What’s your body saying to you? The entire organization of the body broadcasts messages internally that you can’t ignore, whether you’re conscious of them or not. Physical sensations feed how you think and feel. You know this already - you’re not a beginner. You do yoga, meditation, tai chi - you know how much returning to your body calms your mind. Or maybe you’ve heard that this is true but just don’t know how to get there.
Google your body
If you’re old enough to remember the pre-Google search engine days, you remember how hard it was to retrieve useful information from the internet. Often other search engines returned information that didn’t truly meet your query. By organizing the world’s information, Google made it universally accessible and useful. When you organize your body, you can make the signals you perceive accessible and useful.
Once you understand the signals, you’ll discover your body is as powerful as your brain when it comes to solving problems so you can
feel more physical comfort
find more emotional calm and
get more clarity for action.
You can unstick your body through your sensory system to resolve your persistent limitations.
In this book you’ll learn how you can make sense of body messages so you can feel whole and empowered, connected within yourself so you can connect with others and move forward in your life with clear intention. This approach uses a deep dive into posture and walking in order to make that happen.
These simple acts, although pedestrian, contain a depth of unexamined riches. By discovering how to consciously link the
the body that feels and
the brain that creates meaning
you can see what is body and what is your perception of your body. Seeing this distinction allows you to break through old patterns that are limiting you. The quickest way to get there is to learn how to organize your whole body in what I will call your Sensing Posture.
Your Sensing Posture gets underneath your personal filter of perception and offers you the baseline human experience of wholeness through internal body organization.
Your sense of how to
balance from the inside,
listen without being defensive, and
see clearly so you can move towards your goals
converge in your body to generate postural cues. When you successfully upgrade this convergence to reach a new level of homeostasis, you transform your life in a way that piecemeal approaches fail to achieve.
Self-control vs self-regulation
When you learn how to find your sensing posture, you learn to distinguish between self-control and self-regulation. Self-control is suppression to stop or prevent the body from doing what it’s doing. It’s a hierarchical approach that says top controls bottom.
Self-regulation is giving the body what it needs so it can do things better. It’s a relational approach that says bottom informs top, and the conversation goes both ways. You learn self-regulation by understanding and responding to the body’s needs. And you communicate with your own body through your sensing posture.
Self-control can be a necessary skill for certain situations and is often more about directing behavior. It does not address the internal experience and if you don’t know how to incorporate that, unmet felt needs will ultimately catch up with you. Self-regulation, on the other hand, is building a relationship with your body so you are collaborating with it in the sensory language it understands.
Before you read any further, let’s try an example of how this might work in your body…
Stand with your feet 2-3 inches apart. Now, do the following move internally and imagine you are doing it so no one can notice it. Position your pelvis as if you are about to take a seat, and send your shins forward at the same time. Remember, it’s an internal shift, imperceptible to observers. Take at least 30 seconds to notice what happens.Take longer if you wish.
What changed for you? How did you feel in the whole of your body?
Now position your head to listen to the sounds around you, and keep doing what you did above. Imagine you are waiting in line somewhere. Imagine people around you are impatient and stressed about waiting in line.
How do you feel? What changed now?
If you feel more grounded and settled, more spacious and open in the chest, or more relaxed in your shoulders, that’s a good sign. (If not, try it with your eyes closed). It’s such a minor change to stand with these instructions, yet the change in your whole body experience can be significant.
Instead of ‘standing up straight’, you position yourself to the signals your body seeks. The body connects into the ground through the arches of the feet, which you activate by putting more weight into your shins while slightly changing the position of the pelvis.
Can you use these cues when you think of ‘standing up straight’: shins, take a seat, listen? Can you imagine what would happen if you used these cues instead of bracing yourself in anticipation of something you fear / dread / “can’t stand”?
Now organize yourself as if you are listening from the front surface of your spine, deep inside you. Continue to reach your shins forward while you “take a seat” within your pelvis. Let the sounds inside the room connect to the front of your spine. Connect to the sounds outside the room with your ears.
What changed here?
[book excerpt ends here]
Ready to read more?
In this book you'll discover a body resolution process that you can use again and again to resolve old patterns that keep you from moving forward.
Back in the early 2000's, I replaced yoga classes and martial arts classes and talk therapy with a commitment to change how I felt in my body all day long.
The result? I am more calm and powerful in my body and mind in my 50's than I was in my 30's.
Since then, what used to cause me emotional turmoil or resistance to change is now resolvable. I use my body as a resource, instead of managing it as a burden or when I leave my body and go into my head when faced with old stressors. And my clients have likewise learned to trust their bodies and capacities to face the challenges that used to hold them back.
My book, When Things Stick: Untangling Your Body From Old Patterns, reveals the fundamentals steps of the process.
Inside, I'll share how your posture can facilitate self-regulation, the body resolution process that is available to you right now, and the power of using your sensory system to change old patterns. I use these things today to cultivate deep trust in my body.
I'll also share how I restore balance and power in my body without strain or loads of time.
This book includes videos that illustrate the critical adjustments you can make to change how you feel in your body all day long, the reasons you are stuck, why your current strategies aren't working, plus many more tools that you can use every day, spontaneously and at the moments you need them most.
People have come to me after having tried multiple mind-body methods or even getting certified in a couple of them, still struggling to master ease in their bodies. This multi-sensory approach connects the dots or fills in the gaps that saved them thousands of dollars and precious time by averting surgery, being able to quickly self-recover, or finding every-day resilience that transforms how they show up in their lives.
You’ll find all this in this book, When Things Stick: Untangling You Body From Old Patterns.
