Uncategorized – Page 4 – A Body Psychotherapist's Journal

Distress Tolerance

Distress tolerance is our ability to stay with our own uncomfortable feelings. The knee-jerk, unreflective reaction to distress is avoidance. We’ll do almost anything to avoid feeling our own distress: laugh about things that are terrible, bury our feelings in compulsive behaviours, go deeply down De Nile…however, none of these things helps us to become more ourselves. They only serve to get us through avoiding our own distress.

Much of the work of psychotherapy is about tolerating our emotional pain. Sometimes we need a witness: someone else to hear our distress. Knowing that we don’t have to bear it alone can be a big help. Sometimes we need someone else to label it for us: yes, that’s distress, or anxiety, or fear, or grief. That’s what is going on for you there. Sometimes we need to know that we are able to tolerate it. Yes, this is fear (or anger or sadness or rage) and it doesn’t last forever and it won’t kill me and I can be here with it. I can maybe even sit down with my distress and become curious about it. Hello, distress. My, oh, my, you are big, aren’t you? You are a very big feeling, and very intense. Hello, there, big intense distress. I can sit here with you, without needing to run away, or needing to change you or needing to change me.

What happens when you increase your distress tolerance? There are a number of waterfall effects. First, you can tolerate other people’s distress without reaction or taking it personally. Second, you tend to have less distress. Specifically, you might react to a current situation but you will no longer be acting our your fears for your own distress, so a whole layer of complication is removed.

Third, and maybe most important, tolerating your own emotional pain allows for freedom in your interactions and in your life. Imagine what you would do if you knew you would not fail? That’s one of those contemporary slogans designed to uplift and inspire. But honestly, what if failure wasn’t an issue because you could tolerate the discomfort that might come from failure? If you knew you could tolerate the FEELINGS that you fear, then you’d have very little to fear. We don’t have a lot of saber-toothed tigers in our world. Mostly we are afraid of being looked at, being the subject of others’ thoughts and words, and of social consequences such as shunning. If you knew, KNEW, that you could tolerate any discomfort that might ensue from an activity, you’d have less fear about actually doing it.

So….it sounds like a winner….increase your distress tolerance and you decrease your distress. Increase distress tolerance and increase your sense of freedom to be yourself. Notice when you are experiencing distress, watch how you try to avoid or mitigate it, and then just stop and be with your distress. What happens then?

Here’s a link to some good self-help materials on developing distress tolerance: http://www.cci.health.wa.gov.au/resources/infopax.cfm?Info_ID=54 Copy and paste into your browser if just clicking doesn’t relocate you.

Traveling through time

We cannot return to the past; we can only go forward.

I had that thought this morning, pondering my life, my career, my current state. But I think it is likely that both parts of that thought are untrue.

We can go back and we can go forward, always and sometimes obsessively, in our minds. We do a lot of both. Sometimes I spend a lot of time in one place or the other, and sometimes just waffling in between. Remembering, for example, my mother’s death, or then her life, and wondering how much of my memories of her are based on “reality” of actual events in the world, and how much based on the reality of my child’s experience. And then flipping into some future where I have written about my life, and made sense of it all. And then flopping to another new future where I leave therapy as a career and do nothing, nothing at all. Or write, but somehow make a living at writing. Or reshape my therapy practice so I focus on groups and have more free time, or then I wonder if I don’t really embrace some idea I have for work, well, then, will I die feeling incomplete???

The point is that I am returning to the past over and over. I am slipping into the future again and again. And when I spend my days in those places I miss being alive. I miss what is actually going on.

Where can I find a balance so that I am living my life here and now, and also creating a future that conforms to my desires? Oh, that’s a point….all of this time travel is usually about control. It is about my desire to control my future and my rage that I could not control my past. Aha, yes, indeed.

I wonder if acknowledging that I want to CONTROL my future will help me let go of that deep desire. Actually, I don’t really want to control the future….I just want the outcomes to be the outcomes I want. It reminds me somehow of the prayers I was taught as a child. I was taught to ask God to bless parents, friends, the dog, and to keep everyone safe and happy. Somehow I believed that my supplication would protect people and keep outcomes the way I wanted them. That’s a pretty long history of wanting to control how things work out.

Maybe all I can do right now is try to limit my time traveling. Here and now can be a pretty good place. It can also be boring, sad, angry, irritable and cold. But the more time I spend in the present, the more life I am getting in my life. I guess I’ll try for that.

The illusion of control

How do I end up in these places? That’s not just a whine about winter, but a bigger question, really. It seems to me that I could not have predicted my current circumstances from my earlier life. I think that a lot of strange, unpredictable things had to happen for me to be here, now, doing what I am doing.

I often wonder if there is any truth to my sense that I have made choices, decisions, which resulted in my arriving here in this place, in this work, in this country, within my particular family structure.

Did I actually have anything at all to do with that?

There are times when I think that maybe choice is illusory and that we operate on another scale. We are mere mites within a grander structure. We run around, choosing one path or another, feeling stressed about what to choose, but we cannot see that the choices are limited by the maze into which we were born. We think we are choosing from all the available options but maybe our very choices are constrained by our pre-existing beliefs, our social structures, or needs for acceptance within our tribes. Those constraints are largely invisible to us as we make our day-to-day decisions. Eggs or pancakes? Divorced or married? Employed or not? House or condo? It is not obvious that there are many other options than just the either-or within our cultural and social limits.

What are the limits? What keeps us inside the maze rather than climbing up the walls and getting a look at what else is there?

I suspect that partly it is our illusion of control. We feel a need to hold onto that, even though life has a way of reminding us regularly that we don’t actually control very much. If we should climb up the walls of the maze just to look out and across the sweep of those tunnels of our options and maybe the related but disconnected mazes of people from other places, cultures, social settings, we would have to acknowledge that truth…control is just an illusion. That’s a frightening idea. We want someone to be in control. Some of us want to be in control of ourselves. Some of us are willing to relinquish control to a beneficent deity. Some of us believe that we are controlled by malevolent forces, from government-corporate conspiracy to the devil. Some people prefer to believe that we are controlled by natural forces, such as evolution, or climate change. After all, we figure, SOMEONE must have set up those mazes.

What if none of it is true? What if our limits are our own conceptual construction, just as our control is our own conceptual construction? What would happen if we dropped all the stories, all the self-talk about us and others, about limits, about control, about events? I suspect we’d be left with experience, our moment-to-moment experiencing of being a human organism living a human life.

Found APOD, credit http://www.thorri.is/ Fabulous photos at this site — Found APOD, credit http://www.thorri.is/
Fabulous photos at this site

I’m going to ponder this for awhile. Who am I when I drop the storyline? When I really drop it, that question also disappears. The “I” of my story is gone and what is left is just the experiencer, experiencing. I get there sometimes, moments during sitting and other moments too, but as soon as I notice then I am back in the story, back in my maze. But I wonder, and this is part of the story too, if I can melt away the “me” of my story, can I melt away the limits of my maze? What is it like to just BE, without putting that moment into the context of my day, my week, my maze?

The meaning of anxiety

More and more, I am thinking that anxiety is about trying to cover up your feelings. You don’t want to feel whatever it is that you are feeling, so you try everything in your arsenal to stop feeling. You tense your muscles, constrict your breathing, start thinking obsessively, focus on external sensations or fill your body with too much food or alcohol or other chemicals to numb whatever is happening.

But the body doesn’t buy it. Instead, it sends you a message that something is wrong. Tense muscles, upset digestive processes, shallow breathing, racing thoughts, pains in gut and head, shakiness or trembling….all of these body experiences can connect to anxiety. Anxiety isn’t exactly fear. Fear is cleaner, has a more specific focus. But fear can be one of the emotions we try to cover up…and that can result in anxiety.

How can you recognize anxiety? It can show up as body symptoms: tensions, pain, nausea or other digestive upsets, headaches. It can show up as shakiness, foggy thinking and an inability to concentrate. Or it can appear in disguise. This is what happens when our defenses against anxiety are working to keep us from feeling it. So, for example, I tend to make internal lists, develop complex plans for my future, create diet and exercise and frugality hell for my body to live in. I have learned to recognize that my mind uses these tools to defend against my anxious feelings. When I am doing a lot of rigid planning and programming for myself in my mind, I know (in some other part of my mind) that I need to look deeper. This is one way that I manifest anxiety.

You might have racing thoughts. Or worrying. Or obsessive ritualistic behaviour such as around cleaning, or working out, or making contacts with people. Or avoiding contact with people. Many different behaviours can be manifestations of anxiety because we learn very quickly to make associations. That is, if we engage in a behaviour and experience a lessening of the uncomfortable feelings of anxiety, then we are pretty likely to engage that behaviour again. Sometimes it is almost as if the behaviour IS the anxiety; so we think our racing thoughts ARE anxiety. But really they are an attempt to cope with the body sensations that are unpleasant.

Learning to live with emotional discomfort is just as useful as learning to live with physical discomfort. We don’t have to happy, contented, or relaxed ALL of the time. Allowing ourselves to feel what we feel, experience what our body is experiencing, and just being present to it….well, that’s a great way to be really alive.

How do you do that when you have only ever run away from your feelings? Yes, that’s the hard part. It helps to remember that you are just going to be FEELING something…and feelings, like thoughts, come and then then go. And it helps to remember that nobody ever died from just feeling something. Watching out for catastrophic thinking helps too….thinking thoughts like “I can’t stand this” won’t make it easier to actually stay right with that feeling. So when you feel a bit anxious, see if you can give yourself some time and space to just ask what might be there under the anxious feeling? What else is there? Allow yourself to breathe into your belly, and feel your feet on the ground, and ask….what is this about? What do I notice in my body? Oh, yes, this sensation in my belly, and this one in my chest….oh, THIS…this is sadness….(or anger, or fear or whatever…). Then watch that felt sense with kindness and compassion and some curiosity…oh, yes, this is what I am experiencing right now….THIS is it. And watch it as it shifts and changes, and notice what that is like for you. Giving yourself time and space and permission to have feelings can make a big difference.

The huge benefit to allowing ourselves to fully experience our uncomfortable, unfamiliar, or unpleasant feelings is that ALL of our feelings become more accessible. When you experience your own integrity, where you are not hiding, covering up, or showing off your emotions, you feel yourself more solidly on the ground, and more real in your body. And that’s what life is about…being here, in this body, in this moment, right now.

You are a human being. You have a whole range of feelings as your birthright. Don’t live your life halfway: feel them all!

What’s wrong with positive thinking?

Positive thinking is fine. There is nothing inherently bad about it. Usually when people refer to thinking positively, they are actually experiencing unpleasant thoughts….thoughts that might create imaginary catastrophes, thoughts of criticism or judgment, or just overt pessimism. Those thoughts generally don’t lead to better outcomes, so people want to change them. And that’s okay.

If all it took to recover from traumatic stress was positive thinking, we’d probably all be just fine. And therapists like me might have a lot less to do at work.

There is a lot that happens in our thinking. And there is also a lot that happens in our minds apart from our conscious, word-based thoughts. That’s where the over-simplification of “positive thinking” starts to fall apart.

What else is in there? If you sit, quieting your body and breathing and just noticing your mental activity for a period of time, you’ll become aware of the constant overlapping parade of ideas, words, memories, anticipations, and images that are flowing through your conscious mind. Then you might be able to start to notice the spaces: can you find space between the discrete items in that steady parade? Then, over time and practice, you might notice specific types of items in your continuous mental flow, or you might focus on paying more attention to the empty space, allowing stillness to come into your mind as well as in your body.

This practice helps us to become more acquainted with the contents of our minds, and helps us to access some things that we may have been avoiding or simply not noticing in the chaos of the untrained mind.

The danger of “positive thinking” is that we might use it to avoid looking deeply into ourselves, to pack away uncomfortable feelings and memories, to try to keep ourselves from feeling sad, for example, or angry or afraid. While there is certainly some short-term utility to that approach, in the longer term we end up cutting off parts of ourselves.

Wow, that sounds brutal! But what might it actually look and feel like, to have cut off parts of yourself? Well, one example might be that you have very poor memory for parts of your life. Or you may only experience a very restricted range of feelings: you feel happy, sad, angry or afraid, but only a little bit and you wonder what all the fuss is about, when other people seem to experience their feelings more powerfully. Or you just feel slightly anxious much of the time, with no apparent reason. Perhaps you everything in your life looks just fine from the outside, but you feel like something is missing….but it is embarrassing to say that because your life is “just fine.” These are all possible indications that you are out of contact with parts of yourself.

Looking deeply into ourselves, staying with the thoughts, feelings, and body sensations that arise, can be an act of great courage. Really experiencing our experiences, whether we label them “good” or “bad,” “positive” or “negative,” or (my preferred label) “pleasant” or “unpleasant,” allows us to find the hidden parts and embrace them.

Positive thinking isn’t bad, especially if you are trying to change a pattern of catastrophizing, what iffing, or shoulds. Using it to numb us to our uncomfortable thoughts and feelings can keep us stuck in our old patterns, though. Be aware of what you most want to avoid…there is usually something of value there!

Happy Spring!

The search for the true self….

The Drama of the Gifted Child, by Alice Miller, has been on my shelf for years. I am not exaggerating. It has been there, reproaching me, taunting me with my inadequacy, for at least twelve years. Now you must understand that this is a thin little book, a small volume that consists of three of Miller’s major essays from the middle of her career as a Swiss psychoanalyst. But I have been afraid of this book, afraid of Miller in many ways.

Today, this morning in fact, I finally finished reading this book. I finished reading and now I sit, both wondering what I was afraid of, and knowing that my own struggles in reading this book come from my struggles to escape my childhood traumas. What Miller wrote was radical when she wrote it, but that was more than thirty years ago.

Her point, oversimplified, is that children experience intrapsychic wounding by parents who have not consciously realized their own wounds. This wounding happens in good families, by parents who mean well and frequently the children of such parents are “gifted:” they are leaders, intellectual, caregivers, compliant and obedient, shining lights in many ways. The problem, and there is a problem, is that these gifted children have given up parts of themselves in order to be what the parents needs them to be….good, nice, kind, smart, beautiful, athletic, obedient, quiet…whatever it is that the parent must have. When a person, a child, has to put away parts of herself in order to stay connected to the parent, those parts can go underground for years. They can emerge as peculiar behaviours, thoughts, or feelings, or show up as an absence, such as when a person feels “nothing” or “numbness” or reports that they feel dead inside. We are built with a part of us that strives toward wholeness, someone, and we get to a point where it no longer feels okay to live your life as if you are a real person having a real life. You want to actually BE a real person and actually LIVE. That means having access to all the parts of you; the nice, sweet, clean, brilliant parts, but also the dirty, nasty, angry, bitchy, sly and disgusting parts as well. We have it all but until we can find acceptance for it all, we are only living a partial life.

Miller is a psychoanalyst, so she constructs this process in terms of objects and introjects. I can see myself in those terms but also more simply. I can still hear my mother’s voice when I start to rage at myself for my usual internal list of shortcomings (that’s where the inadequacy comes in). I recognize that part of me that still operates as if striving will get me something. With striving come harsh thoughts, rigid behaviour and body, focused and energized thinking but only in rigid areas, with tunnel vision. Even though I don’t consciously feel like I need to be punished, my actions are punishing: extreme frugality, extreme exercise, extreme dieting, extreme overwork. When I get that way, now, I know that I have been triggered, something has happened. In some way I have been reminded of the child that I once was, who believed that she deserved to be punished when she was not “good.”

What I have learned about myself includes knowing that I need soothing rather than punishment when I am busy overworking, over planning, and overeating. Because the range of feelings could not be accepted and accommodated in my childhood, I learned that having some particular feelings was “bad.” Even now, even as an adult, a therapist, a psychologist, I may react with shock and shame at some trigger. . And it may take a bit of time for me to see what happened.

When I notice that rigidity coming over me, I can slow down. I can remember that my body is locked in the old, old story, not the here-and-now. I can breathe and remind myself that love is available. I can take it in, right here and now, feeling my connection to the ground and to the sky. I can soften my shoulders, relax my jaw, let my eyes rest deeply in their sockets, and remember that I am who I am, a whole person who makes mistakes and poor choices and has messy and complicated feelings, and that I am also more than that.

And I can thank Miller for her book, for her ideas that really opened up how we think about the inner world of children. I am sorry it has taken me twenty or more years to read this book but that’s just what it took. And I am grateful that I had it to read now.

Power of perception

Yesterday I posted a little note and a photo of a tree in the woods. I commented that the tree was decorated in Mardi Gras colours, purple, green, and gold. That’s exactly what I saw yesterday in the woods.

You might have noticed, as I have, that the picture I posted tells a slightly different story. In the picture, the decorations are not limited in colour, but include other colours as well. And a friend noted that she had seen that tree before in the park, quite a while before Mardi Gras.

Hmm…..this has me pondering and amused, actually, at the influence of my thoughts. Yesterday was Ash Wednesday, a day important in my childhood for religious reasons and the beginning of Lent. I recall many years of the supreme sacrifice of giving up eating candy for the interminable six weeks before Easter. This was for some abstract reason that was going to help Jesus, somehow, even though he was still going to be crucified whether I was compliant or not. In my adult life, Lent marked the end of the Mardi Gras season, which started at Epiphany and was marked by delightful and delicious King Cake, a soggy sweet coffee cake that boasted purple, green and gold coloured sugars, and a plastic baby hidden somewhere for you to break a tooth on.

But yesterday in the woods I was primed to see a Mardi Gras tree, not a Christmas tree.

I had been thinking about Shrove Tuesday, and about my nephew Vic’s birthday, and the particular birthday when Vic turned twelve at our house in Louisiana. The birthday fell on Tuesday, Fat Tuesday. So we celebrated by heading off to Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Vic decided that the party was for him and we all agreed.

With pancakes and king cakes in my mind, how could I avoid turning that tree into a Mardi Gras symbol? But I was wrong. The power of perception was so strong, so insistent, that I came home and posted a picture claiming what I had seen. Only now I know it’s just what I thought I had seen.

Thoughts can be powerful and persuasive. I wonder where else I have experienced a sort of perception-blindness?

Body pain, emotional pain: why I don’t work out at the gym

Working out challenges me. I am challenged physically, of course, and also in terms of my attitude and thoughts, so I guess I could say that I am cognitively challenged, too. I have to stay positive, to avoid over-thinking and to just DO IT.

But what I have found out about working out at home, is that the sensations in my body allow to me access other kinds of emotional responses than I thought likely…or even possible. I suppose if I had not been a client of bioenergetic therapy for more than ten years, I would perhaps not feel free to allow the behavioural expression of my experience. But I do, and I am amazed and full of wonder at what is going on.

Specifically, when I work through some of the deepest and most chronic of my body tensions, it hurts. It hurts a lot, but I am okay there, knowing that what hurts is my own tension. I am not injuring myself but pressing extraordinarily tight tissues against gentle resistance, such as the foam roller, or opening my hip outward using a strap to support my leg. What happens is this: I wait with the sensation, sink into the intensity, try to allow relaxation to happen around the exquisite pain of the place where my resistance meets the roller (for example). And I am moved to sobbing, deep, deep sobbing, tears and wailing. It feels pulled out of me, from my deepest self, like part of me is tearing apart. Rolling my thoracic spine over the roller has a piquancy that is like nothing else, but as the roller descends toward my lower ribs, to the area of my diaphragm, the intensity increases. It is painful, genuinely painful, but I know it is not the pain of injury. It is the pain of my chronic tensions, chronic defenses against living my own life, resisting the pressure to soften, to release, to let go, to allow, to surrender.

So I do let go; I let go into the sobbing and wailing and that contributes to some softening and relaxing. I can’t stay for long; the sensations are too intense, my reactions are big, and I can only hold that space for a few moments. There it is: my body letting go another tiny bit, releasing ancient tensions through sobbing and vibration. I don’t have any stories to tell myself about WHY I am crying, don’t have any need to locate a reason in my everyday world. It just happens. Then it is over. And then I can step away, take a deep breath, and rest in the experience of a new and different body, a calmer and more alive self than just a few moments before. The ground feels more secure, the world looks brighter, and I am intensely present to myself.

Music moves me….and probably you, too.

Music has power in our bodies, to the degree to which we permit it.

This is obvious but so much a part of everyday life that I suspect we ignore it. We certainly don’t use it to our best advantage. In fact, it may be used to influence our behaviour without our awareness. Have you ever noticed the background music in restaurants or grocery stores? You might wonder, actually, why on earth anyone bothers to have music in the grocery store. But it is for a very clear reason: people’s behavioural tempos are affected by the music in the background, even, or maybe especially, when you are not fully aware of what you are hearing.

I play music in my waiting room, and it is a particular, carefully chosen type of music. I choose relaxing, non-challenging music for that space. I don’t want music that is too hard to listen to, so I don’t include jazz or (much) classical music, because most people don’t feel comfortable with that music. And because the trajectory lines in that music are long…that is, in order to feel the whole pattern, you have to listen for several minutes, and that’s not always available in the waiting room. Even with that, I don’t put Top 40 pop on my playlist because going to the therapist is NOT like going to the mall. It is not a casual, no-big-deal sort of experience. I look for fairly attractive, innocuous, relaxing music without obvious repetitive patterns. In other words, New Age music which is often actually marketed for relaxation or to accompany massage, Reiki, or other calming modalities.

All of this actually is peripheral to my point, which I promise to get to…..we are affected, sometimes quite deeply, by the music and sounds around us, but we are often not mindful of these effects. When you tune in to what you are hearing, you become part of the moment, part of what is going on. You get to experience your own experience! In a very clear way, you see yourself responding to the music, which otherwise you might consider background. But background becomes foreground when we take a moment, breathe, listen, and feel.

This question of how music affects you can be an entire area for self-inquiry. What kinds of music do you find energizing? Enlivening? Relaxing and soothing? What challenges you to pay attention? What do you notice about yourself when you are challenged that way? And of course, music will tap into memory systems. So you might notice that songs from your youth generate some feelings that are like you might have felt years ago. How can you put those bits together?

As you begin this practice, you may begin also to understand how you might have been triggered into a different mood state in the past. Perhaps you came home from the store feeling really wonderful, bright, cheerful, alive….maybe you heard a song on the “background music” that reminded you of a wonderful memory. Or perhaps you suddenly develop a dark, somber mood….what have you just been hearing?

JS Bach, thanks to: (http://www.8notes.com250px-JSBach.jpg)

If music can affect our mood without our awareness, can we harness that power to influence our moods purposefully? I know that Bach has gotten me through some very difficult times. When everything else in my life seems like it is falling apart, I can put on the some of the piano works and feel a shift. Even though listening to Bach won’t fix my life, it can remind me that some things maintain their integrity and will stay stable even if I feel like I am coming unglued. I also know that I have run some pretty long distances listening to even cheesy music like Tom Petty singing “I Won’t Back Down.” Having a sound track for parts of your life can shift mood, support memory, and remind you that your life is bigger than the story you tell yourself. Check it out: notice music in your everyday world and see what it is doing to your inner space. Then see how you can use that information consciously.

Knowing by slowing…

Body psychotherapy isn’t as odd-sounding as it once was. People are beginning to understand that the mind and body are not really separate, that there are tissues in the gut, for example, that are much like brain tissue, that emotions are experienced at the body level, and that even those classic “psychological” problems of depression and anxiety are body experiences. The mind of course is part of them; the kinds of distorted thinking that we engage in when we are experiencing depression or anxiety can most certainly make things a lot worse. But I am not sure that the chicken-egg question matters here….I personally don’t care if how you feel affects how you think, or if your thoughts are affecting your emotions. The point is that things are pretty bad, one way or another, and how can you live more comfortably?

So it is obvious, I guess, that developing awareness of what you are thinking can make a difference. You can even change your habits of mind. You can also change your habits of body, and your habitual ways of responding to situations, and those kinds of changes can be most helpful in trying to cope with symptoms of depression or anxiety.

Self awareness is the key to any kind of change. You can’t change if you don’t know what you are currently doing. And the key to self awareness is, for many of us, slowing down. Slowing our everyday experiences so that there is time for self-reflection, slowing our thinking, so that we can become aware of thoughts as they arise and fade away, slowing our behaviour so that we can become responsive rather than in the perpetual knee-jerk of reaction.

What happens when you slow down? Just take a moment to notice what happens….without judgment, without struggle, with compassion. For many of us, slowing down generates negative thoughts (“this is unproductive,” “I”ll never accomplish anything,” “Does she think I’m not a busy person? I don’t have time for this nonsense.”). For some people, the open space of unstructured time feels uncomfortable, as if you should DO something. For some, a bit of quiet allows us to feel our exhaustion, the fatigue that comes with forever and forever keeping up a front, being frantically productive and chronically stressed.

But without judgment and with compassion, what is it like for you to take time and space to just be? What do you notice about yourself? Who are you, really, when you separate yourself from the story inside your head?

Wherever you are is the place to work. Notice sensation in the body. Notice what you notice in your environment; what are you sensitive to in this moment? In the next moment? Notice thoughts as they arise and fade out. Notice which ones tug hardest on your attention. Notice more sensations in the body; try moving, and notice what that is like. Can you feel the desire to move, the intention to move, before you manifest that intention into action? Where in your body are you aware of that intention? How do you KNOW, in your body, that you want to move?

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this: