Thinking, feeling, sensing & doing
Thinking, feeling, sensing & doing
Discerning between signals of mind, body & world
I recently discovered The Work of Byron Katie, an extraordinary woman who, after fighting psychological demons for years, “woke up” in 1986 to this insight:
All her suffering came from her thinking.
She says life has been blissful ever since she stopped “believing her thoughts.”
Furthermore, she says she has “stopped making decisions” and simply watches curiously “to see what I’ll do.”
The Work consists of four questions, used to ‘inquire’ into any thought:
Is that true?
Can you absolutely know that it’s true?
How do you react, what happens, when you believe that thought?
Who or what would you be without that thought?
If you want to try the process, you can go to Katie’s website and download a ‘Judge Your Neighbor’ worksheet. As you fill it in, you are encouraged to be “judgmental, childish, and petty” as you describe how you think about someone in your life.
After spewing all over ‘your neighbor’, you put each statement you’ve written through the wringer of Katie’s four powerful questions.
The questions are followed by ‘turnarounds.’
If you’ve written:
“I can’t stand the sound of his voice”, or
“She should mind her own business”,
you now write:
“I can’t stand the sound of MY voice”
“I should mind MY own business”
“She SHOULD’NT mind her own business”
and you consider the ways that these statements could also be interpreted as true.
However certain you felt before, what you inevitably discover is:
It’s not certain that this thought is true,
When you believe that thought you harm yourself, and
Without that thought you would feel much freer
When you do the turnarounds - testing the hypothesis that you are the jerk instead of your neighbor - you’re forced to notice your own imperfections.
The cool thing about that is that now you are looking in the direction of something you do have some control over - your own behavior - rather than fighting with the reality that this other person is who they are and you cannot control them.
Byron Katie describes her wake up call.
I’ve done a bit of work with The Work.
After going through Katie’s four questions many times, I can now access a more spontaneous shift with only the slightest ‘verbal’ cue. I don’t always have to go through the whole process. It happens in an instant, way below the level of words.
Our culture has been woefully confused about the words ‘mind’ and ‘body’ - and the (unrooted) root of the problem has been trying to understand with our minds.
Our bodies understand the world quite well.
But our minds don’t understand the language of the body.
When I have a thought and the tone of my body immediately changes, I get suspicious.
For example someone cuts me off in traffic - Asshole!
But - Is it true?
I don’t need to say words in my head.
I don’t need to debate whether that driver is really an asshole.
I already know that I’m an asshole sometimes.
I just attune to what wasn’t there before this thought and invite a letting go.
Do I let go of thought or muscular contractions?
Or are they the same thing?
Insight teacher Bonnitta Roy gave a year-long course at
in 2023, to respond to the rampant confusion about how we experience ourselves, A New Theory of the Body: Putting the Mind Back into the Body and the Body Back into Nature.Combining the most up-to-date findings of cognitive neuroscience with experiential play designed to help feel our inner workings, she kept emphasizing a key principle:
The body precedes the mind.
Some concrete examples illustrate this principle:
How would you be able to talk about a concept like ‘infinity’ if you had never looked up and seen how the sky just keeps on going forever and ever?
When you keep your eyes relaxed but still, thought is inhibited.
(Try it: gaze straight forward without fixing sharply on one point. Can you maintain this gaze and say the alphabet backwards? Or do you end up wanting to move your eyes?)A researcher at the MIT media lab has created a device that can “read your thoughts” - sort of. What it actually does is read the sub-threshold muscular impulses in your mouth and throat that are stimulated by inner speech.
Infinity, silencing thought, “mind reading” - isn’t that ‘mental stuff’?!
What these (and many other possible) examples show is that most of what we think of as being the work of our minds is actually grounded in the body.
While I hadn’t previously known about the device from MIT, I was familiar with what mental rehearsal feels like in the body from practicing the Feldenkrais Method.
(Notice how the phrase ‘mental rehearsal’ creates an image of some executive sitting up in your head that tells the rest of the body what to do.)
If you imagine raising your right arm you should be able to sense a subtle muscle activation in that limb. Yet, if you think about it - how could you possibly imagine such a thing if you had never actually raised your arm before?
The body precedes the mind.
Much of what we think sets us apart from other animals seems to be ‘mind stuff.’
So if we discover that those qualities can be sourced in our bodies - our animal bodies - this has profound implications on another scale.
(A human superiority complex that justifies destroying the planet is harder to justify.)
In countless crucial moments of your life, the truth is:
Your body doesn’t need to take directions from your mind.
If you’ve ever driven your car across town while “lost in thought”, notice how your body successfully got the job done while your mind was up to other things.
If you’ve ever been in a flow state (effortlessly accomplishing tasks that usually don’t feel so effortless), you have probably noticed a significant decrease in thinking.
Wade into these waters experientially . . .
What we feel is almost always the product of both mind and body. Yet we frequently fail to understand how the ‘parts’ come together to make our whole experience.
Suppose that someone - with whom you have “history” - asserts in front of a group of people that “you are such a ____ !”
The blank might be filled many ways. Perhaps they even said something nice.
In any case, they present their judgment of you as the truth. They seem to imply things about the relationship between the two of you and your past actions.
If the others believe this, what will be the consequences?
How do you experience this moment?
Whatever happens, you can likely notice three aspects:
The words in your head, the sensations in your body and your overall sense of self.
Let’s take them in reverse order.
- Your sense of self is dynamic. It’s something like your mood.
Today it’s like this.
Before this person speaks you have a certain disposition, a certain baseline tone.
Did you already think this person was a %&#! ?
Or are you in a forgiving mood today?
Were you upset due to an unrelated incident?
Were you high on life for an unrelated reason?
This person’s words don’t exist in a vacuum. They connect to what’s already in you.
Landing on top of your disposition are the bodily sensations that arise in the moment:
Do you choke on your breath?
Tighten your jaw or belly?
Clench your fists?
Do you dilate your eyes dilate or squint?
Do you shrink? Expand?
Smile? Laugh?!
You might have stories about why these different kinds of responses occur.
Story is another level away from ground, sitting on top of how your body feels.
Asshole!
Liar!
He doesn’t understand me.
This is so humiliating!
Wow - poor thing. Your life must be so miserable.
What might your body feel for each of these narratives?
Unfortunately, we rarely notice how the ingredients in the soup are blended. Instead, as if there was too much salt, the narrative on top tends to show up the most.
Let’s say I was already ticked off for some reason. Now you say something I don’t like.
In an instant, I could think:
You ALWAY do this!
My body tenses to fight - but then instead I fight the urge because I think I’m a “nice guy. ”
I tell myself ANYONE would feel like I do. This is an impossible situation!
My mind has my body in a straightjacket.
But what if I start from a different baseline?
What if I’m grounded and clear?
Maybe I don’t like what you said, but first I notice my body’s response.
I feel my various muscles contracting.
I see the stories parade into my virtual space.
This time I don’t start with words. I start with sensations.
First, I feel an absence of the calm presence I had before. I don’t like that.
Feeling my body’s shift into noise, I awaken intention.
A conscious breath.
Attunement to ground.
I still have a narrative about us, but my body isn’t its prisoner.
Body is foregrounded in my attention.
‘Attention’ also describes an action of my body.
My body relaxes. Now I have more choice with how I respond to you. I can take time to decide because this doesn’t feel urgent.
I continue to live inside each inhale and exhale.
I’m not in the narrative inside my head. I’m in my body.
My eyes still look out into the world to see what is really going on right now.
This is all quite simplified, best and worst case scenarios.
’Real life’ takes place in the region between.
Yet if we understand these dynamics more precisely - though they unfold within fractions of a second - we can tilt our experience towards more preferred outcomes.
In the first scenario, attention was in with words and images in my head - simulations of reality based on narratives from the past.
Because I was looking here (in virtual space), I was blind to my body and the ‘real world’ for at least a few moments. This could also be a deep rabbit hole.
The second case is different because I already attend to my body as a default behavior. When something disturbs my baseline, I attend even more.
I treat my body - and the earth below - as an anchor. If I feel myself floating up into narrative I deliberately sink down again into foundation.
I feel the sinking, as if swallowing a bowling ball.
It’s worth remembering that Byron Katie was basically living in hell before she stopped believing her thoughts. Hell was her thoughts.
It’s likely that she also had little awareness of what was happening in her body - although I imagine there was plenty of pain. Likewise her sense making about what was really happening in the world must have been quite crippled.
Most of us won’t experience the extremes that Byron Katie has lived, but hopefully it’s getting clearer how - and where - we can cultivate more agency.
Not in our minds.
What I described in the second scenario is recommended as a practice.
But it’s important to understand that the act of deliberately sinking deeper into your body when you feel yourself trapped in narrative isn’t the key move.
The essential thing is the cultivation of a more grounded, aware and present dispositional state that precedes whatever happens in the moment.
It’s only your previous grounding that makes you capable of responding in the moment.
Something crucial to understand about any practice of self-cultivation is the distinction between practices and practice.
The plural refers to activities that you set aside intentional time for.
The singular refers to every waking moment of your life.
Stylized practices afford you the opportunity to study nuances of pattern and make playful and insightful experiments.
The ritual setting is a better learning space for your nervous system.
When you feel comfortable and safe, you can make more subtle discernments.
Yet, if all you ever do is practices - in safe environments. If you never bring the intention of practice into the complex and unscripted scenes of daily life, your practices will have limited impact on your sense of agency in the world.
Your habitual baseline disposition is cultivated through practices.
It’s what sets you up for success - or failure - in the midst of the practice of life.
So it’s also helpful to notice the choice of attending to body or mind in the moments when stakes aren’t so high, when it might seem that you have “nothing” to do.
These opportunities for spontaneous life practice are like low-hanging fruit.
Do you scroll?
Or go for a stroll?
Do you wonder if so-and-so likes you?
Or breathe, and clarify your connection to ground?
What you think is easy to translate into words.
What you feel (emotionally) - can be harder to language, but still filled with images.
What you sense with your body is simply THIS.
Or more accurately, it’s this and this and this - all at once.
Body senses through many channels simultaneously,
Synthesizing them into a single experience.
The synaesthetic body’s capacity for blending sensations precedes the mind’s capacity for blending concepts into metaphors and abstractions.
“A brain without a body could not think” - Moshe Feldenkrais
Your brain, an organ of your body, plays a key role.
(Think ‘brain’ - from head to toe.)
Your body meets the world.
These other bodies move before your eyes, making these sounds and gestures.
You don’t need to put it all into words in order to understand.
Wordless wisdom has uniquely seamless clarity.
In life, in the moment, can only do our best.
But when we have extra time and space, we can practice maintaining a clear dispositional state grounded in the body and connected to reality - as a habit.
When I run in the park, the trees, birds, bugs, wind, trail or creek don’t ‘trigger’ me. Natural surroundings hold space for me whenever I feel scattered or disconnected.
Yet sometimes I barely notice.
I’m in my head, thinking about something.
The park doesn’t totally disappear, I don’t go completely blind, but
it’s as if my eyes glaze over.
My connection to the world is dulled - until I notice what’s happening.
Now I can intentionally send my eyes back out into the world again.
I sink back into my breath, the space in the bottom of my belly and the rhythmic response of ground to each of my steps. I track the rebound force from the Earth as it travels back up my legs, up my spine, all the way up through the top of my head.
Two minutes later, I may have to start all over again
That’s why it’s a practice.
Simple, repetitive, beautiful
Medicine for a world where feeling insane makes perfect sense.
Practice makes it easier
to stay connected,
including in society
(where company isn’t so friendly
as the trees in the park)
I don’t love the word ‘embodiment.’ It points in the right direction, but the way the word is typically used seems to diminish its importance.
Let’s do a little embodiment to feel more present . . .
Ah, that was refreshing.
Now let’s get down to business!
But ‘embodiment’ isn’t a pinch of salt for the soup.
It’s your native language as a human animal.
It’s where you’re meant to live.
All. day. long.
If your body feels like a foreign land to you, learning to become native again will literally make everything in your life easier.
If more people realized this, it could be a much kinder world.
Did exercise and online movement classes help preserve your sanity during the pandemic?
The words in your head can drive you crazy.
So can the things that people say.
If emotions come on too strong,
you can feel like a leaf blowing in the wind.
But you don’t have to be driven from above by judgments and concepts.
Allow that and you become an increasingly easy target for the algorithms. AI thrives on top down control and this is the world already being designed for us.
The only vote we get is with our feet.
If you live in the ground of your earthly origin, if you know how to speak the language of sensation, then you can remain anchored, even as the shitty-verse comes online.
If we get back in the habit of thinking from the ground up - remembering that thinking is an action of the body - then we can still build communities that live in the real world.