Mental vs Physical

Man, I love waking up really early before the world starts its daily murmur and just bask in the silence ( and my neighbour snoring upstairs, damn these thin walls!)

Today I woke up at 6:30. No alarm. It was set for 7:40, so I could say I got a head start on my day.

Did a guided morning meditation — body scan, visualisation, get ready for the day ahead. Towards the end I was invited to set an intention for the day.

“How will you feel in your body today?”

Great question. So, I have to pay attention to my body now. Cool.

I don’t know about you, but I have lived all my life in my head. Sometimes in my feelings, but mostly in my head. I have never been able to maintain an exercise routine for more than 3 weeks. I enjoy exercise, I’m just so used to living from my neck up that it’s simply not in my field of awareness that I can do it.

When emotions arise in my body, I generally use reason to understand them. A little bit like a robot I would say. Processing … Calculating…Ding! I-am-fee-ling-sad-to-day (Robotic voice). Then I have to understand why.

Okay, cool, this is just an exaggeration for dramatization purposes — but still. How will I feel in my body today?

What I love about guided meditation is that I can temporarily replace the voice in my head with the guide’s voice, so I don’t need to think about what I am doing. I just surrender to it and follow the instructions. I have no words to describe how much it has helped me ( and I usually have a lot of words for everything lol). I will try, though: Doing body scans has been the best because, when I do it, I can feel the tension in my body and release it consciously. I get the chance to realign my spine and feel the energy moving through my body.

It’s very physical. When you are used to living in your head, like myself, this is very uncomfortable at first. What are all these sensations and how do I get rid of them?? Cause that is what you want to do at first — get rid of the discomfort.

I have to admit that I have not been very consistent or systematic with meditation practice so far. I mean I have not been doing it religiously every day. It’s been on and off for 5 years now. However, the transformation is real and obvious. I do pay more attention to how things feel physically in my everyday life. Like how my feet feel against the ground when I walk. Energy moving up and down my upper body when I am nervous. Or how this chair is supporting me right now as I am writing this, making me feel safe.

Connecting to the physical body is grounding. It’s an expansion, a new perspective on oneself and life. Another way of experiencing things, that is not from and through your mind. You start to understand why they say “Don’t believe everything you think”

This morning, in my meditation, when I heard the question “how will you feel in your body today?” I noticed that the answer came in my mind first( “I will feel safe, relaxed, confident, etc etc etc). Not too bad, it’s still setting an intention for the day. But I would have liked my body to answer it, so I can anchor that sensation and use it for the rest of the day.

I will try again tomorrow.

Do you also tend to live in your head? What do you do to connect with your body?