Spirituality, for many, is experienced at a distance from the body. It is spoken about, thought about, believed in, and often longed for, yet rarely lived as something felt and inhabited. This distance is not accidental. Much of modern spirituality has been shaped by habits of transcendence — reaching beyond the body rather than returning to it. Embodied spirituality begins with a different movement altogether. It begins not by seeking elsewhere, but by turning toward the body as the place where spiritual life is already unfolding.

To speak of embodied spirituality is to touch a place many instinctively resist. Returning to the body sounds simple, yet for many it feels uncertain, even unsafe. We have learned to live at a distance from sensation, vulnerability, and felt immediacy, often in the name of spirituality itself. And yet what repeatedly reveals itself through lived experience is this: spirituality, if it is to be true, cannot remain abstract. It must be lived through the body rather than spoken about from a distance.

This recognition — that spirituality must be lived through the body rather than held at a distance — did not arrive as a conclusion drawn from ideas, but as something felt and confirmed. Recently, I was given a small deck of cards with a guidebook titled Cultivating Grace by Miranda MacPherson. Opening the book at random, my eyes landed on a page describing a card named Embodied Spirituality. There was nothing more that needed to be read. The words named something already known. I closed the book and the box, aware that the invitation had already been given.

Spirituality, if it is to be true, must be lived through the body rather than spoken about from a distance.

What follows in this essay is not a method to be applied, nor a programme of self-improvement. It is a foundational reflection on embodied spiritual practice as a way of life — an invitation to return to the body as the ground where spiritual life is received, integrated, and lived. This essay serves as a threshold. It prepares the soil for what follows, naming the orientation required before any practice can become true.

Much of modern spirituality remains curiously disembodied. Even when spiritual language is used, the body is often treated as secondary — something to manage, refine, or eventually transcend. The body becomes an object of improvement rather than a place of encounter. When spirituality is lived in this way, it may offer insight or belief, but it rarely offers integration.

Yet spiritual life does not unfold above the body. It unfolds through it. The body is not an obstacle to awakening, but the place where awakening becomes lived. To return to the body is not regression or indulgence; it is descent — a willingness to inhabit the very ground we have learned to overlook.

The body is not an obstacle to awakening, but the place where awakening becomes lived.

B.K.S. Iyengar once said, “The body is your temple. Keep it pure and clean for the soul to reside in.” Read carefully, this is not a moral demand, but an orientation. It names the body as the dwelling place of spiritual life, not its enemy. The ancient insight attributed to Patanjali echoes the same movement when the journey is described as one that passes through the self rather than bypassing it. Awakening does not occur by leaving the human behind, but by inhabiting it fully.

In my own spiritual journey, particularly in the years following a profound awakening in my mid-twenties, I encountered many sincere seekers who had absorbed the teaching “you are not your body” as a belief rather than a realization. Detachment became distance. Transcendence became avoidance. Spirituality was spoken about fluently, yet lived at arm’s length from sensation, vulnerability, and grounded contact. A similar pattern appears within the Western Christian tradition, where the body has often been associated with “the flesh” and treated with suspicion. In both cases, the result is the same: a spirituality that struggles to touch life as it is actually lived.

The consequences of this misunderstanding are not subtle. When spirituality is lived at a distance from the body, it produces fragmentation rather than freedom. James Joyce captured this condition with characteristic precision when he wrote, “Mr Duffy lived some distance from his body.” The line endures because it names a quiet tragedy that has become almost normalised — a life lived close to thought, belief, and habit, yet removed from immediacy, sensation, and felt contact.

Mary Oliver gestures toward the return with equal simplicity and compassion when she writes, “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” There is no strategy here, no ascetic demand, no spiritual achievement to pursue. There is only permission — an invitation to re-enter the body not as an object to be mastered, but as a living participant in spiritual life.

There is only permission — an invitation to re-enter the body not as an object to be mastered, but as a living participant in spiritual life.

This essay therefore stands as a foundation. Before exploring specific movements, practices, or pathways, it is necessary to name the ground from which they arise. What follows in the series held within the mnemonic ROOTED unfolds from this return. ROOTEDness is not something to be achieved, but something to be remembered — a quality of being at home in the body, available to life, and receptive to what seeks to be lived through us.

ROOTED names the quality of embodied spiritual practice that this essay gestures toward, not as a method to follow, but as an invitation to inhabit life more fully. Each movement within ROOTED points to a lived orientation rather than a task to complete. Together, they describe a way of returning to the body as the ground where spiritual life is received, integrated, and expressed.

This invitation to ROOTEDness will be unfolded gradually through a series of articles published here on the blog. Each piece in the series will explore one movement of ROOTED in depth, not as an abstract teaching, but as a lived and embodied orientation that can be recognised, practised, and allowed to mature over time. What follows here is not a summary of that journey, but its threshold.

• R — Returning
  An invitation to come back from abstraction, distraction, and distance, and to re-enter the immediacy of bodily life as it is being lived now.
• O — Opening
  A softening of habitual defences, allowing sensation, feeling, and vulnerability to be met without judgement or control.
• O — Orienting
  A gentle alignment of attention toward what is already present, learning to listen rather than strive, and to sense direction from within lived experience.
• T — Trusting
  A growing confidence in the body as a reliable place of spiritual KNOWING, rather than something to be transcended or managed.
• E — Embodying
  Allowing insight, prayer, and intention to take form through posture, breath, movement, and daily life, rather than remaining conceptual.
• D — Dwelling
  Learning to remain, to abide, and to live from this groundedness over time, so that embodied spirituality becomes less something we practise and more the way we live.

Embodied spirituality is not an abstract philosophy. It is a lived Way. It asks for a descent into immediacy, a relinquishing of spiritual distance, and a willingness to let the body become the place of encounter. The invitation is simple, though not easy: to return, to settle, and to allow spiritual life to take root where you already are.

Continue with ROOTED

This essay forms the foundation of the ROOTED series within The Embodied Way. Each article explores one movement of embodied spiritual practice in depth, beginning with ROOTED — R: Returning. You are welcome to continue with the series as it unfolds here on the website.