Embodying
untapped toolkit

MindBody Archetypes

Exercise four innate qualities that build internal capacity to stress.
MindBody Archetypes
01

Why it matters?

Stress can often be perceived as a binary state: we’re either stressed or not. Which is true neurobiologically if we think of it on terms of our either on-or-off sympathetic and parasympathetic systems. 

However, under less obvious circumstances of low-grade stress, which is often constant, we begin taking on embodied qualities as a lasting behavioral extension of our more knee jerk: fight / flight / freeze / feign modes. 

These embodied qualities (in matching order) are to tighten up / space out / numb out / or evade. There’s more research coming out to support the emergence of personality traits as influenced by an “individual motor signature” (IMS); below is a simplified framework that looks at universal attentional faculties and motor signatures. 

02

How it works?

The example below illustrates these as more personified archetypes: Gritty, Sensate, Cerebral and Fluid. They describe our two modes of attention (Narrowed Focus - as Cerebral) and (Open Awareness - Sensate), and two modes of motoric orientation (Tension - as Grit) and (Relaxation - as Fluid). All of us embody these qualities as they are faculties used to observe the world as our brains develop and respond to stressors in our environments, eventually showing tendencies within our personalities. As a less nuanced example, if you tend to be a fighter, you’re high in Grit and could draw upon more relaxation to deal with a situation with more fluidity. Or, if you tend to fall into analysis-paralysis and disconnect yourself from what’s important, you could maybe do with opening your awareness to get out of your head. However, we often embody a combination of these under different situations and so these qualities get extremely subtle but profound in their nuanced application. They work as mind-body tools that can reshape you from the inside out: need more grit? Lift something heavy. Need more fluidity? Practice flexibility. Need to be more sensitive? Up your meditation time. Need to be more focused? Prolong your ability to concentrate. 

Take the quiz (link in Sources) and figure out what your dominant Mind Body archetype is and read up on how you can further embody your dormant qualities in a different way.  

03

Examples

Take aways

Get a sense of the embodied quality of your default stress reaction and practice centering to shift into a new quality response. 

Sources: