What needs to happen before you are fully willing to be in your body… again?

You know, the way you were when you were an animated three year old: curious, excited, finding your “no” to declare your boundaries, trying everything you were interested in unabashedly, laughing so hard. So hard.

What needs to happen before you are fully willing to be in your body again?

Let’s first look at why we might not be fully in our bodies.

When most people have a scary experience, they tend to avoid going back where it happened. If i got food poisoning at a restaurant, I don’t know why I’d go back to that establishment. Even if there was a new owner at the same location, I have definitely thought twice about returning to the scene of the crime.

Interestingly, all of our scary experiences happen while we are in our bodies. For most people, on a subconscious level, the body itself becomes the place people resist. Different events get mapped to different parts of the body. You’ve heard about people carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders, or someone being a pain in the neck, or having a queasy feeling in their guts. Similar to that, in times of stress, the mind maps events to parts of the body, then decides not to go there.

However, this article isn’t where I talk about how to revisit and resolve whatever happened that had you escape from your body into your imagination in the first place. Whatever it was, I’m sorry you had to face that.

Today I’m simply suggesting that because you and your body are currently safe enough to have read this far, it’s likely you have sufficient distance from that danger to de-escalate your nervous system, and return from your imagination to your body. If any part of you feels resistant to this, consider that you can return temporarily, briefly taking our attention into our body and back out is very easy to do.

Try this 10 second practice:

Please read through these simple instructions before practicing:
once you’ve read the instructions, take your eyes off the screen where your mind is engaged with the conceptual realm
take a deep slow breath in, while noticing how your torso expands and contracts as you take are in
let it out slowly, looking for the end of the breath
enjoy any pause at the end
(optionally) repeat

Look away from the screen and try it…
Take 1 or more breaths, honestly the more the better, then resume reading if you’re not already enlightened.

…

I imagine that some percentage of readers will have read that as an idea, but did not pause to take that breath. If that was you, we could say that you decided to let your imagination fill in the blanks based on the previous experiences of your breath, instead of actually feeling your breath. When you skip over actually experiencing things, you miss out on the simple, profound, delightful experience of presence in the body.

Whether you did last time or not, here’s another chance. This time feel the way your body expands and then contracts as you inhale then exhale with your eyes off the screen…

Welcome back.

What you did there bring your attention down out of your conceptual mind, and into the sensations arising directly from your physical body. Your conceptual mind may or may not have taken a break. You may have experienced no words for a moment, and just bathed in blissful presence with only sensations flowing through your awareness, or perhaps a part of your mind might have been narrating the experience, Either way, your attention came to your body for a moment. Check in whether part of your attention is still in your body, or if it came back exclusively to the part of your mind that can read.

As you continue reading, explore feeling your body as you read.

So far we’ve touched on putting your attention in your body for a moment. Next is to put your attention FULLY in your body.

We can break this into two parts. First, there’s finding paths to get your attention into each of the hard to reach places. Second is having that attention spread throughout the body rather than darting from place to place.

Any place that’s hard to get your attention will likely feel tight, painful, or numb.

The issue with tightness and pain is that those uncomfortable sensations have most people want to look away. Just like when you’re at furniture store, if one chair feels uncomfortable, and another feels comfortable, you’re going to go for the comfortable one. When fully cleaning your counters, you can’t just wipe the tidy parts, you need to get into the hard to reach places. When attempting to get your attention fully into your body, you can’t just feel the comfortable parts. You need to also feel the parts of yourself that you’re uncomfortable with.

There’s practice for relieving bodily discomfort that I originally learned as a headache cure. This works for me and most people I’ve shared it with for just about any bodily discomfort. Through this process, I found that when facing a headache,, I had a pattern of holding my whole head tight: squinting my eyes and tightening my jaw, etc. It turns out, having my attention on the thought pattern “I have a headache” sends subtle signals to the head to do things that keep it aching! It was a self fulfilling prophecy. This practice involves simply naming the sensations. Since no two headaches are identical, I started taking the time to actually feel enough to describe in detail how THIS headache feels. As I described the headache, repeatedly scanning around my skull, the throbbing, tightness, stabbing, etc would evolve minute by minute. Normally the sensations would be softer, sometimes the same, occasionally more intense, though eventually disappearing altogether, and allowing my attention to roam free throughout my skull.

There is no need to hold off on this until you have a headache, nor to limit it to your skull. Let your attention roam all throughout your body. Naming the sensations is mostly a technique to get you to pay attention to the sensations enough to get a name for them. It’s slightly more effective to feel with the sensitivity you would have if you were eventually going to write a poem about them, without actually engaging the wordy part of your mind.

The yoga practice is filled with poses that help you feel parts of yourself where you hide your tension where you can practice this technique of allowing your tension to dissolve in the light of your awareness.

I also mentioned the possibility of numbness. Numbness can happen if there is nerve damage, and there’s simply nothing we can do about that. Sometimes, however, the mind creates a kind of smoke screen, where when we first put our attention in, we can’t feel anything. When this happens, the effective practice is to let your attention linger on the area you know there is supposed to be sensation. Like you’re looking for a well camouflage bird in a tree. You just wait and feel everything you can feel in the surrounding region, and breathe. Eventually you will feel something there, and in the meantime, it’s a lovely way to meditate.

Finally, the practice of putting it all together and feeling all of yourself at the same time.

Normal attention is somewhat pointed. My attention jumps from my fingers on the keyboard, to the tension in my shoulders that relaxed when I checked, then to the weight of my hips in the chair, etc. The quality of attention I’m talking about is the difference between that kind of darting awareness, to an expanded state. I compare it to a listening to a symphony. Perhaps I listen for the violin solo, then to the trumpets, or I could soften and hear all of it at once,

Often in a yoga practice, we’ll have people scan their body from their toes to their head. Feeling their feet, then ankles, shins… all the way up to the scalp. I’m inviting you to take that one step further. Instead of scanning over your body, consider filling your body with awareness. Feel your feet AND your ankles AND your shins, and keep including the parts you’ve felt as you add more in to your proprioceptive awareness until you feel all of yourself at once, and savor that radiance.

Enjoy