embodied

1. 1
   verb

   Simple past and past participle of embody.

   The old courthouse embodied the ambitions of an entire generation.

   These values were embodied in the company's first charter.

   Note

   One spelling does two jobs. As a simple past it stands alone (the courthouse embodied an era). As a past participle it follows have or be (has embodied, was embodied). Embody is almost always transitive, so the participle turns passive easily. The thing doing the embodying is then introduced with in: values embodied in a charter, an ideal embodied in a single person.

2. 2
   adjective

   Experienced and shaped through the physical body, in contrast to purely mental experience.

   Like a musician's fingers that find the notes on their own: the knowing lives in the body, not just the head.

   Researchers argue that memory is partly embodied, held in posture and gesture as much as in the brain.

   The therapist focused on embodied awareness, asking him to notice the tension in his shoulders.

   Similarbodily, somatic, physical

   Oppositedisembodied

   Note

   A psychologist's word whose force comes from its opposite: what is embodied is set against the abstract and the purely mental. It anchors theories of embodied cognition in cognitive science and phenomenology. In therapy it describes a kind of practice, as when Karden Rabin writes of embodied work as feeling "something visceral, not abstract." It is not graded: experience is embodied or it is not, never more embodied.

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