Returning to the Body

It’s good to want to heal.

To push ahead.

To open to life.

To have powerful experiences that expand and deepen us.

It’s good to want to be spiritual — whatever that word even means anymore.

The impulse to become who you are, to integrate the parts, to face the demons of your own psyche — this is not a problem. If anything, it’s rare. If only more of humanity carried this intention with the seriousness you do, reader.

But there is a risk on the other side of stagnation:

doing too much.

Moving too fast.

Trying to fix or transcend yourself at a pace your system can’t sustain.

In the process, we often bypass the very thing that needs care most:

the body that holds grief, shadow, fear, pleasure, addiction, longing, and pain.

Because when you zoom out, something becomes obvious:

We are not floating interfaces behind our eyes, remotely operating bodies.

We are bodies.

 

Why We Are Bodies

When you were born, you had no ego consciousness and very little left-brain rationality.

You were a body.

A screaming, naked, helpless eruption of life.

An accumulation of nature itself.

A raw animal.

Long before that — millions of years ago, if we take evolution as our guide — the prefrontal cortex wasn’t doing anything like what we ask of it now. There was no reflective self. No narrative identity. No capacity to plan a future beyond instinct, safety, and survival.

Self-reflection wasn’t even possible.

Abstraction wasn’t on the menu.

The body came first.

Our brains evolved for the body — not the other way around.

They developed to protect it from harm, help it find food, build shelter, make fire, form bonds, and survive long enough to reproduce. Thought emerged in service of flesh.

We did not descend into bodies.

We emerged from them.

Ancestrally.

Biologically.

Developmentally.

The body is not a vehicle we inhabit.

It is the ground from which everything else arises.

The body is foundational.

 

The Bypassing Trap — A Short History

The habit of ignoring the body is not new.

It appears almost as soon as humans begin to think abstractly.

Across history, many philosophical and spiritual traditions treated the body as something secondary, suspect, or in the way. Truth was located elsewhere — in ideas, heaven, enlightenment, reason, purity. Spiritual progress often meant rising above sensation, desire, and physical limitation. Thinking your way out of flesh.

Platonism framed the body as a temporary prison.

Gnosticism saw matter as a mistake.

Large strands of Christianity moralised flesh and spirit, privileging escape over participation.

Buddhism, at times, drifted toward detachment from sensation.

Stoicism sometimes became emotional suppression disguised as virtue.

These traditions are not identical, and each contains more embodied counter-currents. But a shared pattern runs through them: abstraction is elevated before regulation is established.

Modernity did not resolve this — it intensified it.

With Descartes, mind and body were formally split. The body became mechanism. Consciousness became something floating behind the eyes. Spiritual bypassing gave way to something even more pervasive: intellectual bypassing.

We didn’t transcend the body.

We forgot we had one.

Even contemporary spiritual culture repeats the pattern:

“You are not the body.”

“The ego is the problem.”

“Everything is love.”

“Just let go.”

These can be genuine insights.

But without capacity, they become weapons — used to bypass grief, terror, rage, sexuality, need. Used to leap over the very ground where healing would actually have to occur.

The bypassing trap shows up wherever meaning arrives faster than the body can metabolise it.

Where abstraction outruns regulation.

Where truth is pursued without regard for nervous-system capacity.

And by that measure, it has shaped much of human history.

The Mind That Forgot Its Body

It doesn’t take long to see that the trap of dissociating from the body is far more treacherous — and far more widespread — than we usually realise.

So where do we go from here?

I’d like to say: stop living in your head and start feeling alive in your body.

But for many of us, that simply isn’t possible.

And worse — it can be cruel advice.

Because most of us didn’t choose dissociation.

We inherited it.

We inherited dissociated bodies through a dissociated culture. And as a result, many of us can’t feel much of anything at all. We have been reduced to left-brain–dominant rationality — thinking about life instead of inhabiting it.

But how do you rationalise embodiment?

You can’t.

Embodiment is not something you understand your way into.

It has to be experienced — through the body itself.

And here is the real predicament: the very rationality we evolved to protect ourselves has quietly become our master. A culture that lives almost entirely in abstraction loses contact with felt reality. And when that happens, cruelty becomes procedural. We turn against our own nature. We turn against the planet. We turn living systems into mechanisms.

The tool designed to safeguard life begins to override it.

This is not a failure of intelligence.

It is intelligence without grounding.

Meaning without sensation.

Thought severed from flesh.

And once you see that, the depth of the problem — and the care required to address it — becomes impossible to ignore.

 

Bypassing Is Not the Same as Transcendence

This matters more than most people realise.

At least pragmatically, it is possible to transcend the nervous system prematurely. After all, being in a body is not easy. It’s uncomfortable, limiting, vulnerable. In existential terms, we live with one foot in infinity and one foot in finitude — and that finitude is largely negotiated through the body.

Spiritual bypassing is a term coined by psychologist John Welwood to describe a subtle but powerful strategy: using spiritual ideas, practices, or experiences to avoid unresolved emotional pain, developmental wounds, and nervous system dysregulation. It often looks elevated. It can sound wise. But it is not integration.

Bypassing does not remove suffering.

It relocates it into the shadows.

The aim of serious integration is not to escape the body, but to bring everything in. Including the body. Especially the body.

This is where polyvagal theory, developed by Stephen Porges, becomes profoundly useful. “Polyvagal” simply means “many wandering nerves” — a name that frustratingly describes how it looks rather than what it does. In essence, it maps how the nervous system organises safety, connection, mobilisation, and collapse.

Chronic disembodiment is often associated with dorsal vagal dominance — more commonly known as the freeze response. This is the nervous system’s last-resort survival strategy. When a mammal has no viable options — cannot fight, flee, or appease — the system shuts down. Heart rate drops. Emotion flattens. Sensation dulls. The organism “plays dead” in order to survive.

This distinction matters:

Freeze is not relaxation.

Freeze clamps down on arousal so the body does not overload. From the inside, it can feel calm, neutral, or detached — which is why it is so often mistaken for spiritual openness, equanimity, or peace. But it is a state of constrained life, not expanded presence.

And that makes it incredibly difficult to recognise in oneself.

Glazed eyes.

Emotional numbness.

Difficulty choosing.

A sense of being cut off from intuition.

Decisions feel impossible because decision-making ultimately relies on bodily sensation. When the body is offline, so is direction.

My suspicion — shared by many clinicians — is that a significant portion of modern culture operates in some degree of dorsal freeze. Functional. Productive. Rational. And profoundly disconnected.

From what I have observed and studied, it is very unlikely that genuine spiritual experience arises from a sustained freeze state. The spiritual states described across traditions appear to require bodily presence, nervous system safety, and the capacity to feel.

Transcendence without embodiment is not transcendence.

It is dissociation with better language.

Real integration does not rise above the nervous system.

It moves through it.

 

Psychedelics and the Nervous System

Let me be open.

I believe plant medicine, psychedelics, entheogens—whatever we choose to call them—can provide the fuel needed to humble the rational mind and begin rebuilding a relationship with the body. In that sense, they may be among the most powerful re-embodiment tools we currently know of.

But that does not mean we should all run out and take as much as possible.

Without the right preparation and containment, they can make the problem worse.

Much worse.

Psychedelics can deliver more insight than a nervous system can actually absorb.

You might be ready to see it.

You might even be able to metabolise it intellectually.

But when the body is left behind, the experience can leave you feeling more disconnected, more isolated, and more alone than before.

At the same time, psychedelics can restore embodiment—sometimes immediately, sometimes profoundly. Under the right conditions, with the right preparation, pacing, and dose, they can bring the body back online in unmistakable ways:

• breath deepening
• sensation returning
• emotion thawing
• presence landing

But they do not do this automatically.

Psychedelics amplify conditions rather than override them.

They reveal what becomes possible when capacity is met—and they expose where capacity is exceeded.

Preparation matters.

Dose matters.

Intention matters.

Environment matters.

And what happens after matters just as much as what happens during.

Without those supports, the same substances that re-embody can overwhelm.

Without integration, even genuine re-embodiment can fade, fragment, or be translated back into abstraction.

The medicine can open the door.

But the body has to be able to walk through it—

and stay.

Orienting Principles

Embodiment rarely begins as blissful, dramatic, or enlightening.

It usually begins as boring, uncomfortable, and faintly threatening.

This is one reason we don’t move toward it collectively.

Presence does not feel safe to a nervous system that learned early on to leave the body in order to survive.

So rather than instructions or prescriptions, what follows are orienting principles — ways to avoid making things worse.

 

Capacity Before Chemistry

Before working with psychedelics, it helps to have some relationship with your own body.

Meditation, in its simplest sense, is not about clearing the mind or achieving insight.

It is the capacity to stay with sensation and feeling without immediately reaching for distraction.

If sitting quietly with your body for ten minutes feels intolerable, that does not mean something is wrong with you.

It means your nervous system has not yet learned that presence is safe.

In that case, psychedelics are unlikely to help yet.

They tend to amplify whatever relationship to sensation already exists.

This does not mean seated meditation is the only path.

Many people — especially those with ADHD, trauma histories, or high baseline activation — find stillness inaccessible at first.

Movement can be meditation.

Yoga. Walking. Climbing. Swimming. Martial arts.

Anything that brings sustained, attentive contact into the body can build the same capacity.

The common thread is not technique.

It is contact.

Embodiment is not dramatic.

It is often dull.

It can feel like watching paint dry.

But there is no shortcut around it.

Psychedelics do not teach presence from scratch.

They deepen a relationship that already exists.

 

Somatic Over Semantics

A useful starting point comes from Somatic Experiencing.

Rather than analysing thoughts or chasing insight, the work begins by tuning into bodily sensation — no matter how subtle — in everyday life.

Notice when you feel off.

Anxious.

Constricted.

Collapsed.

Then notice what openness feels like.

And I don’t mean thinking about what you feel.

I mean actually checking in.

Pause.

Scan.

Track sensation without naming it, fixing it, or interpreting it.

Warmth.

Pressure.

Tightness.

Movement.

Stillness.

Let sensation speak before meaning rushes in.

This is a core principle of Somatic Experiencing, a modality developed by trauma researcher Peter Levine. His book Waking the Tiger remains one of the clearest introductions to how the nervous system returns to regulation — not through insight alone, but through felt experience.

The emphasis here is simple, and quietly radical:

the body must be met before it can change.

 

Nerd Out on the Body

There’s an irony here worth using to our advantage.

Many of us are deeply intellectualised. We live in our heads. We consume information constantly. Rather than fighting that straight away, we can use it as a bridge.

Learning about the nervous system, trauma responses, and embodiment can provide orientation — not as a substitute for feeling, but as a way of making feeling less frightening.

Understanding what activation, freeze, collapse, and regulation actually are reduces shame. It reduces confusion. It helps the mind stop panicking when the body begins to thaw. It gives language to experiences that previously felt chaotic, personal, or broken.

Used properly, knowledge doesn’t pull us further from the body — it reassures the mind enough to let the body speak.

Alongside Waking the Tiger, other grounded entry points include:

• In an Unspoken Voice — how trauma lives beneath language
• The Body Keeps the Score — a broad, clinical overview

Read slowly.

Notice what happens in your body as you read.

If something tightens, pause.

If something softens, stay.

And if you’re already on the embodiment path, this podcast episode opens the field beautifully:

Embodiment Means Being Torn Apart & Flying Away (The Emerald / Mythic Body).

Information is not the goal.

Capacity is.

Learning about the body is useful only if it ultimately brings you back into it — rather than giving you another clever way to avoid it.

 

Traditions That Did Not Bypass the Body

It’s worth remembering that not all spiritual traditions made the mistake of abandoning embodiment.

Some placed it at the very centre.

Yogic traditions — especially Tantra — are perhaps the clearest example. Tantra does not seek awakening away fromthe body, but through it. Sensation, breath, emotion, and energy are not obstacles to transcend, but gateways into deeper presence.

Taoist practice is similarly grounded. Tai chi, qigong, breathwork, and internal alchemy work directly with the body as an intelligent, self-organising system. Regulation, flow, and balance are cultivated somatically, not imposed conceptually.

Across many indigenous shamanic traditions, spirit is inseparable from land, body, ancestry, and rhythm. Trance states are embodied, communal, and paced — not dissociative or isolating. The body is not left behind; it is the vehicle.

There are also deeply embodied streams within mystical Christianity, Judaism, and Sufism, where song, movement, devotion, and lived experience matter more than belief alone. Here, transformation arises through participation, not abstraction.

These traditions did not aim to transcend the body.

They aimed to inhabit it deeply enough for transformation to occur.

And that distinction matters.

Doing any of these practices on a regular basis will bring you into a closer relationship with your body. 

 

Dosing: More Is Not Better

Higher doses do not automatically lead to better outcomes.

This is a nuanced — and often controversial — topic, but it’s worth saying plainly: there are situations where a higher dose may be more impactful for someone who is deeply dissociated. In some cases, the roots of disembodiment run very deep — into limbic or pre-verbal layers where cognition alone cannot reach.

That said, this does not mean high doses are a good idea for most people.

Dissociation is, at its core, a strategy for safety. A nervous system that learned early that the world was overwhelming, misattuned, or dangerous will unconsciously prioritise control and distance. From that perspective, psychedelic work becomes less about insight and more about containment.

This is where set and setting become non-negotiable. They matter in every psychedelic context — but when working with dissociation or freeze states, they matter even more. A high dose in a disembodied system carries significantly more risk. Too much, too fast, can overwhelm the very structures that are barely holding things together.

And yes — we live in a dissociated culture. Almost no one arrives untouched by this. But for those with histories of chronic misattunement, neglect, or abuse, the margin for error is thinner.

If that is you, it may be wiser — at least initially — to step away from substances altogether and return to practices that build basic capacity: meditation, somatic work, movement, therapy. Not as a failure. As preparation.

A high-dose experience in a disembodied state can be destabilising, even damaging. It can push someone further away from the safety they are seeking, reinforcing dissociation rather than resolving it.

Lower doses, by contrast, often offer a gentler and more sustainable entry point. They may initially surface anxiety or discomfort — but when approached slowly, relationally, and consistently, they can support reconnection rather than rupture.

Microdosing psilocybin, in particular, can be a surprisingly effective place to begin. When paired with meditation or somatic practices, it may gradually soften rigid cognitive dominance and reopen access to emotional and bodily awareness. Not dramatically. Not all at once. But steadily.

For many, this slow approach offers the highest likelihood of loosening the grip of hyper-rationality without overwhelming the system that learned to rely on it.

Embodiment is not forced.

It is invited.

And dosing, more than anything else, determines whether that invitation feels safe enough to accept.

 

Substances & Embodiment

A careful word

There are substances that can support re-embodiment — but they do not all do this in the same way.

And more intensity does not mean more healing.

For embodiment work, high-dose psilocybin is often not where I would begin — especially for people with trauma histories or long-standing dissociation. At higher doses, psilocybin can become highly cognitive, symbolic, and disorganising. Powerful, yes. But not always regulating.

If I were walking this path again, I would orient first toward substances associated with safety, attunement, and nervous-system support, rather than those that overwhelm perception.

MDMA

MDMA, while not a psychedelic in the strict sense, is often described as an empathogen. Its unique action reliably generates felt safety, emotional openness, and relational attunement — qualities that are deeply reparative for trauma and dissociation.

This is one reason MDMA-assisted therapy has become the current gold standard in trauma research in countries willing to study it seriously. The clinical outcomes are striking — not because of insight, but because of regulation.

Huachuma (San Pedro)

Huachuma occupies an interesting middle ground. It can feel psychedelic, but it is slower, gentler, and often more embodied than psilocybin.

Many people report that Huachuma naturally invites movement, walking, and relationship with the environment — training embodiment during the experience rather than abstracting away from it. Traditionally, it is not a medicine for lying still in darkness, but for being in life: in motion, in contact, in landscape.

A word on MAOIs

Adding a small amount of MAOI can shift psilocybin from a head-heavy experience into something more body-led. However, I do not recommend experimenting with MAOIs outside of careful, experienced retreat contexts.

At the very least: research MAOIs thoroughly. Poorly understood combinations can be dangerous.

High-dose psychedelics & ayahuasca

High-dose psilocybin and ayahuasca can be profoundly instructive — but they are also highly demanding on the nervous system.

Ayahuasca, in particular, can teach safety, and can open you up to re-embodiment in hours, but often through ordeal. Without sufficient preparation, capacity, and integration, these experiences may deepen dissociation rather than resolve it.

Lower doses of psilocybin, by contrast, can feel surprisingly different — more grounded, somatic, and relational. Once again, dose, context, and readiness matter more than the substance itself.

 

Gentle Plant Allies

Alongside — or instead of — stronger substances, there are many legal, lower-risk plant allies that support the nervous system gradually and relationally.

These plants tend to work through regulation rather than rupture, and through repetition rather than intensity.

Examples include:

• Cacao
• Bobinsana
• CBD
• Rapé
• Ajo sacha
• Other gentle Amazonian allies traditionally used to support emotional processing, grounding, and reconnection with the body

These plants do not promise revelation.

They invite relationship.

 

What Blocks Embodiment

Some habits reliably pull us away from the body — especially when used unconsciously.

• Constant stimulation
  Endless scrolling, noise, and multitasking fragment attention. When attention never settles, sensation never deepens. The body fades into the background.
• Numbing substances
  Alcohol, benzodiazepines, habitual cannabis, and similar sedatives can dull sensation over time. Relief is mistaken for regulation. Absence of pain is confused with presence.
• Living in analysis
  Endless self-reflection and theory can become a refined form of dissociation. Insight replaces contact. The body is discussed, not felt.
• Spiritual bypassing
  Meditation, prayer, or psychedelics used to escape discomfort block embodiment. Calm is not the same as safety. Transcendence without presence is still dissociation.
• Control over listening
  Forceful discipline, perfectionism, or self-punishment override bodily signals. The body complies, but does not participate.

Embodiment doesn’t grow where sensation is numbed, overridden, or explained away.

It grows where the body is allowed to register experience — even when it’s slow, awkward, or uncomfortable.

The question is simple:

Does this bring me into my body, or take me further away?

That alone is a powerful compass.

 

Embodiment = Bodily Presence

Practice is what makes it real

Really, it’s all pointing to the same thing.

Psychedelics amplify presence by loosening the brain’s reducing valve — letting more sensation, emotion, and immediacy flood into awareness at once. That’s a big part of why they can be profoundly healing: they temporarily reunite mind and matter into a single field of experience.

But psychedelics aren’t actually doing the healing.

They’re revealing what does the healing.

Presence.

They show us what it feels like when the body is allowed back into the room.

And here’s the part that matters most: presence doesn’t require substances. It can be trained. Slowly. Mundanely. Repeatedly.

Psychedelics may offer a glimpse — sometimes a dramatic one — but presence is built through practice.

Walking to the shop: can you feel your toes roll against the ground?

Lifting weights: can you feel the muscles contract and release?

Yoga: that one’s obvious — it’s baked in.

Really, anything counts.

Whatever you’re doing, try being with it rather than hovering above it.

That, ultimately, is embodiment.

Not transcendence.

Not insight.

Contact.

 

Final Thoughts — The Body Comes First

If there is one priority worth naming, it may be this:

bring your nervous system into relationship.

It is the most fundamental layer of being human.

We are nervous systems first. Everything else comes second.

Which is why eating a bunch of mushrooms may not deliver what you hope it will. Not because psychedelics are useless — but because embodiment is no longer our default state. It has become a skill.

That sounds strange.

Unnatural, even.

But that’s where we are.

So respect your body.

Listen to it.

Learn from it.

And if you choose to journey — bring your body with you.

That’s where the work actually happens.