get out of your head

your body is talking to you!

I Dreamed of a Sea by Danny LaiLai

I sit in a mostly empty bar listening to my friend play live music with his band. It’s getting late. I watch the recently-snowflakes-now-raindrops slide down the window behind them. I feel calm, content, like this is exactly where I’m supposed to be. I wonder: what if I gave myself permission to always feel this way? To always believe that I am exactly where I’m supposed to be—that I am on time. That everything I’m worrying about is going to be okay. That I’M GOOD. Truly, deeply, intrinsically, infinitely, timelessly good. What would that be like?

How much time do I spend in my own mind, wondering if I’m on time, late, early? How much time do I spend thinking about time? More than I can track, because that time doesn’t go anywhere. It doesn’t become anything. It is time that I could spend trusting that I am where I am meant to be and all will work out if I pay close attention to the moment I’m in—if I make full contact with the present.

I’ve been thinking about presence in terms of sensuality lately. About what it might mean to make love to the moment you’re in. This is a framing for presence that has unlocked some greater access to my inner being for me. This idea that living can be an act of sensuality. Being in this body, writing these words, reading them. We are doing something that only those who are living, breathing, who are alive can do. We are existing. What a miracle! And in a way, our existence is purely the consequence of whoever made us embodying their own sensuality enough to create us—yes, in the act of conception—but also in that they were alive enough to see a moment, to see an opportunity, and to make love to it. What would it look like to treat every moment as a divine opportunity to conceive? To give birth to the exact opportunity, idea, connection, sense of peace, presence, wonder, aliveness that is being made available to you in that moment? How can we meet the present with the same intimacy we would meet our beloved in a moment ripe with sensual energy?

get into your body

Embodiment is not something we are taught growing up. We are taught how to use our minds pretty well—in fact it might be the only thing we are taught. But how to exist in our bodies? That was left out of the curriculum. The irony, of course, is that to fully experience life, you need to exist in your body.

Mind-training is wonderful. It helps us solve harder problems, be more efficient, get more done. But without embodiment, we are a floating head leading a numb entity through the world—never feeling the raw thrill it is to be alive. Our body is our guide. Our mind was never meant to do the heavy-lifting of telling us what to do—it was meant to help us figure out how to do it.

get out of your head

This is a common phrase I’m sure we have all heard before and perhaps say to ourselves from time to time. But what does it actually mean? What does it look like, feel like, to get out of your head? And if you’re not in your head, where do you go? And what happens to your head?

While these questions sound almost comical, they are also the doors that unlock the key to presence, and by extension, to living well. I wrote once about processing the passage of time where I make the argument that the best way to process time is by writing about it, capturing mental snapshots of the moments you’re in. I stand by that take, though I think it deserves a caveat: you can only vividly recall a moment if you were fully, deeply existing in your body as it happened. Our body is where we feel joy, pain, love, fear, resistance, attraction. It is where we feel the urge to approach someone, to write something down, to eat, drink, play, escape, create, run, hide, leap, act. If you are in your mind—analyzing, predicting, thinking, worrying—then you cannot meet the moment fully, surrender to it, exist in it. And your recollection of that moment is going to be tainted by the stream of thoughts you were having as it unfolded rather than the feelings that swelled inside your body as you experienced it.

don’t think

There’s this clip I adore that I recently mentioned in my essay ‘on being ready’. In it, Ray Bradbury talks about the importance of not thinking when he is writing. He says that when he arrives at the typewriter, his task is to be living. To let his soul pour out onto the page. To quiet the mind and let his body do the talking. Then, he checks his work afterwards using the mind as a ‘corrective force’ to refine. But he uses the body to create. He dwells deeply in the moment, notices what the body is saying, and by not thinking—by getting out of his head—he can breathe life into the stories his body is trying to tell.

trust your body’s signals

My best decisions never made sense to my rational mind at the time, but felt so deeply right in my body that it became nearly impossible to choose anything but that. My body knows. This is something I’ve learned over time. When I doubt, resist, or ignore my body’s signals in favour of what my mind thinks I ‘should’ do, I almost always regret it and eventually end up doing what my body initially wanted (or paying the price). I’ve learned to trust my inner wisdom—the ‘gut feeling’ as most of us call it. But how do we tap into this? How do we get in touch with the body? How do we inhabit this precious, miraculous vessel we’ve been given to navigate life with?

The short answer: breathe deeply. Inhale. Exhale. Come to presence. Are you with me now? Are you paying attention with your mind and your body to these words?

The long answer: when you notice you are stuck in your mind, pause, step back, and thank your mind for its service. Thank your mind for all of its thoughts, suggestions, concerns. Remind it how smart and clever and valuable it is. And I mean this: literally say these things to your mind and feel them fully. Feel the appreciation and affection you have for your mind. Then, let it know that you are going to drop into your heart/body/vessel for a little while. Because when you get stuck in your head—worrying, thinking about where you need to be next, about what you haven’t done—you separate yourself from your power. You lose access to your inner compass: the connection you have to your body. You cannot hear the signals that are trying to rise up in you, because they are being drowned out by the noise of your mind.

Most often though, the mind is just trying to protect you. It is getting loud and aggressive because it is worried about you, because it loves you, because it wants you to survive, prosper, be safe. So, if you provide comfort to your mind instead of getting frustrated with it—if you say to it: your input is valuable and thank you so much for all of your thoughts, but I am safe. I am okay, and I don’t need to be thinking right now, so I am going to tune into my body—it might just loosen its grip on your psyche. Sending love and appreciation to the mind relaxes it. Whereas getting angry at ourselves for being angry, or getting anxious about being anxious, or getting sad that we’re thinking sad thoughts only sends us deeper into a mind-spiral. It is when we pause, breathe, step back, and genuinely appreciate what the mind is trying to do, that we can get out of our head and into our body.

sweat

If I had to describe my biggest learning from 2023, it would probably be that exercise solves most of the problems that my mind is convinced it needs to solve itself. Simply forgetting myself through intense exercise, extreme hot or cold, stretching, walking, or hot yoga melts away most of my mind’s worries. Because instead of being stuck in the mind, I instantly drop into my body. And when I’m in my body, I can see that the world is beautiful and there is time.

I’ve been bringing a notebook into my yoga classes for the last few months and allowing myself to write down any stream of consciousness thoughts that emerge at the end of the class. When I read them later on, I am struck by how pure they are—absent of any self-judgement or unnecessary qualifications that leave me justifying my own thoughts back to myself. They just are. They are clear, potent, true. That is what messages from the body sound like. When I leave those yoga classes, I feel more grounded. I feel more alive. Time feels slower, thicker. I feel one with the moment. I am making full contact with the present, allowing it to be what it is, not resisting it, not wishing it would speed up or slow down or stop altogether. I am allowing time to wash over me. I am moving with time instead of against it. I feel more in control, more deeply rooted at the seat of my consciousness, out from under the weight of my mind’s chatter.

body as the compass, mind as the engine

For the longest time, I doubted my inner signals. I refused to trust my intuition. I would force everything to make sense. I can’t trust my feelings! I’m a thinker! I would say to myself. I would reason and test and experiment and only when my mind finally agreed with my body’s intuition through evidence and logic, would I trust myself.

I eventually realized that this was slowing me down, forcing me to spend too much time in my head, and weakening my relationship with my body’s inner wisdom. This second-guessing, doubting myself, eroding the relationship I had with my inner signal was not helping me. And in the end, I pretty much always ended up doing what my body had told me to do before all the mental gymnastics proved it right. I now understand that my body knows what is best for me in a way my conscious mind does not. It absorbs and synthesizes and concludes in ways that the mind is not even capable of.

This in no way makes my mind obsolete. I absolutely love, worship, and revere my mind. My mind does things my body could never do! Like optimizing, strategizing, forecasting, reflecting, learning, predicting, observing, executing, doing. My mind is an engine. It wants to work. It craves being useful. It goes on and on about all day about all of the ways it can be useful! I’ve learned to love this quality it has—this burning desire to contribute. How lucky am I to have such a powerful tool that wants to serve me all day long? That being said, I have also learned to wield its power intentionally, to handle its insatiable desire to help a little more carefully. I’ve learned how to turn my mind on, and I’ve learned how to wind it down when it’s time to stop thinking.

body and mind as a team

I’ve learned that my mind is meant to actualize the signals in my body. My body tells me the What—the right thing to do. Then, my mind figures out the How—the best way to do it. Both are critical to living in alignment. If I just listened to my mind, I would be cut off from the centre of my being, from my sensuality, from the life pulsing through my veins. And life would be pretty boring. I would be living an algorithmic existence determined by logic and reason, sanitized of my innate gifts, talents, likes, dislikes, interests, magical powers—my humanity. The body stores this self-knowledge intrinsically and uses it to point me in a direction uniquely aligned with me.

But if I only ever listened to my body and discarded the talents of my mind, it would be pretty hard to get anything done. I would get so caught up in collecting all these miraculous downloads and messages from my body without doing anything, that I would eventually erode my self-confidence. I would get backed up with self-insight. The same truths would keep revealing themselves over and over, waiting to be integrated through action. But without my greatest tool of doing—the mind—I would begin to doubt myself. I would doubt whether this wisdom was even useful, whether this whole listening-to-my-body-thing was taking me anywhere. I might even start to become resentful towards the inner wisdom—because where are the results? Where are the changes in my life? Why do I feel so stuck?

Well, darling—have you consulted your mind recently? It will you show you how to use these insights! It will harness the wisdom of the body. It will actualize these ideas for you. It will conspire with you to make your visions and aspirations come to life. It will help you use your time well, spend energy efficiently. It will help you craft and refine and create and distribute. But you need to empower it do so!

If you de-value your mind while worshipping your body, you will end up doubting your ability to follow through. Sometimes you do need to do things that don’t feel appealing to the body (like sitting down for a few hours in front of a screen to write this!). The body might have the idea, but it’s not going to get you to sit down and actualize it. That is the mind’s job!

Problems arise when we spend too much time in either body or mind. When we only pay attention to the body and de-value the mind, we end up purely existing with no doing. And when we only listen to the mind and disempower the body, we end up with all doing, no being (a much more common modern affliction).

We are meant to use both. That is why we were given both tools. At their best, they operate together—as a team. The body serves the mind, and the mind serves the body. The mind brings to life to what the body feels and knows. And without the body, there would be no signals to follow! We would be cut off from our creative power—a floating head, numb to the juiciness of existence itself, following a generic script stripped of our individuality and inner wisdom. The aligned path is one where head and heart move along the same axis. Where they nourish each other, revere each other, and conspire together to take us far and fast, in the right direction.

revere your tools equally

I now view my mind and body as a collaborative pair. I view both as essential, in different ways. I don’t expect one to do the job of the other. I know what I can rely on each of them for. I am learning to love them both. I am learning to detect when I am skewing too far in one direction, when I am asking for too much or too little from one. I am learning to tune into my body to receive its messages, and then activate my mind to bring those messages to life. I am learning to notice when my mind is pulling me out of the moment with thoughts that do not serve me, and I am learning to gently wind down those thoughts by dropping into my body. I am learning to notice when my body is unwilling to give the mind space to do its job, and I am learning to discipline my body to endure activities it doesn’t love every minute of.

I am learning to be where I am—to think and be and do and make love to the moment I am in. I am learning the right balance of being and doing, of embodiment and thought. I am learning to allow time to pass smoothly, while using it intentionally—whether that means making a to do list, dancing with friends, moving in a yoga class, listening to an audiobook, sweating in a sauna, embracing a loved one, or typing these words. These are all beautiful experiences that require a unique balance of body and mind. A life well-lived comes from being in tune with both. Harnessing both. Recognizing when one is over-compensating, when one is being blocked, when one needs more love.

I am learning to appreciate these sacred, miraculous tools for the unique powers they possess. I am learning to braid them together to weave the most alive, intentional, aligned existence I can inhabit. An existence that allows me to envision, notice, act, and create on time. When the moment presents itself. Not in a rush, not in avoidance, but with boldness, courage, urgency and aliveness. By living with trust—something that is only possible when we are in tune with body and mind.

To find that sweet spot where mind and body work together, get curious about your being. Notice when you are stuck in your head, when you need to get into your body. Move. Shake. Sweat. Shower. Dance. Breathe. Drop in. Listen to what your body tells you when the mind is quiet. Then, activate your mind to bring those ideas to life. Determine the right course of action and take it. Repeat this cycle. Remind your body and mind that they are both essential—that you couldn’t live without them, that you wouldn’t want to. Because when your body and mind both feel appreciated and heard, you can be where you are and feel like it is exactly where you’re supposed to be.

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Related essays you might enjoy:

• comfort — on listening to your body

• ambition as a fingerprint — on finding your unique, personal path of ambition

• becoming yourself is a process of reduction — on curating your life consciously

• on slowness, taste, and living well — on embracing slowness and developing taste

• on self-trust — it’s all in the title!

You can also find my daily thoughts on Twitter. Thank you for reading to the end.