You can't "kill the part of you that cringes." Cringing is part of how you know there is a subjective "you" inside. Cringing is one of a few physiological responses by which your innate subjective experience can produce any qualitative significance to otherwise-empty signs like "I," "myself," etc. If you could not cringe, or enjoy yourself, or scare yourself, etc., you would be a philosophical zombie. You would be nothing other than a name on a birth certificate, or an envelope, or a gravestone.
Embodiment? You think medical embodiment is the refuge of a metaphysical ground of self? Your sense of embodiment is something you got out of a medical dictionary, or worse, the medieval equivalent of a medical dictionary that was translated by an isolated Buddhist monk trying to fix his meditation posture and then mis-translated and spiritualized by a late-colonial German and taken up by a bunch of hippies in the postwar period.
You do not actually feel like a body!
More symbols! More symbols!
Begin with a single nerve cell. A nerve maintains stasis with a negative electrical charge relative to the positive charge outside. This resting potential will determine its stimulation and facilitate the rest of the reaction. This resting potential is the sign-vehicle: it is that affordance by which some reference will interact. That reference will be something like a neurotransmitter. This is a type of stimulus that expresses its character the sign-vehicle at the moment of firing. ...
All of this is "translated" by dual activity of the nerve cell to restore the resting potential and release a neurotransmitter from the axon. This is the consequence or significance of the initial combination of vehicle and reference.