-term outcome of Embodied Living, the ultimate gauntlet for most of us will be money.
Why? Well, for one, it’s integral to our survival, let alone our ability to thrive, in our lives on Planet Earth. For another, the narrative we are fed by the overculture is based on a hunger for excess against a backdrop of scarcity: “More is always more. To be happy, have more, buy more, pursue more. But beware: There is not enough, especially when it comes to money. Therefore: Be afraid. And do whatever you have to to get as much as you can.”
This, along with the money traumas and behaviours we learn from our caregivers in childhood, sets up a very complicated and rarely secure relationship with money which results in even the wealthiest amongst us feeling that they don’t have enough to relax and truly enjoy their lives. There is so much to unpack in this Realm! And I look forward to doing so in future posts, podcast episodes, classes and more.
For now, suffice it to say that when we cultivate safety, security, and regulation from within, we do not need to seek it in impermanent external things, money included. Wealth is a state of being that many billionaires don’t possess. And it actually has little to do with the amount of money in your bank account.
WHAT’S NEXT?
IF THESE REALMS ARE CALLING TO YOU, LET’S WORK TOGETHER!
CLICK THE BUTTON TO GET STARTED, BOO. ☝🏼💛
kate juniper
LEO 🌞 VIRGO 🌝 VIRGO ⇧
Kate is the Founder & CEO (Chief Embodiment Officer) of WHOLE HOUSE. She is a writer & book editor; trauma-trained & certified MindBody somatic coach; Reiki Master & energy healer; workshop & retreat facilitator, & serial creative entrepreneur.
As a neurospicy survivor of CSA, she’s seen some sh*t—and many, many thanks to somatics, she has lived to tell the tale—and to support fellow ambitious, creative, multi-passionate and “squiggly-brained” women and femmes to alchemize their pasts into powerful fuel for their stunning futures, just as she has. 💛