“Our quality of being is the ground of all appropriate action.”

- Thich Nhat Hanh.

The word embodied has been following me around lately.  It’s been showing up everywhere.
Everywhere I look — embodied leadership, embodied teaching, embodied health — there it is.

I must confess: even though the word sounds lovely, I’m not sure I really understood what it entirely meant until recently.  Even when people have used it to describe me.

I remember two moments in particular when this happened.
The first was when one of my yoga teachers once called me “embodied” and said my role as a teacher was to help people become “more embodied,” too.  At the time, I assumed he meant something purely physical, as if I had developed good proprioception or simply knew where to put my limbs and could therefore understand how to instruct others to do so too.

The second was when a friend described me as “so embodied”.  A compliment, I think.  And this time, I knew she didn’t mean my alignment in Tadasana.  She was seeing something in how I showed up — something I wasn’t quite seeing in myself.

Both times, I was flattered… and a bit unconvinced.

Embodiment has never been something I’ve comfortably identified with, despite all the years I’ve done yoga.  For most of my life, I’ve lived almost entirely in my head: analysing, anticipating, managing, coping, controlling. Yoga has always offered a break from that, a way into my body for an hour or so, but I wasn’t entirely sure it created the deeper shift this mysterious “embodiment” word implied.

I thought embodiment was something other people had — something I could only aspire to, conceptually, because I didn’t know what it would actually feel like for me.

This past year changed that.

Stepping away from work, saying no when my reflex was to say yes, letting myself rest, wander, and reflect — all of it ended up being a kind of education that thinking could never have given me.  Education by action, not theory.

And slowly, slowly, I started noticing that I was making choices from a different place.  Less from fear, habit, or expectation, and more from something steadier underneath all that.  A kind of inner yes or no that seemed to come from my chest or belly — intuition, feeling, something that came from the body rather than the brain.

I didn’t plan that shift.  I didn’t even realise it was happening.  Maybe yoga had been doing its quiet work all along and had laid the groundwork.  Perhaps the people closest to me could see it before I could name it.  But for the first time, I’m beginning to get an inkling of what embodiment actually feels like.

As I return to teaching again and sharing what I love about yoga, I think what I most want to bring with me is… this.  This subtle, steady way of experiencing the body, and life.  This sense that life feels different when I’m actually in it, instead of hovering somewhere above it in thought.

“Embodiment” feels just that bit simpler and less mystical.  To me, it’s beginning to mean noticing when I’ve drifted up into my head and deliberately choosing to come back down.  Where "I am more than my thoughts” has become suddenly more than a soundbite or a mantra. It means trusting what I feel instead of endlessly analysing what I think.  It means letting my actions line up with what I say matters — even in small, unglamorous ways.

This is why yoga has held me for so long.

It gives us a place to act on what we say we believe.  To put intention into muscles, breath, and attention.  And to feel the difference between thinking about change and actually living it, even for a moment.

It’s one thing to talk about slowing down.  It’s another thing entirely to pause in a pose, soften your eyes, notice your breath, and actually feel the ground beneath your feet. Or even take a sabbatical, for that matter.

Practice makes ideas real.  Practice gives theories a body.  Practice teaches us things we can’t learn from thought alone.

When I look back on this year — the decisions I’ve made, the boundaries I’ve held, the risks I’ve taken, the things I’ve allowed myself to want — it all comes down to one truth: I didn’t think my way into these changes.  I practised my way into them.  One tiny choice at a time.

If any of this resonates — if you’ve been hovering in your head, waiting to feel ready, or longing to feel more like yourself somehow — embodiment holds a way back to something steadier and truer, in a way that’s hard to put into words but unmistakable when you feel it.

Even a small taste of it feels right.  And reachable.

A teacher once told me my job was to help people become “more embodied.” I think I’m finally taking that to heart by understanding it in my own.

And I’d love to explore this with you, letting the yoga mat be an experiment in embodiment through action, one practice and one breath at a time. 

Let’s practice.