Category Archives: personal growth

Sensing and Feeling

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“Where do you feel it in your body?”

What a revelation, the first time Coach Christine asked me this during a session. It had never occurred to me to tune in to body signs of anything other than hunger, thirst, fatigue, and pain. In this conversation, c.2005, Christine asked me to locate peace, connection, and knowing. Almost 20 years later, the answer now is still the same: deep and central, between my diaphragm and navel but toward the back–where rhythmically mobile and unsung, stable body parts meet and coexist in dynamic balance–huh, I have never thought to describe it this way before.

“What are your body signs of stress?”
“What do you actually feel, physically?”
“How would your loved ones answer this question for you?”

I make these queries during clinical interviews to help patients recognize how their anxiety, fear, and agitation manifest. Often the physical signs arise before conscious awareness of their origins. It occurs to me now that localizing joy, love, connection, and confidence would also be useful. My inner peace and knowing reside at my center of gravity, now that I think about it. I feel it as a weight, though not a heaviness. It feels solid, centered, grounded, and stable–a substantive, resilient nucleus. I have used ‘unassailable’ multiple times to describe its quality–when that perception occurs, I know I’ve tapped into something important and profound, and good things often result soon after.

Our culture does not often facilitate or value this organic, instinctual attunement to body signals.  We look to devices to tell us—how we slept, how much we moved—before we query and trust our own natural knowing.  How ironic, that we seek intrinsic information and knowledge from extrinsic sources, without questioning the devices’ precision, accuracy, and ultimate relevance. More importantly, the frenetic chaos of modern life, coupled with the siloed and and non-integrated nature of ‘data’ from any given source, can pull us unknowingly into a vortex of statistics without synthesis. I see it as an epidemic of dis-integration. How much more self-aware and -regulated might we be, how much simpler and better our quality of life, if we just slowed down, got still and quiet, and asked/answered the questions above more regularly and frequently? That investment of time, energy, and connection could yield high returns, no?

What do I feel?
Where do I feel it?
What does this correlate with?
What’s going on with me/us/my world right now?
What does this all tell me?
How do I best respond?

How do you relate physical sensations to emotions? This is the intersection of ‘sensing’ and ‘feeling’, in all senses (ha!) of both words. Fear causes an agitated vibration in my chest, a shrill buzzing, and makes me want to discharge it with mindless, moderately intense activity, like on the treadmill or ellipitical. Anger also vibrates, but at a much lower frequency (more of a thunder rumble) and lower in the body, in my abdomen. Relief comes from slower, heavier, stronger movement–lower body lifting and lumberjack/throwing motions. Love and connection feel light–both in photons and mass–my visual perceptions are brighter; my chest lifts forward and up; I feel lighter on my feet. In these moments, often after an Ethos workout or quality time with friends, I hear music in my mind, songs like River and and Granted by Josh Groban, Hallelujah and Amazing Grace by The Tenors, and Say It to Me by AHI. Listening to my Agape playlist while in this state sustains both the physical sensations and the psychological feeling of connection and love, giving me mental space and time to revel and reflect. Blog post ideas often emerge in this setting, the words flowing forth in torents of values synthesis and integration.

So this is what I wish for us all, my friends: That we see the value in attuning to our innate sensations, that we practice connecting them effectively with emotions and relationship, that we may trust our intuitive assessments and use this important information to regulate how we show up–to ourselves and one another. I wish for a confidence, an inner peace that emanates from that deep, quiet, grounded, unassailable place that makes us present, open, loving, resilient, and connected.

When/where/how does this already happen for you?
How could you get more of it?
What would that be like?

Bit Post: My Pack Is Thrown

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Committed.

All my stuff—my ideas, things I want to share and explore—is in the pack.

Gotta go where I’ve thrown it, on the other side of the river.

The River of Fear. Self-doubt. Disbelief. Naysaying.

Now I must find my way across the river

Myself

Without getting swept away and over the falls.

Brave the rapids. Find my footing or make my raft, get over it.

Pick up the project and keep walking, marching with it on dry land.

However hilly, rocky, slippery, snowy, or uncertain.

Or maybe I have help?

Am I really alone?

😏

The Knock

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“I wish for more doors to open for you than to close or stay closed.”

I love middle age. At this point in life, I have accumulated enough experience to have earned real expertise, solid street cred in my domains of study and work. And yet, there is still plenty of ‘runway’ to do cool shit! That’s assuming I don’t drop dead tomorrow, of course. But even this, the keen and escalating awareness of my own mortality, makes my potential feel that much more exciting and acute.

I have had conversations with multiple friends about this lately. Many of us, especially in medicine, have lived what I would call a social norm-driven life: College, med school, residency, practice/research/academics, leadership. Date, marry, have kids. Launch kids into the same social norm-driven life. Color inside the lines, even if it’s not totally our nature–often not even noticing or questioning whether it’s our nature or not. Huh. Not good enough anymore, I think.

So much emerges now about the vastly, truly wide diversity of human nature, such as gender and sexual fluidity, psychology, physiology, and sociology. Narrow social norms taken for granted by generations, at least in the Western, ‘developed’ world, dissolve and disintegrate under scrutiny exponentially faster, it seems. It feels understandably scary in so many ways, for so many people. We have never been here before, never faced this much newness of both magnitude and volume, in the history of humanity. Anything new is uncertain, daunting. This much new is mind bending. I think we can figure it out, though, just like humans always have. If we can practice effective self-awareness, self-regulation, and communication in the face of high anxiety about the unknown, great things could ensue… though this is a great, big collective ask.

…So, what is this super cool shit any/each of us can do, whether we have lived a mainstream life thus far or not? As Mary Oliver wrote, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

Some of us hear the Knock–a call, a whisper–to do something different, something new, something heretofore unimagined. For me it’s Book (well, I have imagined it for nine years, but hey, some of us also move slowly). For others it may be leaving an office job, exploring new creative outlets, pursuing long hidden or newly emergent dreams. Regardless, there is energy here. I have described it as pushing outward, broadening myself against the walls of a box within which I had not noticed I lived until now. The status quo feels newly small, constraining, unsatisfying. What I understood previously as black or white, open or closed, good or bad, right or wrong, feels ever less clearly dichotomous. Not only do I now perceive the gray, I feel pulled toward it. Touching it, experiencing it, feels liberating, expansive, an existential education that I could only think to seek by having lived this long a certain way.

The call, however, can come with no shortage of ambivalence, even conflict. For those who live with underlying depression or anxiety, this tension between the relative safety and security of the status quo and the freedom and exhilaration of answering the Knock may exacerbate symptoms significantly. When questioning my friend on the phone today about how she feels in her body when imagining the new thing, she could hardly attain, let alone stay in that sensation. Rather, her mind skipped ahead to potential negative outcomes, focusing on uncertainty and risk, bypassing said freedom and excitement. The status quo confines her, body, mind, and spirit; she feels it. Her dissatisfaction with it grows, causing agitation. I could also feel the tumult in her voice, like a roiling swirl of motion without movement, a frenetic vibration seeking resonance. I could only sit with her, from a thousand miles away, holding space. I could relate, help just by validating, even though I could not solve.

At the end of our call, I thought of the door analogy. Trying new things does not have to be all or nothing. We can go slow. There may be many doors to the new place to consider. We can check each for heat, sounds, vibrations from the other side, see which are un/locked. We can turn knobs and open slowly, peeking inside, possibly anticipate what we may find. We can back out quietly, leave it, come back later. No need to kick any doors in, potentially hurting others on the other side or causing recoil that slams ourselves in the face. We can examine potential costs, benefits, intended and unintended outcomes. And we can trust ourselves to handle whatever results from our deliberate and thoughtful decisions and actions. We can be mindful, intentional, honest, and authentic. This way, we will have less to regret, no matter what happens.

The Knock is Possibility. It is a signal of hope, light, and growth, both an uplift and a deepening. Sometimes we hear it only briefly before other sounds drown it out. When it recurs, however, I advocate for listening, following, finding its origin. We are only here for a short time. Fear and anxiety can be overcome; we can find our way to brave, new, big, wonderful things. There is no rush. And it’s probably better if we go together.