When I was newly postpartum, I was periodically bombarded by feelings of intense rage that seemingly came out of nowhere. The feeling would hit me before I ever really noticed it creeping in and before I knew it, I was quietly simmering in anger and shooting daggers out of me eyes at my partner from across the room. In one of these moments, as I prepared to unleash the dragon inside of me on my entire household, my partner said, “Wait a second, are you hungry?”

As it turns out, that dragon inside of me was hangry. Making milk for a growing baby is immensely metabolically taxing and my body was sending requests that turned into demands for more nutrients, more energy, more food.

In Western culture, we often overlook the wisdom of the body. We have a long history of separating the mind and body into separate entities with the thinking mind taking priority over the feeling body. The idea of a mind-body connection has emerged only in recent years with research in neuroscience supporting the notion of the two being “inextricably intertwined.” Dr. Willa Blythe Baker, Founder and Spiritual Director of Natural Dharma Fellowship in Boston, takes it one step further with her coining of bodymind - a term that seeks to further challenge the dualistic notion of mind and body by merging the two into a singular form.

Mindfulness practitioners have long touted the importance of the body for a healthy mind. Calm body, calm mind. Inhale, exhale, repeat. Simple, right? But what happens when we as a society disconnect so strongly and swiftly from our bodies that even the feeling of hunger no longer registers as such in the brain?

This disconnect between mind and body is what we call dis-embodiment. A state of being in one’s head and not attuned to the feelings and sensations within one’s own physical being. Disembodiment can manifest as an inability to feel hunger after years of ignoring the sensation or the inability to discern how one is feeling in any given moment after a lifetime of numbing out.

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The answer to *dis**embodiment? Embodying a felt sense of Self.*

Embodiment is defined not as an idea or a theory but rather a state of being. Dr. Willa Blythe Baker says that it is “a malleable state of being in which you feel connected and attuned to your body and senses.” Mind and body merge as one until only a bodymind remains.

When we are embodied, we are aware of how the fabric of our clothing feels on our skin. We notice the pitter-patter of rain on our windows and the crunch of leaves beneath our feet. We feel the expansion and contraction of our lungs as we breathe and how the tone of our lives shift in response to the posture of our spines.

In other words, we feel everything. For better or for worse.

In a world that prioritizes doing over feeling and gives little to no space for the experience of uncomfortable emotions, it’s no wonder that we as individuals do everything in our power to feel as little as possible. It is far easier to use our tools of dissociation, of the conscious and unconscious variety, than to sit in the discomfort of feeling.

This long history of disregarding the importance of the body in the Western world, viewing it only as flesh and bones with no intelligence of its own, has no greater disservice than during pregnancy and birth: the two most biological and ecological events within the realm of human experience.

A time in which disembodiment should be nearly impossible as the entire physiology and psychology of a gestating parent transforms. A time in which you are brought into your body and confronted with the feelings and sensations you once ignored for the sake of nourishing a new being. A time in which your entire body shifts and morphs to accommodate the growing of a new human inside of you.

And yet, despite the innately biological and ecological nature of pregnancy, disembodiment is prevalent in birth. The shift to a medicalized birthing system in the 20th century, one that puts decision-making in the hands of doctors and prioritizes medical intervention over bodily wisdom, has been largely responsible for this disembodiment of birth. Although, not solely.

The medicalized view of pregnancy and birth would have you believe that growing a baby is much like growing bacteria in a petri dish. The baby grows in the womb with a little help from the gestating parent and emerges 9 months later. Baby and mom are separate entities in this model. Two organisms that remain largely individual to one another.

On the contrary, we now know that this supposed division between mother and baby is not so clearly defined. In a process known as fetal microchimerism, cells from the developing baby actually pass to the mother and live in her body for years to come. Possibly for the rest of her life. Much like the merging of bodymind, baby and mother are not so separate. The merging of the two begins the moment of conception.

A disembodied view of pregnancy ignores the symbiotic relationship between birthing parent and child and in doing so, disregards the massive physiologic and psychological transformations that take place during pregnancy and birth.