From disembodiment to incarnation 2.0

Incarnation is at the heart of what makes us human. At the time of the digitalization of human relationships and activities, we may also have to end up reinventing it to find it again, an incarnation 2.0.

Incarnation is defined in the following way: To clothe (a spiritual being) with a carnal body, a human or animal form. By incarnating, we would give a carnal and living form to that which belongs to the domain of the abstract.

Over the last few weeks, several exchanges with my clients have focused on the notion and need for incarnation. It was about embodying values, embodying roles, embodying aspirations.

The context of COVID is certainly not foreign to the emergence of the theme of embodiment, as this context alters and thwarts our relationship with what is carnal and living. Moreover, in the face of the uncertainty that some of us experience, the desire to make a response palpable, tangible, or rather the beginning of a calming response is often decisive.  

However, the need for incarnation becomes more and more pressing perhaps also because we experience, even in a very sneaky way, our disembodiment. 

Either, we are mired in the concrete from morning to night, and we carry out a series of tasks without having the time to give them an abstract and reflective dimension. For example, we are busy assuming our responsibilities as leaders, managers or individual contributors. We deal with the most pressing issues. We hope that this is enough until the question of meaning (or the experience of the absence of sense) finally invites itself by surprise, sometimes brutally, into our daily lives. 

Either we are locked up in our thoughts, our cogitations which do not lead to any concrete action and do not give our hands and body any opportunity to express themselves, to embody anything. Eventually, our body becomes a stranger until the day it remembers us by the illness or the effects of age that we had come to ignore. 

In both cases, we dissociate within ourselves the concrete and the abstract. Our actions, our thoughts are disembodied because the link that holds the concrete and the abstract together is too tenuous. 

This may be because this link is partly in the realm of emotions and, that the management of individual and even more collective emotions is not an easy process if we do not wish to devote a little attention, effort and time to it. 

If emotions are sluggish, it would be not easy to experience the synthesis between the abstract and the concrete. If emotions are overwhelming, they would take precedence over the rest and would overwhelm any possibility of including other dimensions of the experience such as the somatic and cognitive. 

The universe of our emotions is as vast as that of our experiences if we take the time to explore it consciously. It is on this condition that we will be able to find the path to live the diversity of experiences fully and to give substance to incarnation.