Practice : sensing & feeling

A simple practice that I use on most days to get underneath my lovely mind chatter and have an honest conversation with myself is to begin the day in connection to my body.

This is a gentle invitation to connect with yourself - it's even possible when you've got little time.

Begin by noticing where your body is, where your bum makes contact with the chair, maybe where your feet are touching the floor - make a point to press your heels into the floor not just your toes - this gives a signal to your body to be here now, not wanting to run away.

Notice your spine and the support you feel from your bones, the chair and the floor.

Now, place your hands somewhere on your body that feels comforting, so that you also feel the support of your hands on your body.

From this place you're going to ask yourself two simple questions:

What am I feeling?

What am I sensing?

You can imagine with asking ‘what amI feeling'?’ that you're asking your best friend or a loved one ‘how are you?’, so that you ask yourself from the place of really wanting to listen to the reply because we care deeply.

Notice what comes up when you ask your body ‘what am I feeling?’. And try not to judge what you find, there's no need to fix it or change it, just let it be exactly how it is.

For the question ‘what am I sensing?’ we're looking at finding sensation in the body. Sometimes this can feel challenging but a simple way to do this is to see if you can find opposites.

Is there a place in your body that feels hot, or cold, tight or relaxed?

PS - I have a handy PDF with some more sensation words you could explore linked below

Once you've had this conversation with your body you might want to say ‘thankyou’ and gently come back into full awareness of your surroundings.

Maybe you feel like journalling about what you disovered.

Perhaps you noticed something that you weren't aware of before - maybe that you thought you were bursting with energy but somewhere in your body there was a little fatigue or something that felt slow or heavy.

Whatever you find the invitation is the same, can you let it be there? Without rushing to fix it? And maybe, it gives you a signpost of how to nurture those parts of you as you go through your day.

This is a small example of what connecting to your body can feel like. We so often fall into just thinking about how we feel, and there's nothing wrong with that at all, but often when we involve the body we get to uncover understandings or insights that maybe we wouldn't have noticed before.

I'd love to know how it goes if you give it a try ❤️