What is Embodiment? Why Somatics Are Key to Better Sex and Relationships

Your body remembers every touch, every rejection, every moment of connection—even when your mind has forgotten. But most of us are living from the neck up, disconnected from our bodies and the wisdom they hold about our desires, boundaries, and authentic selves.

In this episode, I'm demystifying embodiment and somatic (body-based) approaches for intimacy issues. I'll break down what it actually means to be embodied (versus disconnected), why your nervous system holds the key to better sex and relationships, and how somatic approaches differ from traditional talk therapy.

You'll learn a wee bit of the history of body-based healing—from Wilhelm Reich's "character armor" to modern trauma research—and discover why bottom-up healing (starting with your body) often works better than top-down approaches for intimacy challenges.

I'm sharing the 5 specific benefits of getting more embodied: better emotional regulation, real confidence (not performed), authentic relationships, reduced physical tension, and magnetic presence that makes people actually listen when you speak.

Plus, practical examples from my practice showing how embodied approaches help with everything from performance anxiety to not knowing what you want sexually. This isn't woo-woo stuff—it's science-backed work that creates real change.

Perfect for anyone who's tired of living disconnected from their body and ready to access their full aliveness. Also perfect for anyone who simply wonders "what's the point of being more embodied? Why bother?" 

Get my free email newsletter with helpful tips, plus a free guide to Finding Your Deepest Turn-Ons, and learn how to work with me at https://laurajurgens.com.

Transcript

Welcome to Sex help for smart people. I'm Dr Laura Jurgens. I'm here to help you have better sex, intimacy and relationships. So let's get at it.

Hey everyone,

welcome to episode 86 we are talking today about what the hell is embodiment anyway? Why we might want to bother thinking about being more embodied, or setting a goal even of becoming more embodied, and why somatic therapies, so those are specifically therapies that work with the body are game changers for sex and relationship issues.

So here's the deal.

Your body, yours,

remembers and records every touch, every rejection, every moment of connection, even when your mind has forgotten. We actually know that the body has memories we hold patterns of protectiveness, patterns of expansiveness, in our bodies from our pasts. What we know about trauma now is that trauma is held in the body. There's a really famous book by Bessel van der Kolk called the Body Keeps the Score that has really popularized this idea, but it's been around for a while, and our bodies also remember our joys. They imprint our ways of being in the world. We come into this world very much embodied, but we often acquire different protective mechanisms that sort of block us or push us more in our heads, especially in modern society. And a lot of times those are helpful in some way, shape or form, and they may remain helpful, but a lot of times they become unhelpful. Sometimes those protective patterns of being more and more up in our head block us from our true joy and our open connection, from pursuing our passions, from really feeling the good things in life. And a lot of times we're actually trying to stuff down the bad things in life, right? But this episode's purpose is about demystifying somatics and embodiment, especially for intimacy issues. And nowadays, I want to really own up to the fact that I often take for granted that people would like to be more embodied, and really I shouldn't,

just because I have

found it to be so profoundly helpful in my life, and so just like fulfilling and freeing, I didn't even know if I think back. I didn't even know it was a goal of mine, or that my lack of embodiment was a problem until I started being more embodied. So now that I know in my mind and my body and my soul, even that living as a whole being in my physical body, and not just treating it as something to be sort of perfected for outside approval, but living inside my body and feeling everything from the inside, and not just being a disembodied head like I used to be, especially when I was an academic. This is so critical for true joy, for me, for having a rich, vibrant life, that I really do kind of take it for granted that everybody knows about it and everybody understands it and wants to be more embodied. And I was, you know, I was walking through the woods the other day. I live in North Carolina, in the mountains, and it's beautiful here, and it's early September, and it's just gorgeous, especially if you watch out for the acorns that are falling.

I almost got brained by one,

but I was walking through the woods the other day and I realized, oh my gosh, I've been really taking this for granted, and I've never talked about it on the podcast. So we're here today to talk about embodiment. We're going to talk about the way we physically engage with the world, how we are perceived through our embodiment also really matters. It has a profound impact on our social interactions, on our relationships and our overall social success, really, to be frank about it. So I want to talk about five key benefits. I'm going to give them to you in short, and then we're going to talk about them in more detail in a little bit. So one benefit of being embodied improved emotional regulation. We'll get into all like what I mean by this, but just think about being able to regulate your emotions better. And I don't mean control or not have emotions. I mean how you respond to them and how you process them, and how you soothe yourself through them, or how you get to experience them, both positive and negative. Emotions, number two, enhanced self esteem and confidence and all of the. These are researched and documented benefits of people who are more embodied, so enhanced self esteem and confidence is number two. Number three, stronger interpersonal relationships of all kinds. Four is better physical health and reduced stress. And five is increased social influence and leadership ability. Now, if those five things sound like things you are like, sign me up for I want those things. I want to better regulate emotions. I want to have more confidence and self esteem. I want stronger interpersonal relationships. Want better physical health and less stress. I want increased social influence and leadership ability. If you want those things, your ticket is through embodiment, even though a lot of us are kind of afraid of it, because we're mostly because we're afraid we're going to encounter and have to feel negative emotions. But here's the thing, you're going to encounter negative emotions anyway in life because you're a human so you might as well learn how to feel them and process them in your body so they can move on, and they don't run your show subconsciously, and then you get all those five benefits. So we'll talk a little bit more about each of these in detail, but I wanted to throw out early on why you might want to keep listening to this podcast. Okay, here's also why this matters for intimacy. You are more than your brain, your mind, your brain is just actually a part of your body, and it's not even your biggest organ, your desires, your history, your true self. They live in your full body, not just in your head and your heart and your gut and your genitals and your feet

and everything about you, everything in

the whole rest of your body,

it all matters what your body likes, what your skin likes, what your heart wants, what your gut tells you, what you crave. All of that matters to be fully present with yourself in this life, to be fully alive through your life, with yourself and with others, you actually need to be in your body present. And yes, we could say, hey, everybody's present in their body, right? Unless they're in, you know, a coma or something, they're present in their body. But actually, if you really look around, I want you to notice and even ask yourself, if you're really honest with yourself, how much of your life do you spend as kind of a, just like a walking head, as sort of like, you know, mostly up in your head. And if you look around at the world, how many people are distracting themselves from being in their body, whatever our distraction of choice, right? It could be scrolling. It could be, you know, whatever watching screens. It could be consuming something like alcohol, or, you know, overeating, or it could be overworking, even it could be being busy. What are the ways that we use to get out of our physical experience, even if that physical experience is just the really mild discomfort of boredom or dissatisfaction, right, the mild discomfort of sitting in traffic when you don't want to right? We use so many distractions to pull ourselves out of our bodies. And it's not that all that is bad. It's not bad, but if we do it too much, we really miss out on our lives. And I think we've all seen those people who are missing out on their lives. I see them at restaurants all the time. They're like, on their phones, right? Instead of like, engaging with their with the partner, or with their meal, or just with their own sensations. And I've been that person. I have absolutely been that person. I tend to read books while I'm eating. It's a really bad habit, because I love eating good food.

So being we

are designed to be fully embodied. Babies are, but we grow these armors and protections around us that disconnect us from her own experience. And they're not wrong. We often need them at least temporarily, but when we carry them around longer than their useful shelf life, they get fixed and stale and they cut us off from our full selves and each other. So what does that look like when we're disconnected from our bodies? And I see this all the time, both with myself and with my clients, and I do it less, but it's not that I don't do it at all, right? I think it's okay to keep some level of not being fully embodied all the time in modern society. That would be a real challenge.

Challenge, but a lot of us

are living in this kind of constant state of mild dissociation, not the clinical kind, but just that sort of everyday disconnection where you're going through the motions without really feeling much of anything good or bad, and maybe not even noticing what you're feeling, except when things get really bad. So maybe you're just really good at pushing through discomfort without acknowledging it's there, right? Maybe you are scrolling through your phone to avoid feeling stressed. Maybe you're staying really busy so you don't have to sit with some dissatisfaction, and that's okay. It's okay to have protective mechanisms. It doesn't mean there's something wrong with you, but it's just not the only option. And sometimes we learn to disconnect from our bodies, because it actually wasn't safe to feel everything that was happening. And when it comes to intimacy, all of these different types of disconnections can become a problem for us. So just to give you a little bit of history here, because none of this is new, people have been figuring out in Western psychology the mind body connection for really quite a few decades. So Willem Reich, back in the early 1900s talked about how our bodies hold psychological patterns. He called it character armor. Peter Levine developed what's called somatic experiencing, which looks at trauma as an incomplete response in your nervous system, rather than just thoughts in your head. And we have new iterations lately, and somatics is getting really popular because it's incredibly effective, especially for trauma, and it also feels connecting. It connects us to ourselves, because we are more than our heads. And while Western medicine has been treating mind and body as separate things for centuries, our trauma research is actually finally catching up to what many indigenous cultures have always known, that you can't actually heal the mind without involving the body. So that's what we now call somatics, and that's what we mean by somatics is involving the body in a full body, mind, body healing. And it's so I mean, a lot of questions I get, you know is, how is this different from regular talk therapy and traditional talk therapy is usually top down. We kind of figure out what you're thinking, consider why you might where you might have picked that up in your history, and hope your feelings and behaviors follow some sort of pattern of change once you have awareness. And there's nothing wrong with that approach. It is useful, especially for gaining insight, but there it is quite limiting, and it doesn't address trauma very well. I know that firsthand, and I also know it from a toner research. Somatic work is more bottom up. We start with what you're feeling in your body, what sensations are happening, and we work from there. We let the body help us understand what you need, because the body holds so much wisdom, and it knows you have an inner knowing about what you need. It's not always the story, though, that your mind is making about those sensations. So for example, minds make a lot of stories based on the sensation of fear. So if you're afraid, for example, of public speaking, your mind is going to make all kinds of stories about what the audience is thinking about you, and that's not necessarily true, but it's like your mind is making these stories from fear. But we want to go to the fear in the body and start really like working with it there to let the body release the fear, and it tends to relax the mind too. So in my practice, for example, I might notice that someone's breathing gets shallow when they talk about a certain topic, and it gives me a clue about something. You know, maybe we need to stay present with that for a little bit and see what's there. Or that their whole posture changes when they mention their partner. And does it change? Does it contract? Does it expand? Right? Tells us something about what their sort of current state of being in relationship is, how that relationship is feeling to them, and that's all information that's all the nervous system telling us something important that the conscious mind might not even be aware of. So here's where this gets really practical for intimacy challenges. A lot of the issues that people have that they struggle with, difficulty setting boundaries, people pleasing, not knowing what you like or what turns you on, not knowing how to talk. About it. Having those sort of desires get stuck in your throat, not feeling safe or welcome, opening up to your partner about real challenges or your real feelings, performance anxiety, not feeling like you're getting enough emotional connection, not feeling like you're getting enough physical affection or sex. These aren't just mental health issues. They are not they are nervous system issues. They are embodied experiences. They are felt experiences. For all of us, when we are having a challenge in connecting with ourselves and our true desires, our authentic selves or connecting with other people. That's an embodied experience, and it tends to be one that is, you know, our patterns tend to be encoded patterns in our nervous system from attachment wounds we had a long time

ago.

So for example, I had a client who couldn't figure out why she didn't want sex. She'd been to doctors, she tried hormone therapy. She'd read all the books she's been she'd been to a bunch of therapists, but when we started paying attention to her body, we discovered that she was actually holding so much stress and tension that her nervous system was basically in constant fight or flight mode. Her body wasn't available for pleasure because it was too busy trying to keep her safe, and there was a lot of concern about perceived rejection from a partner or perceived disconnection and the need to care take that was really left over from very old stuff, but had gotten stuck in her nervous system. And so when we worked with her body, her body wanted to release all that stuff. And it turned out, her body actually and her mind really wanted to have sex once she calmed her nervous system, once she released a lot of that and could see that her current relationship wasn't her old relationship. It wasn't a threat. So let's look at some specific let's go back to those five benefits and look at the specific benefits of getting more embodied. And I want to break them down for you. So first, actually feeling your feelings, instead of just thinking about them, or listening to the stories that they're telling us. So a lot of us, you know, when we're living from the neck up as achievement oriented people, it's really hard to deal with feelings. The mind is not designed to deal with feelings. Well, it is just not. When you start tuning into your body, like noticing that tight chest when you're anxious, or the way your jaw clenches when you're frustrated, or the sort of lump in your throat when you're feeling unsafe to speak, or you're feeling grief panic can be like, you know, in the stomach or the solar plexus. When you notice these things, you get an early warning system for your emotions, and you also start learning how to let your body handle your emotions instead of making them emergencies. So instead of being blindsided by anger or overwhelm or identifying with it, it's not your identity, it's just the weather, right? You can actually catch it early see it as separate from you, not who you are, and actually do something about it, which is process it through your body. And the body is great at processing emotions, even though the mind sucks at it, okay. Second, your confidence becomes real, not just performed. And it's something I see with people, with my clients, all the time. We all, we all kind of default to thinking that confidence is, like, either fake it till you make it and then I'll have, like, all the evidence that I'm amazing all the time, or they think that confidence means arrogance. Like, if I'm confident, then that means I'm I think I'm better than everybody else, so I'm not allowed to be confident, because I don't want to be a dick. And neither of those things are true. So embodied confidence. And I mean, I used to think these things too, absolutely 100% and sometimes I'm almost still, like, catch myself feeling like or thinking that way, because that's kind of how confidence is portrayed in our culture, but actual, embodied confidence is really quite different. It's when you really feel entitled to take up the space that your body takes up in the world, when you feel expansive inside, when you're allowed to stand tall, when your eyes feel relaxed making eye contact. I didn't used to be able to make eye contact until I had really powerful somatic treatments for some PTSD, and all of a sudden, literally, literally, in the course of after one three hour treatment, I could make eye contact with people, and it never. Went away. Ever since that moment, I have been able to make comfortable eye contact with people. This is embodied confidence. Your nervous system starts getting the message that you're safe and you're capable, and other people can then pick up on it, and it's not about pretending. It's about your body and mind being on the same team and on the same page about your worth, that your worth is unshakable. You are chosen by evolution, the universe, whatever you choose to believe in. You were chosen to be here, and you are therefore worthy of being here. End of story. You can't lose it. You can't gain it. You are just 100% worthy. Nobody else is any less worthy than you. Nobody else is any more worthy than you. It is an internalized knowing, and your body knows. Your body already knows you're worthy. The only places where we wind up feeling unworthy are in our mind. Okay? Second, No, we just did second, third, your relationships get way more authentic when you are present in your body, you are actually able to be present with other people. When you are really present with yourself, there is someone there for them to connect with. You can notice people's energy. You can feel it when something's off and you're not just, you know, waiting for your turn to talk out of anxiety. And I mean, this happens to me. I know what that feels like. That's kind of my a lot of my life actually has been sort of super high social anxiety and feeling like I had to, like, impress people or perform in order for them to approve of me. And that was all coming from my head. So I see this a lot with couples, the way that embodiment encourages more authentic relationships, because it enables attunement, and they're able to start paying attention to their physical connection, like really making eye contact or matching each other's breathing, being attuned, even just turning towards each other in a way where their their whole posture is open. It enables emotional intimacy, and it enables a sense of deep safety that allows a lot of people to access desire levels that they never knew they had. Your Body helps you connect in ways that your mind alone just can't. So number four, you stop carrying all that tension around. This one is really big when you are disconnected from your body. You know when I was disconnected from my body, and even when I'm disconnected from my body on like a daily basis, just in the little bits that I sort of check out, I notice that I accumulate stress in places that I'm like, wait a second. How did this happen? My shoulders, my back, my jaw. Getting more embodied means you notice it. You can actually release it. And practices that enable embodiment, like mindful breathing, or, you know, yoga, if you're being present with your yoga, gentle movement, they actually change your stress hormones. So it's not just like feeling better, it's measurable improvement in how your body handles stress and when you release all those micro tensions or macro tensions, sometimes the case may be

and especially releasing deep body bracing, which happens when we access really deep levels of embodiment that typically we need help accessing. And spoiler alert, there will be an upcoming podcast on releasing some of this deep bracing. I'm going to have Dr alien Lapierre, who's the founder of the neuro effective touch Institute, come and talk on the podcast. I'm so excited, because I just absolutely love that modality for releasing deep bracing and attachment trauma. But when we release that tension that we hold in our body, we start actually being able to sell you at the cellular level to handle stress better. Okay. Fifth, people actually listen when you speak, when you are embodied. Now, okay, not everybody, because there's some people who won't listen no matter what they're just so actually, usually really disconnected from their body so much that they can't absorb anything. But it is amazing. The more embodied you are, the better your leadership ability is, and it because, in part, because you can attune to other people, because you can really read the room, because you really deeply, can listen and you can understand what's called for. And this one, I love this one, I love this one because it's so practical. But when you're grounded in your body, you're not like rushing or shrinking or performing. People respond differently to you. If you go back to that episode all about non verbal communication, and how much of our communication is actually non verbal this will make a ton of. Sense, but your presence has weight, and when you're whether you're in a meeting, whether you're having a challenging conversation, whether you're talking to a you know, your parent or your child, whether you're trying to influence somebody at work, embodied energy is magnetic, whether you're trying to date, right? It's not being about being louder or more aggressive in order to get people to listen to you. It's about being more genuinely you, and that is both incredibly powerful and incredibly satisfying. So that those are like the five big ones. I will also say that being embodied really helps with decision making. This is not as commonly sort of cited in the literature, but being your body can make decisions at a level that your mind cannot. It's not just about gut feeling, although I totally 100% suggest tapping into that and listening to it. But if you think about it, the analogy that somebody gave me, which I thought was so powerful, and I'm not totally remembering who it was, so I can't give them credit right now, but I will think about it, is maybe it was, maybe it was Christy Foster, it's, you know, walking through a crowded train station or an airport. Can you imagine? So robots like, melt down trying to calculate how to navigate a crowd without running into people they just like, can't do it because and your mind can't do it either, because there's just too many variables. There's too many people moving in different directions that your body can just intuitively navigate a crowd. You don't have to make conscious decisions about it, and you're not making conscious decisions about it. Most of the time. You are letting your body make those decisions. Your mind would be absolutely overwhelmed trying to calculate all the trajectories of all those different those different people. Bodies are great at making decisions. So that is another great benefit.

Okay, so

who can most benefit from more embodiment? I would generally say, honestly, most people could benefit from being more embodied, but it's especially helpful if you have any history of attachment wounds or trauma that affects your intimacy, if you feel disconnected from your emotions or your body, and a lot of times we don't know we're disconnected. So that's a hard one, right? When we're disconnected, it's hard to know we're disconnected. But if you feel like you get hijacked by your emotions easily, or you only have a couple emotions, or you don't know what emotions you are often having, that's a good clue. Or if you don't know what to do with your emotions when you have them, if you feel like you need to distract or check out or numb out a lot. That's another good clue. Or if you and your partner are struggling with communication or emotional or physical connection, and you want someone who's properly trained in somatic approaches, who understands trauma and who respects consent and boundaries. And this isn't just anyone. This isn't something you can do at like a weekend workshop on breath work, or something you want someone who understands very deeply that going slower is often faster when it comes to nervous system work. And so be really discerning. Be really discerning. And I'll give you a couple of just simple practices you can try that deepen embodiment, and you can just start with them today. So one thing is to just start checking in with your body a few times a day. I like to set specific times, because it will keep it in a habit or a ritual. Rituals are really powerful for humans. They just help us have regularity. So pick, pick a few times. Say, pick three times to check in with your body every day, and just Take three breaths and notice what you're feeling. Notice the sensations inside your body, not the story in your head. Really challenge yourself to feel. Where do I hold tension? Where am I holding tension in this moment? Are there any tingles or heaviness, or is there what is the texture of the sensations in my body? Where do I feel ease? Where do I feel clenching? Right? It's not about fixing anything. It's just about noticing, just allowing yourself to notice and let it be okay that what's ever there is there. Alright. So that's number one, checking in with your body a few times a day and just deeply noticing. Number two, if you're partnered, try breathing together for a minute. Or two, just sit facing each other and sync up your breath. It sounds really simple and kind of dorky, but it's actually incredibly powerful for CO regulating and feeling

connected with someone else. So

the beautiful thing so this is this podcast is just about embodiment. It is not a replacement for trauma. Work with a professional and your body is wise, but Healing Trauma particularly often requires professional support, and I would say almost always requires help. Humans are social species, and we do better together. The beautiful thing about embodiment work is that small changes really make big shifts. You don't have to overhaul your whole life. You just have to start paying attention to the wisdom that's already there in your body. And so my offer to you, my sort of mission should you choose to accept it is as you're listening to this notice one sensation you're feeling right now, and maybe it's just your feet on the floor or your back against a chair, or a little tension in your jaw, or maybe it's the feeling of air moving across your skin or the feeling of sunlight on Your shoulder. Just notice some sensation that's embodiment. You are already good at it. You already have an innate capacity for it. You were born with that, and that's the foundation for everything we've been talking about. All right, my dears, I will see you here next week.

Hey, if you're curious about how you could have better sex and connections, go grab my free guide, find your secret turn arms. It's right on my website, www.laurajurgens.com,

and the link is in the show notes. I'll see you here next time.