Are You Paying Attention?

 My therapist friend was the first person who, years ago, told me that I might want to work on mindful embodiment. 

I looked at her like she had three heads.

I could not even comprehend what those words meant when they are put together. Now, I realize that this truly is the basis for uncovering and working on all sorts of things in your life. 

Mindful embodiment, said another way is Noticing.

How do you feel right now? Do you feel the chair underneath you? Are you squinting at the screen? Sunshine in your face or a breeze against your skin? 

We go through so much of the day without even noticing the physical sensations. Or we do notice them, and we try to push through. Ouch, ouch, no. No, I'm fine. We get injured running, we eat until we feel bloated, we stand up and our legs ache from sitting for hours.

This is Noticing, Level I. The environment and our bodies within that environment.

Noticing, Level II might bring you to your internal landscape. Maybe we stay with the physical. How do you feel inside? What emotions are rolling through your body? Where do you feel it? Are you nervous? Do you feel that in your belly? What about excited? Does it move up into your heart and lungs?

Do you wrap words around these sensations? I do. We all do, let's be honest. We are creatures who have used information from our past to help inform the future. This is a survival mechanism that has been around since we learned about fire.

We are storytellers. We use stories to help explain what the hell is going on in our world. We did it then and we do it now.

Trouble is - some of these stories are pretty rough around the edges. They can be mean to us, troubling, worrisome, etc. And here's the thing - those stories don't really exist. What I mean is, when we are supposing for things that might happen, or remembering somethign that happened long ago -- none of that is right now. None of that replaces what is happening right now. Rolling tension through the shoulders, tightness in the throat, your breath moving in and out of your lungs.

Stillness.

Sometimes referred to as meditation or quieting the mind, stillness allows us to drop out of the stories we tell ourselves about what's going on (why am I nervous?) and in our environment.

Stillness allows us to come back to breath and roll with it. Let the thinking self quiet down and notice​.