Your life is your art
use it to get to know yourself
So many insights I once thought in my mind have now landed in my body. People tend to critique the idea of trying to ‘figure things out’ in the mind when they just need to be ‘felt in the body.’ While that is valid, I do think there is something frictionless that happens when you’ve thought about something for a while, and it finally does click in your body. It lands smoothly, because you have laid out the mental terrain to integrate it with ease.
For example, today I was doing a lot of writing and tweeting, practicing saying what I mean without inhibition. I then went to yoga, and felt a bit frantic and high energy, still charged with the energy of all of the ideas I had been stewing on and shooting out into the world. But over the course of the class, the pace of my mind slowed, and eventually stopped, and I could just focus on my breath, be in my body. I started feeling much better, my energy slower, softer, more tender, because these insights I had been accessing in the mind were finally being integrated. They just landed, quietly, softly, without announcing themselves. It was as though I did not need to think about them anymore, because they had arrived. I had arrived. To the place where I now knew these things, viscerally. A place I didn’t need to keep re-learning them from, and investigating them, and finding better words to describe them, and trying to see them from new angles. I just felt them now. They felt obvious and simple. They had woven their way into me. They were part of me.
One of those insights was about my name, Isabel. I thought about how my parents had no real reason to name me Isabel except that they just loved the name. Not only did they love the name, but they felt incredible strongly about it (you should see my dad, in his full embodied emphasis explaining just how much he loved my name.) They immediately knew it would be mine. There was no thought, just knowing. In the end it wouldn’t be so easy to give me this name, though. They faced some resistance with it.