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173. How to Get Out of Your Head and Live in Your Body with Philip Shepherd
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Want to learn how to live in your body instead of just in your head?
In this episode of Spiritual Fitness, Eric Bigger talks with embodiment expert and bestselling author Philip Shepherd about moving beyond overthinking and fully integrating mind and body.
Philip shares how breaking free from cultural conditioning and reconnecting with your body can unlock deeper peace, truth, and presence.
You’ll discover practical steps to embody what you know, release mental overload, and experience life with more clarity and connection.
This episode unpacks:
- Why moving beyond overthinking leads to true presence
- What “hara” is and why your belly holds deep truth
- How to listen to the world through your body
- Breaking the habit of separating thinking from being
- How embodied living brings clarity and unlocks your gifts
About the guest:
Philip Shepherd is recognized as a leader in the global embodiment movement. He is the founder of The Embodied Present Process™ (TEPP), which offers a series of over 250 practices to help people ground themselves in the body’s wisdom. These practices are taught online as well as in workshops, retreats and Facilitators Trainings worldwide.
Philip is the author of two books, Radical Wholeness and New Self, New World, and co-author of Deep Fitness. The philosophy and practical applications of TEPP help people recognize how well-being is undermined by living in the head – a state of disembodiment our culture takes for granted. TEPP helps people recover the intimacy of true presence, in which they soften into the deeper intelligence of the body, find themselves rekindled with purpose, and discover a new kind of freedom and possibility in their lives. Find out more at EmbodiedPresent.com.
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Transcript
Introduction to Spiritual Fitness
00:00:05
Speaker
Welcome to the Spiritual Fitness Podcast. I'm your host, Eric Bigger. And each week, we will explore powerful practices, inspiring stories, and expert insights to guide you on your path to holistic health.
00:00:18
Speaker
By blending spirituality and physical wellness, we support you in strengthening your body and soul. Whether you're a seasoned spiritual seeker or just beginning your journey, the Spiritual Fitness Podcast is here to help you unlock your inner potential and live your most vibrant, purposeful life.
00:00:35
Speaker
It's miracle season.
00:00:39
Speaker
Spiritual Fitness, Spiritual Fitness. I'm your host, Eric Bigger, back again with another
Guest Introduction: Philip Shepard
00:00:45
Speaker
episode. And today we get to be present and body lit.
00:00:50
Speaker
And I have the embodiment expert, Philip Shepard, also bestselling author. And he has so many great things to share from deep fitness, radical wholeness, and his process, the embodiment present process.
00:01:06
Speaker
Philip, welcome to Spiritual Fitness. How are you? Eric, I'm wonderful. And it's it's a real pleasure to meet you and to be here with you. So thank you for that. Well, thank you. Thank you. um I've realized in these last six to eight months of my life, I've been learning to slow down because most of my life I've been in my intellectual property of my mind.
00:01:28
Speaker
I've been learning lately about embodiment, presence, and integration. From your paradigm of life and the history of living, How did you fall into embodiment and present? How did you bring that together for your existence and what you do in the world?
Philip's Journey to Embodiment
00:01:46
Speaker
It started a long time ago. um Okay. aha ah You know, when I was teenager, I could feel, you know, you you talk about being told to live in your head and go, go, go, and all this stuff going on.
00:02:01
Speaker
You know, I could feel how my culture was basically cle wanting me to make myself small. It was like I was being funneled into this cookie cutter of of what what life is. and And the whole of my being rebelled at that.
00:02:18
Speaker
and You know, at the end of high school, I sort of had a choice. I'd been accepted to study physics at university, which really interested me. But then there was this other option, this idea that I would go to England and buy a bicycle and head off for Japan.
00:02:36
Speaker
So that's what I did. Wow. and something in me just knew that if I didn't step out of my culture, I would be dragged down by it. And so there on the bike, you're wide open to the world.
00:02:50
Speaker
And I went through so many, you know, went through Europe and the Middle East and India and eventually Japan and and went through so many different ways of understanding what it means to be human.
00:03:02
Speaker
And every one of them was luminous and every one of them was limited in its way. I really went to Japan to study this classical form of Japanese theater called no theater. It's 600 years old.
00:03:18
Speaker
Like every footstep has been the same for 600 years, every gesture. And it's exquisite.
Learning 'Hara' and Cultural Reflections
00:03:24
Speaker
And i learned in studying no theater about hara, which is the Japanese word for belly, and how they, that the belly is the seed of their deepest truth. It's where they come to rest within themselves. It's where they, you know, all these expressions we have in English that refer to the head like he's hot-headed.
00:03:45
Speaker
In Japan, they say his belly rises easily. You know, that is their center. And so I was lucky to encounter that as a teenager. And i was gone two years, and when I came back, I developed the ability to question my own culture, the ability to undo the veneer of normality that I'd been habituated to.
00:04:09
Speaker
And so it began. and And ultimately, the cultural instruction to live in your head is so strong. It's so embedded in our language, our institutions, our hierarchies, our architecture, our cars. I mean, what's a car? It's a head on wheels.
00:04:27
Speaker
Why do we have a love with a car? Because we love being in a head, moving along the road. And it's got two headlights, like we have two eyes. And you never see a car with three headlights, even though
Cultural Mandates and Mind-Body Division
00:04:37
Speaker
that would illuminate the road better. But, you know, we need the metaphor of this head on wheels to move out of the head and back into the body has been...
00:04:46
Speaker
really my life's work. And it just feels better and better. yeah and This quality of being at rest in the body and at rest on the earth and at rest in the present is the antidote to that so that rushing quality that you speak of where we're never at rest.
00:05:06
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, we've been at rest. You think about this. We've been at rest on the earth since the day we were born. That's just how it is. And yet, you know, for most people, when when was the last time you truly felt yourself at rest on the earth?
00:05:23
Speaker
We just don't. Yeah. And it's so hardwired and conditioned in programming that even times now that I'm more evolved and healed, even more, I can find myself, if I'm just on the phone, I can feel that anxiousness coming through my vibration.
00:05:41
Speaker
And I'm like, why am rushing? Where is this coming from? And I have to tell myself, it's okay. It's okay. Where you going? And, you know, being in, you know, Los Angeles, I realized this culture, you got to get the next thing. You got to get the next gig. You got to do this. You got to do that.
00:05:57
Speaker
Know the agent, know the manager, know this person, go to this concert, go to this event. And you're never in your body. Like you're never your body. And most of my life, I've been really good at intellectualizing life, making it make sense. I can figure it out.
00:06:12
Speaker
I'm in survival mode. I got this, but never could feel. So when I was having the acknowledgments or the success, I couldn't feel it. And now to what you're speaking on, I can see when I slowed down,
00:06:26
Speaker
and take her bird-eye view like, oh, look at nature. Look at the cars driving. Oh, look at the little girl walking with her mom. Look at your dog.
Embodiment and Presence
00:06:35
Speaker
I'm all present with the present of the moment.
00:06:39
Speaker
And I think, you know, I'm curious to know at what age or what part of life you knew for sure this was the true medicine of being human, was to be present and to embody life through our vessels and not our...
00:06:54
Speaker
mind I knew it in my core as a teenager. Yeah. the The impulse that moved me to, it's ah as an 18-year-old, to go to England and buy a bike and buy my matting off for Japan. We'll catch you later.
00:07:08
Speaker
That impulse was deep, deep in my body. It was like in the pelvic bowl, on the pelvic floor, such a clear necessity that I felt there. It has carried me through my life.
00:07:20
Speaker
Yeah. I like to say, you know, things of that is like body intelligence. You just know. You don't even have to believe. I know. And when I believe, well, you know you be and then you do.
00:07:32
Speaker
Yeah, so there's this tension within within each of us, and it can be characterized as a tension between the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere. And i don't know if you know the work of Ian McGilchrist, but he is brilliant.
00:07:45
Speaker
And he talks about the left hemisphere as this linear mode of thinking that builds models of the world and really doesn't doesn't even see wholeness. All it sees is parts.
00:07:59
Speaker
And then there's the right hemisphere that feels wholeness and attunes to it and grounds us in reality. And another way to characterize that is we are taught to know everything like in an objective way. I either i can look around the space I'm in and there's I can tell you what everything is. and And then, well, if I know what everything is, why would I need to feel any of it?
00:08:26
Speaker
But there's that, you know, that there's that quality. You talk about seeing the the little girl. been trained into is... been trained into is to abide in known relationships, knowing, knowing, knowing what everything is, which keeps the brain kind of grasping.
00:08:43
Speaker
And to come back to the body is to move into a realm of felt relationship where you feel your relationship with the tree, with the sky, with the breeze, with this other person, where you feel your words as you're speaking them.
00:09:01
Speaker
Another way of understanding the divide is we have been systematically taught to separate our thinking from our being.
00:09:12
Speaker
um So you you think about how we're, how I mean, they take these young kids, like these five-year-olds, and put them into this school system that says, sit still in your chair all day long.
00:09:25
Speaker
If you don't sit still, you're going to be in trouble. And so we put the body to sleep and and then fill it your head with with this agenda, these ideas, this knowledge, these strategies, and we will reward you.
00:09:41
Speaker
So, you know, 12 years of the system of reward and punishment, and we emerge from that system believing that we can think more clearly if we sort of shut down all that sensation below the neck and just consolidate our thinking in the head. And I remember when I believed that.
00:10:00
Speaker
But how could you think more clearly with a fragment of your intelligence than you can think with the whole of your being? To join your thinking in your being so that every thought is felt through the whole of your being and every sensation felt.
00:10:16
Speaker
in your being is recognized as a form of thought.
Integrating Thinking and Being
00:10:19
Speaker
And then what happens? Because your thinking is holistic, you lose that running commentary, that inner dialogue. I mean, inner dialogue is only possible when we are in division.
00:10:34
Speaker
The basis of it is here's this wound within us, where we've separated our thinking from our being. And we long for wholeness. Anytime we're wounded, we want to heal it.
00:10:46
Speaker
So our attention is brought back to this wound, trying to reconcile through this inner dialogue, this rupture in our being. And once that heals, then the mind goes quiet and you find the world more interesting than you find your own ideas about it.
00:11:05
Speaker
At least that's my experience. That's a beautiful TED talk. That was a lot. I don't know if you ever did a you know ah process or case study on the knowing paradigm versus the felt paradigm or the knowing relationship and the felt relationship because we live in this new world of AI, information, but no one talks about feeling.
00:11:30
Speaker
He or she who feels it knows it. We have the known. I know this is my partner. I know this is my job. I know this is my title of what I do. But what does it feel like in your body?
00:11:42
Speaker
And I used to think having the knowledge was everything. But I couldn't ground the knowledge into my being because I was always up here flying around. It's like, I want to be in my body.
00:11:54
Speaker
And I will ask myself, Philip, why don't I want to get him? Why don't I feel safe in my body? And then I went back to birth. I like, oh, premature. I came a month early. What was my mom dealing with?
00:12:06
Speaker
Oh, I had a twin. I didn't make it. Oh, so i I didn't feel safe in the womb of that ocean. And then I look at my life, Philip. I've always jumped when I wasn't ready because I didn't feel safe.
00:12:19
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So then I'm thinking, my sister that I lost at birth was my twin. Maybe I never grieved her and I never wanted to feel that grief or that sadness.
00:12:30
Speaker
So I just went on life and I'm just going and going and going. Figure this out. Go. Accomplish. Read the book. You know, was on this journey just to come back home to myself.
00:12:42
Speaker
There's the messaging from our our culture ah about safety and, you know, make enough money that you can retire and and and everything is about safety. And I mean, yeah, you know, look both ways before you cross the street, but but there's something about safety that is inherently anti-life.
00:13:01
Speaker
Life is not safe. You're going to be wounded. You're going to get sick. You're going to feel grief and loss. You're going to die. If you're alive, you're not safe.
00:13:12
Speaker
and And so I think people kind of understand that. But the response, the conclusion they draw is, oh, you know, life isn't safe, so maybe maybe if I'm less alive, I'll be more safe.
00:13:29
Speaker
And they make themselves smaller. Right. And that's what happens. They they they reduce, they hand themselves in to safety. And, you know, the the the alternative to safety is security.
00:13:42
Speaker
And the security of your being something no one can take from you. So safety is contingent on circumstance, having a good lock on your door, whatever it is.
00:13:53
Speaker
Safety requires contingency on circumstance. Security of your being isn't contingent on circumstance. It's always there once you find it. Once you can drop down into the body and come to rest there, that's something no one can take from you.
00:14:09
Speaker
So how do we do that? What's the easiest way to drop into our body on a day-to-day to build in this new software within ourselves to say, I want to be present?
Understanding Presence and Wholeness
00:14:19
Speaker
Because intentionally, that's what I'm working on.
00:14:21
Speaker
I mean, I know what I do, but what would you recommend? Someone out there listening who's going to see this, how do I become more present within my body where I can feel safe?
00:14:32
Speaker
So our culture really complicates presence, and it's complicated by this division that we live in. The result of that division is that we are self-conscious. We are conscious of the self, and we r we put ourselves in charge of organizing the self.
00:14:58
Speaker
And we organize our thoughts. We organize our responses to other people. We organize our emotion. To me, mike my experience of being present is an experience in which I feel myself being organized by the present.
00:15:13
Speaker
I'm being touched by it. I'm being guided by it. I'm being shown the next step forward by it. I'm being informed by it. And if I've taken charge of organizing myself, then I've i've got a buffer to to ever feeling the touch of the present in that way.
00:15:29
Speaker
So that quality of presence, you know, if somebody somebody says to you, Eric, just be present. I mean, in our culture, the response is, okay, give me a minute. And I start organizing right yes into what i imagine presence to be, right?
00:15:46
Speaker
So I see an equivalence between presence and receptivity. If I'm fully receptive to you, I'm fully present to you.
00:15:57
Speaker
If I'm fully present you, I'm fully receptive to you. So then to understand presence as a state of receptivity, what facilitates receptivity? Emptiness does, right? If a bowl is empty, it can receive.
00:16:12
Speaker
whatever you pour into it. If a bowl is full, it's going to spill over. It can't receive it. There is a cultural imperative that says, well, you want to be full of good ideas. You want to be full of great plans. You want to want to have all that in place. And and we we have a an aversion to the emptiness that invites the present to move into and through us in that state of receptivity.
00:16:37
Speaker
The challenge for me that that journey into presence is one of feeling all the bound, unintegrated energies in the body that have been parked there.
00:16:53
Speaker
and integrating them one by one. It's like the ah body's full of cotton balls. And then our our inclination is, well, how do I get rid of them? but But the there's only one journey to wholeness, which is integration.
00:17:08
Speaker
And nothing else leads to wholeness, only integration. So the intelligence within your being that understands wholeness, that understands integration, is in the pelvic bowl.
00:17:21
Speaker
That's the center of your being. That's where when I when i come to the security of my being, I'm dropping down. yeah into the pelvic bowl. And what happens in the course of our lives is we have events that cannot be fully felt in the moment, cannot be integrated.
00:17:39
Speaker
If we allowed that to happen, we would be annihilated. And so we park them in the body. But then the years go by and you find that groundedness within yourself.
00:17:51
Speaker
And then you can gently revisit those cotton balls, those shadows in the body and feel them and give them love and give them gratitude.
00:18:02
Speaker
And they are like orphans. They've been exiled from home, right? Home is the pelvic bowl and they are held in exile. And how do you bring an orphan home? With love and acceptance.
00:18:15
Speaker
And you offer those qualities and they they feel seen and willing to follow you down. Like I literally feel that energy moving down through the body to arrive on the pelvic floor and then it resolves. It's like...
00:18:30
Speaker
you know what a murmuration of starlings is? These birds that fly in this shape yeah in the sky and and the shape ripples and dips and moves. Well, you imagine a lone starling that's not part of the murmuration and its flight is erratic and then it joins the murmuration and now it's harmonized by the flight of the whole. And that's what happens. These these reactive orphaned energies within the body They come down and they merge with your being and they are harmonized by it.
00:19:03
Speaker
It's so beautiful. It's like, like you said, like the book, radical wholeness, acceptance, all of it. Yeah. And it brings me to this question I have for you today.
00:19:14
Speaker
And I kind of get these confused. We talked about wholeness, integration, but then there's a thing of intuition and discernment. But then I hear embodiment and integration.
00:19:26
Speaker
What's the difference? Wholeness is a state of harmony in which every part of you yields to every other part. There's no self-conflict.
00:19:39
Speaker
Like that murmuration. I mean, how do you get a quarter of a million birds flying in close formation that is moving and responding and rippling and no bird ever hits another bird?
00:19:50
Speaker
So the properties of discernment and intuition and abstraction, they they all have a place.
00:20:00
Speaker
But where they come together is in the holistic knowing of the pelvic bowl. We tend to live in our heads. And when you live in the head, everything is in pieces, and you're trying to paste those pieces together.
00:20:16
Speaker
You drop down to the pelvic bowl, and everything coheres. It harmonizes. You know, intuition, ah a gut sense, is at odds with what the head knows, or maybe at odds with what the heart knows.
00:20:32
Speaker
We flip-flop between these centers of intelligence, right? right It's either this or that. It's either this or that. And which which is it? And the holistic knowing of the body, when the body is like a singing bowl and it just resonates with the truth that it feels, then there's no division. There's no self-doubt.
00:20:54
Speaker
Everything is included and finds its place. Yeah. And and it it sounds like radical wholeness, intuition, body, intelligence sounds like the knowing and the feeling coming together as one.
00:21:09
Speaker
Right. You got And not one as the other, like one as a whole. And I'm listening. Wow. wow And we're all one. We're all connected.
00:21:20
Speaker
But there's part of us that are disconnected because I believe the perception of things and not the reality of it. Like, would it seem to actually feel the feeling to create an emotion?
00:21:35
Speaker
Or we're programmed to feel, to react. So I'm just really thankful for your work because I think I've been embodying things really well, but I didn't know how i was doing it.
00:21:49
Speaker
You know, I'm like, oh, I'm going read this. I'm going to to this retreat. And then I'll just go and somehow, some way, I know how to bring it into my life and make it a part of me. But I didn't know how I was doing it. So I love tangible, practical ways of like calling that space within my being so other people can learn and discern how they can do it for themselves. well Because what might work for me might not work for you.
00:22:14
Speaker
I want to talk about conversation. The embodied present process. This is something you co-founded and created. Tell me more about that.
00:22:24
Speaker
How can we get in union with the frequency of T-E-P-P? The name, the embodied present process, is trying to point to the fact that you know In our culture, I'm in here and the present is out there and I'm trying to connect with it.
00:22:41
Speaker
yeah and And I'm saying, no, no, no. The present lives through you. You embody the present.
The Embodied Present Process
00:22:50
Speaker
and And there's no way to come out of wholeness.
00:22:54
Speaker
All there is is wholeness. You can't ever lose wholeness. right But you can desensitize yourself to it, so you stop feeling it. And that's what's happened with these orphans, these these microtensions of habit that we carry around in the body.
00:23:11
Speaker
We desensitize ourselves to our participation in everything that is. And with that desensitivity, lose confidence.
00:23:22
Speaker
The ability to respond. And the ability to respond is what gives us responsibility. And so when you are available to the present, you respond to it. You're able to respond to it.
00:23:34
Speaker
The responsibility you know isn't a value that you're trying to live to. It is something you feel with the whole of your being. It's bringing me to the notion of to have purpose without purpose, to do without an outcome.
00:23:50
Speaker
But yes what be the income, just be it. And whatever that is, that's the outcome. I think there are three stages to embodiment. First stage is feeling the body.
00:24:03
Speaker
You know, can you feel your toes individually? Can you feel your pelvic floor? Can you feel the breath in the back? Like, bring it all online so you feel the whole of the body.
00:24:14
Speaker
And the next stage is is that process of feeling where the body's spaciousness is taken up and clearing the body. And it's, you know, it's like opening it opening it resensitizing and it.
00:24:31
Speaker
And in that process of resensitization, you are grounding yourself. Because right as you integrate your grounding and and sensitivity becomes incoherent without grounding, right?
00:24:49
Speaker
It's the groundedness that makes the sensitivity coherent. right So I don't think there's any such thing as somebody who's too sensitive. I think rather what it is is it is they haven't learned to ground themselves.
00:25:01
Speaker
And then the third step of embodiment is you know, we talk about embodiment as listening to the body, and and that's that's a stage. It's not embodiment. Embodiment is listening to the world through the body.
00:25:15
Speaker
It's attuning to tune the world through the body. The body is a resonator that feels everything that is passing through the present. And then you're moving from a state in which your primary relationship is between the divided parts of yourself, which is what our culture puts us into. like that In all our life, that that's our primary relationship, now negotiating the relationship between these divided parts.
00:25:43
Speaker
And then instead, you dilate into the world. You're no longer watching the self. You are attuning to the world, and there is your guidance.
00:25:54
Speaker
like There is the hand that helps you forward. So what I've been working around to is that I think every one of us is born with a unique cluster of gifts.
Unique Gifts and Activation by the Present
00:26:06
Speaker
The gifts you have, Eric, no one in the world has ever had those gifts in that configuration. It's just you. And the world is whispering to you to put those gifts into service and to hear those gifts so so that summons into the world.
00:26:24
Speaker
you know, it's not something I hold on to or self-create. It is it is what when you know, becoming present isn't a matter of becoming passive. I become present in order to be activated.
00:26:41
Speaker
And it's that relationship with the present that activates me. As I become present with the present, activation takes place. And the only way to be present Or least I think, correct me I'm wrong, is to be still.
00:26:57
Speaker
Or to slow down. I would say to be at rest. Okay, I like that. Because if you still, I can be running, I can be sprinting and be at rest. Ooh.
00:27:09
Speaker
Because that brings me to the idea when I used to meditate, my mind would not stop lumining. I'm still in my, and I'm not really, my mind is not rest. My body's at rest, but my mind is not. So I'm not really in coherence of the present because I'm in the mind presence of what's going on up here.
00:27:27
Speaker
And that was happening down here. Honestly, this is how spiritual fitness came about. I was going through a dark night of the soul. I was having a lot of chaos in my life. And I had to like bring it back into wholeness to discover when I was in those dark phases, what I had was spirituality in the gym.
00:27:46
Speaker
I know I could work out, move my energy, intentional movement. And I knew I could pray, feel better and do better over time. So over time, I thought it like, oh this is like an oxymoron book, spiritual fitness.
00:28:00
Speaker
And then through that came the evolution life. of It just happened. been I wasn't looking for it. wasn't trying to make it a thing. It became a thing because of the thing I was witnessing, feeling, experiencing through my body came through my life.
00:28:19
Speaker
Because those tools that I was utilizing saved me, helped me, took me to the next level. And I just put it in a container that was safe and sacred for others to take on it themselves so they can benefit as well.
00:28:31
Speaker
And so everything you're saying just brings me back to the darkest moments or those tough moments. What happened? Where did the shift come in? And I was present.
00:28:42
Speaker
And you have something that you created and, you know, expanded your energy within called deep fitness.
Deep Fitness and Mindful Strength Training
00:28:51
Speaker
What is deep fitness? I love that.
00:28:54
Speaker
It's a few things. Let me start with the premise. There's a condition called sarcopenia, which is the wasting of muscle with age. which just tends to happen, right?
00:29:05
Speaker
Every chronic disease that is associated with aging is associated with sarcopenia. It turns out that muscle is the foundation of your metabolic health.
00:29:18
Speaker
And muscle, when it works, creates myokines. Myokines are these, they're like hormones. There are like a thousand different kinds of them that go through the body and promote health in everything.
00:29:31
Speaker
Bone mineral density, mental acuity, capillarization, like... like The benefits of exercise, that that sort of global effect on the body, is a result of myokines. The stronger a muscle is, the harder it works, the more myokines are developed.
00:29:51
Speaker
And so the book talks about two things. One is a specific kind of a workout where you're going very slowly and you're not counting reps.
00:30:03
Speaker
What you're doing is you're timing yourself. So if I'm doing a chest press, I'm just pushing it slowly up. and slowly down. And because it's so slow, it is mindful.
00:30:15
Speaker
I am so present to what is happening. And I keep going until I can't move it anymore. I can't even hold it. So I've come to momentary failure.
00:30:28
Speaker
And when I'm on a machine, I set the weights so that I fail somewhere between a minute and a half and two minutes. then I don't need to do a second set or a third set because the body's got the stimulation to get stronger. It's received the message, listen.
00:30:44
Speaker
The environment has presented challenges that you're not strong enough to meet. We better remodel the muscle to get stronger for next time. And so then, you know, in half an hour, you can do a workout that covers all the major muscles of your body.
00:30:59
Speaker
And the injury rate is far lower because you're not, ah you know you're not, you're not subjecting the body to that kind of stress. It's just this slow, mindful process of being as fully present to it as you can.
00:31:14
Speaker
We call the workout mindful strength training to failure. and And the other, the other part of the workout is the way we treat the body is the way someone might sit on a donkey beating it to go harder.
00:31:28
Speaker
We sit in our heads and and will the body to do more. And once you learn how to drop into your body and come to rest in it, the body loves This movement and and the body is in a place of coherence because you're not in that divided place of sitting in the head telling it what to do.
00:31:51
Speaker
And so there is there is an aliveness and it's just so gratifying yeah to be out of self-conflict. to be meeting this resistance with the whole of your being in harmony.
00:32:06
Speaker
And it's so interesting because when you're saying that, something came and said, the body loves to feel you. And then I'm thinking, I get this vision, Philip, as you were talking, is your body is an antenna. And if you just drop into it and feel it,
00:32:22
Speaker
And those, and then antenna and that space are answers for your life. You don't have to go outside of your stuff. You don't have to go, it's all there, but we've been programmed to be so far away from it.
00:32:35
Speaker
So we're all, yeah, yeah. But when you just, the slow. Yeah. The patterns. holy Fully, fully present to it. And you can feel more. And as you feel more, your life expands because you're not trying to speed the feeling up or bypass it.
00:32:52
Speaker
Or shut it down. Yeah. yeah ah was i was I went to Peru last summer for a plant medicine re retreat, and I'm afraid of heights. So I had to facilitate it like Clear Smengi.
00:33:03
Speaker
from past life. And when we get to the mountaintop wherever we were, we would have to set our intentions. Phillip, I was so impatient. I was so impatient. of like, can we just go? Can we just get to the destination?
00:33:16
Speaker
And I'm like, why am I so triggered? Like, what is happening? And then got back from the trip, I sat with it. I said, oh, I don't want to wait because I don't want to feel.
00:33:27
Speaker
i didn't want to feel being at the top of a mountain. ah All I have is, you know? Yeah. Oh, yeah. And I'm like, oh, that's feelings. Those are your feelings, brother.
00:33:39
Speaker
That's it. That's your life. Right. You have permission to feel. Yeah. And as we go on it the trail, it started pouring down. I'm talking about rainforest.
00:33:50
Speaker
And I'm like, how many more hours we got? Yeah, you about two hours. It didn't care about my feelings or me complaining. But in those moments, now that I look back,
00:34:03
Speaker
Now and I appreciate and understand why I should have been more present in those moments. Deep fitness, the way I like to feel it now, how deep can I get within myself to embody what my soul wants me to call into to give to the world, not for my benefit, but for the collective?
00:34:23
Speaker
Then I can live in purpose and a divine. And we're all one radical wholeness. And it's... Oh, it's just beautiful. And I'm just so grateful for what you offer to the world, what you give the world.
00:34:39
Speaker
And your when you hear spiritual fitness, what's the first thing comes to mind when you hear it? Light. Wow. Wow.
00:34:50
Speaker
You see how there's time to light on too. You see that? So, Phillip, tell us. You know, we're in a we're in a different part of life in the world and the economy. People were experiencing a lot of different things.
00:35:03
Speaker
What would you recommend people do to have more feeling experience in life versus a living one, meaning in our minds, to feel safe again about what the future brings?
00:35:16
Speaker
Because I can account and recall when I'm in the future, I'm anxious, And when I'm in in the past, I'm in fear. And I lived that many years, even having success, because I just didn't trust, right, the moment.
00:35:30
Speaker
What is something that you recommend or something for people to think about in these different times? Some of us don't great, some of us are not. But what do you think we all can contribute within ourselves from your perspective?
00:35:43
Speaker
What's happened in our culture is we've been taken out of relationship and we end up feeling alone.
Reconnecting with Earth and Breath
00:35:52
Speaker
And, you know, if you feel alone, you're disembodied because the body feels the present.
00:36:00
Speaker
The body feels companionship in everything around it. And in that aloneness, you know, if you feel alone, then you're going to disembodied.
00:36:11
Speaker
frightened. it's It's just an unnatural thing. and so And so how to gently, gently come back into relationship, come back into relationship with the earth.
00:36:22
Speaker
If you can feel yourself at rest on the earth, you can feel yourself partaking of its strength, held by its strength. If you can come back into relationship with the breath, and how gently can you feel the breath move through the body?
00:36:40
Speaker
And even, you know, for me, the pelvic floor, it's a diaphragm in the body. And when the pelvic floor releases to the breath, the whole body is invited to release to the breath.
00:36:54
Speaker
So we're used to muscling.
00:36:59
Speaker
The in-breath, you know, we've we've turned we turn everything into a top-down operation. We've turned the breath into a top-down operation. Somebody says do you, breathe deeply.
00:37:09
Speaker
And it's like, okay, and the head knows exactly what that means. And it makes the body do it. And it takes muscle to do it, and the muscles get tired, and the breath goes shallow again. But if the pelvic floor...
00:37:20
Speaker
and gently release to the in-breath and gently and release to the out-breath, there's this invitation of the whole body to release to the in-breath, to release to the out-breath.
00:37:31
Speaker
And then you're coming back into relationship with the body. It's ah an endless path of surrender. And what I teach is all about surrender. you you You don't have to achieve being, and you can't achieve being at rest on the earth. You are at rest on the earth.
00:37:51
Speaker
Can you surrender to it? Can you feel it? You don't have to achieve the fluidity of your body. You're 65% water. Can you feel the body's fluidity?
00:38:02
Speaker
Can you feel the body's spaciousness? You're mostly empty space. Can you surrender to that and feel it and make room for the world? Your center's waiting for you deep in the body.
00:38:14
Speaker
We've dislocated that center and moved it up into the head. And then we wonder why our lives feel off balance. Can you surrender to your true center and come home to yourselves? wow Better take a breath on that one.
00:38:27
Speaker
Feeling the body, creating space. Philip, how can we find you, you know, online or do you have any workshops coming up, any retreats?
00:38:38
Speaker
How do we get in your space to learn to embody the wholeness and integrate what you have to offer? Because I'm curious, and do you have anything correlated for men in general or just everyone?
00:38:52
Speaker
I've got a website, that's really the hub, but which is embodiedpresent.com. It's got free practices, it's got interviews. There's a bundle of practices that you can buy, audio practices that each one is different. Each one invites us to remember relationship, to reignite a sensitivity.
00:39:17
Speaker
I've got workshops coming up in the fall. I've got one in Atlanta, one in Birmingham. I'm writing another book, so I don't have as many workshops coming up as I normally would.
00:39:28
Speaker
And then I do a facilitator's training. They're a year-long program. So in November, I wrap one up, and then there would be another one starting in the spring. And that, I love that process of taking a small group of people and getting into it, feeling the vulnerability and feeling the security all at the same time.
00:39:50
Speaker
I got a question that just came in. Why does it feel weak to feel what you think is weak? It's a long, long story yeah that we have turned against the female.
Historical Shifts in Societal Structures
00:40:04
Speaker
It happened 10,000 years ago with the Neolithic Revolution. So before the Neolithic Revolution, we were gathered around the mother. What happened? What else makes sense but to gather around the mother?
00:40:18
Speaker
And we revered the earth and we felt the goddess living through every little leaf and bug. And then with the Neolithic revolution, we moved away from hunting and gathering.
00:40:30
Speaker
which requires that you attune to the world. And we moved into farming and domesticating animals and taking control. And we staked our survival on control rather than harmony.
00:40:44
Speaker
And then we moved away from the female. We left the earth and and suddenly it's the sky that inspires us. And forget the goddess, suddenly it's gods and they live in the sky. And forget the mother, it's dad, you know, the patriarch. That's that's what the center of our world should be.
00:41:03
Speaker
And so attributes of felt relationship become demeaned and are considered weak. And attributes of known relationship, that wonderful head intelligence. And it is wonderful, but but it's nothing without the body.
00:41:19
Speaker
It's living in a fantasy without the body. And that departure from the female to the male is a journey we've taken in the body. So in the early Neolithic, we were centered in our bellies.
00:41:32
Speaker
Wow. And you can see in literature and and art how our center rose up. And by Plato's day, so that's 350 BC, we were in our heads.
00:41:46
Speaker
Plato's day. So Plato's got a dialogue to Emmaus in which it's explained how the gods fashioned us. And this very wise man says, well, first they made this divine orb based on the spheres of the heavens.
00:42:03
Speaker
And then they realized, goodness, it wouldn't be able to get around. So they grew out of vehicle, arms and legs and a trunk. 350 BC and the body is being described as a vehicle and the head is being described as the divinest part of us.
00:42:18
Speaker
Wow, it's an old, old story. That's a beautiful story. So do you think we're trying to come back to that wholeness that really acknowledged the feminine and gave it its just due to become whole as collective?
00:42:36
Speaker
We've gone so far into the male. Everything's shattered. Relationships are shattered. There's division everywhere. and And we've gone as far as we can.
00:42:47
Speaker
you know in a mode that turns its back on the female. And now now, my gosh, if if we don't recover the female and honor it and live it, it's a dead end.
00:43:00
Speaker
And always say ah the future is feminine, but I feel like the universe is feminine. with Without women, there's no us. you know, there's this fear of women because of this miracle that they achieve of growing a new life and giving birth.
00:43:16
Speaker
I mean, what can we do as men that you know holds a candle to to that
Conclusion and Invitation to Subscribe
00:43:22
Speaker
miracle? Well, Philip, thank you. This was beautiful. Thank you again for your time, your presence, your insight, just everything you bring to the world.
00:43:32
Speaker
I pray that you continue to expand and be blessed, protected, that you have increase in all your assets, visions, and beliefs because you are a miracle. And I just want to say thank you again for joining me in the Spiritual Fitness Podcast.
00:43:49
Speaker
Philip Shepard, people, follow him. I'll put everything in his show notes. And this was a phenomenal episode. Thanks again. it It has been such a pleasure to meet you, Eric. I hope it's not the last time.
00:44:03
Speaker
It will be wonderful to meet again somewhere, somehow. R.T. Yeah, you got it. Whatever. All right. Take good care. Love. Thank you. Bye-bye. Thank you for joining us on the Spiritual Fitness Podcast.
00:44:16
Speaker
We hope today's episode has inspired you and provided valuable insights for your holistic health journey. By blended spirituality and physical wellness, you can strengthen your body, mind, and soul.
00:44:28
Speaker
If you enjoyed today's episode, please subscribe, rate, and leave a review. Until next time, stay strong, stay inspired, and remember, it's miracle season.