_______ I know when I’m stressed out and find moments to calm myself whenever possible.
_______ I experience moments of solitude, stillness, quiet, or nature each day.
DO I FEEL EMOTIONALLY SAFE AND SECURE?
_______ I feel safe and free to authentically express myself and my feelings in my relationships.
_______ I am aware of the things that interest me or that I’m passionate about.
_______ I am open to new experiences and set aside time to explore my creativity.
_______ I make room for spontaneous, playful, or unstructured time throughout my day.
Be gentle and compassionate with yourself if you are not yet able to mark many of the responses above. The next few chapters will explore ways you can begin to meet these foundational needs and heal your relationship with your body.
HEALING YOUR BODY
It’s easy to assume that you’re consistently meeting your physical needs if you’re fortunate enough to have enough food to eat, a safe place to sleep, and access to clean water, adequate clothing, and health care. Even with these privileges, the reality is that most of us don’t meet our fundamental physiological needs because we eat foods that inflame our body, our demanding lives stress our nervous system, or we don’t get the rest our body needs to regulate our mood and emotions. Many of us—75 percent of all Americans9—are chronically dehydrated, and few of us, given our modern lifestyle, take the time to practice self-care, including taking the rest we all need. When unmet, these seemingly minor needs can accumulate and become major issues, sabotaging our relationships by causing us to show up tired, stressed, sluggish, or undernourished, no matter how much therapy we attend, how well we communicate our feelings, or what our partners do or don’t do for us.
Because physical safety is foundational, we’ll begin our journey to embody our authentic Self by prioritizing our physical needs. To do so, I’ve created a practice called body consciousness that will help you become consciously aware of your physical needs, along with your daily physical sensations like your heart rate, breathing patterns, and muscular tension. These are key indicators of whether we’re meeting our physical needs or not and can help us learn and interpret our body’s different cues; an ache in our stomach may mean we’re hungry, tension in our muscles may mean that our energy is constricted, or fatigue may be a sign that we’re overusing our body in some way. Sensations in our body, it turns out, play a surprising role in creating our thoughts and feelings. Let me explain.
Though most people assume that what we think and feel originates in our thinking brain, our physical sensations help create our thoughts and feelings. Our subconscious uses our body’s sensations to interpret how we feel by recalling the emotional experiences that accompanied similar physical sensations in the past. This premise is known as the theory of constructed emotions, which was developed by a neuroscientist, Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, a professor of psychology at Northeastern University.10 Though we’ll talk more about this concept in chapter 5, to put it simply, we can stay locked in the experiences of our past unless we begin to practice identifying and shifting the physical sensations that cause these repetitive thoughts and feelings. By practicing body consciousness, we can learn to tune in to our physical sensations and manage them to some degree, helping us modify our thoughts and feelings. Becoming aware of our body’s sensations enables us to change how we think and feel, ultimately changing how we show up in our relationships.
BODY CONSCIOUSNESS CHECK-IN
To practice body consciousness, you can start to take body consciousness pauses throughout your day. Taking body-consciousness pauses regularly will help move your attention away from an overactive thinking mind so you can practice attuning to or shifting your attention to your body’s experience in the present moment. By checking in with your body before making any choice to engage in physical self-care (like eating, resting, or moving), you will increase your connection to your body and its different physical needs. You may find it helpful to set an alarm to alert three times during the day to remind you to pause and check in with your physical body. In this paused moment, fully shift your attention to the experience of being in your body as you explore your different physical sensations.
On the lines below, write down and take note of your experiences as you begin. You may find it helpful to repeat this list in a separate notebook or journal (or anywhere else where you can access it throughout the day) as a reminder to pause and connect with your body’s physical experience.
Daily Consciousness Check-ins
Body pause: [time]
Physical sensations present:
EMPOWERING YOUR MIND
After you’ve developed a consistent practice of body consciousness, you can begin to work on mind consciousness. Mind consciousness is the practice of becoming aware of the thoughts, feelings, and reactions that you have or do on an automatic, repetitive basis. These reflect our subconscious at work; they’re our instinctual, conditioned ways of being that got programmed into our brain when we were children because we relied on them so often to feel safe, valued, and loved by our parent-figures. Now that we’re adults, few of these repeated habits allow us to feel good about ourselves. They don’t allow us to be our authentic Self, often sabotaging how we interact with others. These conditioned ways of being can actually even make us feel physically and emotionally unsafe or dysregulated.
As we’ll continue to explore, we can learn to identify the automatic, repetitive habits that don’t serve our best interests or those of our relationships. We can find and choose new ways to calm ourselves when we’re upset without falling back on our old conditioned cycles. By becoming consciously aware of our conditioned selves, or the roles we play in our adult relationships that keep us stuck in dysfunctional patterns with others (we’ll talk more about these in chapter 4), we can intentionally begin to more often honor our own needs so that we can then create the safety we need to be our authentic Self with others.
CONSCIOUSNESS CHECK-IN
As I imagine you’re beginning to see, consciousness plays a powerful foundational role in our journey to embody our authentic Self. To develop my own mind consciousness, or ability to witness my subconscious habits, I developed a practice called the daily consciousness check-in. This practice will help you become conscious of the autopilot of your life. Be patient with yourself as you begin your practice; because our brain physiologically prefers to operate on autopilot in order to conserve energy, it can feel physically tiring when we start to shift our brain into a conscious state of awareness.
The steps involved in a consciousness check-in are similar to the ones you take when doing a body consciousness pause. You can start by setting an intention to pause three times throughout your day to witness or notice two things: what you’re doing in the moment and where your attention is at that time.
Here are two helpful ways to create your new daily check-in habit. You can use either approach as you practice setting and keeping these daily intentions until these daily check-ins become a new habit, or until you remember on your own to pause to access moments of consciousness throughout the day.
Set an intention to check in at three different times throughout the day, like at 11:00 a.m., 4:00 p.m., and 9:00 p.m. You may want to set an alarm or reminder on your phone to help you do this.
Set an intention to check in during three activities you do every day, like drinking your morning coffee, preparing your after-work meal, and getting ready for bed.
To perform the check-in, ask yourself these two questions:
What am I doing right now (washing dishes, watching TV, talking with a loved one)?
What am I paying attention to? Am I fully immersed in whatever I’m doing or whoever I’m engaged with? Or am I lost in thought about other things? If so, what am I thinking about (e.g., a conversation I had earlier in the day, a recent credit card bill, an upcoming event, a stressful situation at work)?
Your goal when you practice is simply to be present in the moment, observing your thoughts as you would clouds drifting across the sky. It will be helpful to transfer the lines below to a separate notebook or journal and write down your answers to each question every time you complete a check-in. Keep it in a place where no one can see your answers, so you can practice giving yourself the freedom to write without judging or overthinking this practice. Over time, you may even begin to notice patterns in what you’re paying attention to.
Daily Consciousness Check-ins
Revisit this tool as often as needed. I continue to use it daily.
RECONNECTING WITH YOUR SOUL
From a biological perspective, your soul, or authentic Self, lives in your physical heart—and not just because the human heart is the spiritual or emotional center of the body, according to nearly every culture in the world. Known as the body’s “little brain” and containing more than forty thousand neurons, the heart sends more messages to our nervous system than vice versa, impacting the health and safety of our body and mind while activating our emotional reactions to others.11 Our heart is where our intuition and inner knowledge live, according to scientific research from the nonprofit HeartMath Institute that we’ll dive into in later chapters.12
When we’re connected with our heart, we’re more likely to make decisions based on our authentic needs and desires. Being connected with our own heart actually helps us feel more open and receptive to connecting with the hearts of others. It can even help us begin to “sense” things before they happen: people who become physically and emotionally connected with their heart can actually feel changes in their chest before an incident occurs, helping them discern if something is “right” or “wrong” in their world, according to recent research on intuition.13 We’ll continue to talk more about how our heart is connected to our soul and how it impacts our relationships in chapter 7.
Heart Check-in
Many of us may know what we want or don’t want but override our instinctual needs or desires because we fear losing our safe connection to others and the world around us. To begin to authentically express yourself, it’ll be helpful to begin to notice the different concerns or fears that may be holding you back.
Take a moment to call to mind a recent experience with someone during which you wanted to express yourself but didn’t allow yourself to speak your true thoughts, feelings, or perspectives. Now consider your responses to these questions:
What do I really think, feel, or want to do?
