Being with intensity
Hello friends and welcome to a whole new week. ✨
When I did my coaching certification one of the areas we learned about was the somatic. Effectively, the body/mind connection or awareness. This was one of the most difficult pieces for me to connect to. I think because I spend so much time in my head spinning around in my thoughts. It was hard to grasp what it meant to connect with my body - let alone to “let it inform me”. It was really quite frustrating at first. I had to start small, focusing my attention on one part of my body like my hand and eventually moving to doing body scans.
But why does doing this even matter?
There are so many benefits to strengthening the mind-body connection. In exercise connecting your mind to a specific part of the body often helps you perform an exercise or a stretch better - but what about the other way around? If you’ve ever done a mindful body scan before you’ve likely experienced the grounded feeling that comes from focusing on what’s going on in your body. For me it can stop the spinning in my head, even just for a moment.
But another thing I’ve learned from connecting more intentionally with my body is just how much it can do without any effort. Our bodies breathe all day long keeping us alive with zero conscious thought required on our part. How wild is that? What this has taught me is how to practice “being” instead of always “doing”. It can be easy to feel like we always need to “do” something, to take some type of action. We often forget just how much our body and mind are capable of without even trying. I’ll give an example.
Have you ever done that hamstring stretch where you bend forward, hands and head towards your toes and you just hang there? It feels intense at first, especially if your hamstrings are particularly tight. My mind bounces between getting out of the stretch or pulling on my toes to deepen it. But I just hang there, and suddenly I start to notice my hamstring muscles softening. It literally feels like they almost unhook from something and start loosening. My body just does its thing while I hang out.
Two insights have come from this for me:
1) Sometimes we don’t have to try so hard. Less doing, more being. When you allow ease to be part of the process you might be surprised at what just naturally comes to you. This has worked the same way with creativity for me.
2) Sometimes we just need to be with the intensity. When we feel a negative feeling like tightness in the hamstrings or anxiety in the mind or body, we often feel like we need to either avoid it or change it. But sometimes we just need to be with it for a moment. I don’t mean to dwell in it or spin in it, but just sit with it.
When anxiety shows up for me I’ve learned it often shows up in my chest. It’s like a clamp that try as I might I can’t loosen. So I’ve practiced treating it like my tight hamstrings, I just hang out with it, breathe into it and it doesn’t always change it right away but I’ve started to learn how to just be with it in a way that it doesn’t prevent me from doing what I want to do.
Something to try
One of the first exercises that really worked for me is a hand sensing exercise from Eckhart Tolle. It goes like this:
Close your eyes and hold out your hand. Send your attention to your hand.
Without touching your hand, without moving it or looking at it - how can you tell your hand is still there?
You might start to notice you can feel the inside of your hand, maybe as a subtle warmth or buzzing feeling.
If you have a good connection with your body this might be easy, so you can try spreading that awareness to the rest of your body. But start small, see if you can grow and shrink the amount of sensation in your hand just with your attention.
A few other things
Interview on the MEsSY podcast
I had the pleasure of joining Jacob Morris on his podcast MEsSY this week where I talked about my own experience of early pandemic to now, balancing full-time work with coaching and flower farming and a lot of what I’ve learned over the last year. Jake is my brother-in-law so I appreciated how candidly we could talk and I enjoyed this conversation a lot. You can listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
🌗 The Transition: A virtual workshop April 11th
I’m hosting a 1-hour workshop with my friend Lily Rogers all about transition on Sunday, April 11th. We’ve created a space to come and reflect on what we’ve learned over the last year, what we want to make room for as the world opens back up and what we want to leave behind. Join us and the 20+ people signed up so far! You can find more details on my Instagram and 100% of proceeds will go to SWAN Vancouver.
Learn more and sign up here.
That’s all for this week! Hope you have a great week and see you next Monday.
-Amandah