E070 – Bring Awareness into Your Body

In this post I want to introduce a core technique that I share with and recommend to everyone I work with. It’s really, really simple, and I use it all the time. Watch the video or read on below to learn more!

Cross your hands over at the wrists and, while sitting, place them on top of your thighs, so your right hand is resting on top of your left leg and vice versa. Slowly start to tap one hand and then the other, alternating left, right, left, right, gently and slowly. 

While you’re doing this, bring your awareness down into your body. Feel the tapping rather than absent-mindedly tapping as you think about other things. Bring your awareness down into your body in the seat. This means bringing 50% to 70% of your awareness down into feeling your body and noticing it, rather than being up in your head following your mental narratives. 

We only really need about 30% of our awareness up there for thinking and processing conversation, and we are much better served having more of our awareness down in our body. 

This will help cut the conditioned patterns that each of us brings to our communication, when we go into fighting, pleasing, freezing… whatever your pattern may be. And the moment you start disrupting those patterns and pulling your awareness down into your body, you start disrupting the status quo. 

In tapping, we're very deliberately crossing the midline—which is used in tons of techniques, from eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) to brain gym and pranayama breathing, which has been in use for thousands of years—crossing between the hemispheres to process information and regulate the system. So when we’re tapping, we're regulating and bringing our awareness down.

Try not to get hijacked by thinking “Oh gosh, this is so intense and interesting. I'm going to give all my attention to it, and I'm going to give away all my attention from my own body”!

Often when we’re with a lot of people (or even with one person) and having a conversation, we're completely locked into a part of our nervous system that has been developing since we were three or four or five years old. If you’re watching everything that everyone says when you’re out in the world, and you’re not feeling your own body, how can you even know how you feel in the moment? 

How will you sense your own building rage or know that there's a freeze coming if you’re not paying attention to what’s happening in your body? 

Disrupt the pattern. Come home. 

Our minds create what some people call a boundary program, a mental image of our body. So, for example, focus on your feet right now. Feel your feet on the floor, in your shoe, wherever and however they are. Simultaneously with feeling your feet, there is generally something like a black and white image of the feet in our minds. We see them in our mind's eye. 

Many people substitute actually feeling their feet for that mental imaging. So make sure you're actually feeling your feet rather than experiencing a mental image of your foot. Which one is it, or is it both? What we're aiming for, our home run, is that somatic, or embodied, felt sense—another word for this is interoception. Perception is “out there”: I perceive the world. Interoception is our ability to feel inside our body.