The greatest source of wisdom comes from within: And it starts by paying attention to our very own bodies. Being present starts with being attentive to your body, even just for a few seconds, in a way that you’re probably not accustomed to doing – nonjudgmentally. Letting go of stories and commentary and just being with the bare sensations of the body. Yet it is something that we are all capable of.
There are essentially two ways we experience the world: through our thinking and through our feeling. Thinking looks like planning, organizing, strategizing, judging, and all of the mental processes we use on a daily basis. While we obviously need to think, we get into trouble when the mind takes over, leading to a disconnection from the body and a disconnection from feeling. As the saying goes, “the mind is a great servant but a terrible master.”
Feeling, the other way we experience the world, is extremely important in how we navigate. This includes our five senses that pick up external information, as well as what we feel internally. Your ability to sense your internal bodily sensations (heartbeat, tension, temperature, etc.) is correlated to clearer decision-making. Awareness of these internal bodily cues is known as interoception. Your stomach and heart even have neurons—mini-brains helping you process and decide. To access this wisdom, you need to tune into your body’s signals.
In fact, following your gut, heart and bodily sensations is what makes us human. It’s how we got here in the first place. For most of human history, our primary survival mechanisms were our instincts and the tribe’s wisdom. That includes everything from parenting, what food to eat, and whether or not to go down the dark jungle path. When we made the wrong choices, we would die.
“Intuition is always right in at least two important ways; It is always in response to something. It always has your best interest at heart” — Gavin de Becker
Just like with eroding attention spans, we are getting worse at following our gut. Too many choices and information leads to analysis paralysis. We are left standing at the grocery store trying to decide between 53 kinds of protein bars. Anxiety and depression have skyrocketed since the pandemic and notably decrease our ability to trust our own instincts. When you’re feeling down, you’re more likely to misinterpret a lot about your environment, like people’s emotional expressions, and you’re less likely to take risks. Hardly a recipe for making good, intuitive judgments.
In meditation retreats that I lead, I invite people to scan their bodies from head to toe, noticing bodily sensations like heat, tension, pressure and pulsating. The most common experience is that many people can’t feel many parts of their bodies, saying it’s blank or I feel nothing. This is totally normal. We are chronically disconnected from our bodies, living from the “neck up,” with an over-emphasis on thinking, planning, organizing and all of the left-brained skills that society rewards (useful skills, but only to a certain degree).
If you often find yourself torn between two choices, this can come down to a disconnection from the body. The big decisions in life are not purely logical and require us to be in touch with feelings and emotions, which are largely held and processed in our body. This is why people with damage to emotional regions of their brain find it almost impossible to make a decision. Or, if you find yourself constantly on the edge of burnout (more than half of full time employees!) it’s extremely likely you’ve been ignoring your body’s cues for a long time.
Mindfulness of the body is seen as foundational in the Buddhist tradition. Being with your breath – perhaps the most common style of meditation – is a body-based meditation. Heart-centered meditations like metta require awareness of your body. Mindful listening and communication require embodied presence, being able to feel your own internal cues as you are listening to the other person. Take it from the Buddha himself:
"There is one thing that, when cultivated and regularly practiced, leads to deep spiritual intention, to peace, to mindfulness and clear comprehension, to vision and knowledge, to a happy life here and now, and to the culmination of wisdom and awakening. And what is that one thing? It is mindfulness centered on the body.” – The Buddha
When we turn toward our body and begin to center our attention on what’s present, even for a few moments, we can start to tap into the body’s cues and our innate wisdom. This lays the foundation for developing a sense of being present in the world – being present for your own life rather than being in a rush or disconnected – and serves as the base of most meditations that you will do.
Hope you enjoy this meditation — if you like it please share with a friend!
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