Areas › Your body
Your body
You cannot think your way out of a body that is braced. This area starts there: the breath, the ground under you, moving, eating, resting, and the small physical things that change how the rest of the day lands.
Narrowed down
8 practicesTheme · Feeling from the inside
How long you have · Five minutes
Approach · Body based
There is more than one way to feel your body. The outward senses, the inward signals like hunger and tension, and the sense of where your limbs are in space are separate channels, and on a hard day one of them will be easier than the others.
If tuning into your chest feels like too much, that is worth knowing rather than pushing through. You can go instead to what your feet are pressing…
Thirst, hunger, the ache of having sat too long: these are not nagging, they are instructions. When self-care keeps failing, it is often because the instruction never arrived.
People who have been through a lot sometimes stop registering the signal at all, and then eating, sleeping and resting all go sideways. If that is…
If you are going to bring attention to your body, start with where your body is rather than what it feels. Feet on the floor, back against the chair, the weight of your hands in your lap.
Attention to the inside, the chest, the stomach, the throat, sits close to the emotional wiring and can open more than you meant to open. Position in…
Your nervous system decides whether a room is safe before you have had a single thought about it. Tone of voice, a face, the way someone walks in: it reads all of that and answers underneath your awareness.
This is why you can leave a perfectly pleasant meeting wrung out, or take against someone who has done nothing you could point to. The reading is…
The reading happens without you, but you can catch up to it. Naming what your body has already concluded, out loud or in your head, is most of the work.
Something like: my shoulders came up when he walked in. That is all it needs to be. You are not deciding yet whether it was fair, you are bringing a…
An alarm system can be wrong in two directions. It can scream in a safe room, and it can stay silent somewhere it should not.
Most talk about trauma assumes the first: too much alarm, too often. But some people come out of hard years with the volume turned right down,…
One question does a lot of work: is what my body is doing right now a fair match for what is actually in front of me? Ask it plainly, and let the answer be either yes or no.
The point is not to talk yourself out of the feeling. The signal is information and it deserves a hearing. But you can hold it up against the room…
When someone is distressed, moving too fast to settle them can land as a message that their distress is not welcome here. Let them set the speed.
Offering a breath, a blanket, a change of subject: all of it can help, and all of it can arrive as a shutting down if it comes before the person has…