When the body does not feel at ease... and what does that even mean?

It feels a bit ironic.

I’m sitting at my desk, and from where I am I can see the small shelf that has quietly followed me through different seasons of my life. When the body says no, next to Time will tell… Four noble truths of love… Notes for when I am happy…

They have sat there almost unnoticed most days, but this morning they caught my attention for a different reason.

Call it synchronic, but as I looked at them, I noticed my body before I noticed my thoughts.

My chest was feeling tight. My heart was beating faster than it needed to. There was this subtle sensation that tears were somewhere behind my eyes, waiting, although nothing had happened.

If someone had asked me what I was feeling, I honestly wouldn’t have known what to answer. I couldn’t tell whether I was anxious, overwhelmed, stressed, or simply carrying something I hadn’t found words for yet.

It’s strange how the mind immediately begins looking for an explanation. I exercised this morning. I took my supplements. I followed my morning rituals. I slept well. My bulletproof coffee is next to me. Everything appears to be exactly as it should.

Still, my body tells a different story.I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately.

There is so much conversation around trauma, the nervous system, and emotions that live in the body. I keep studying and diving deep into these practices, while some of it still eaves me wondering whether we are also overlooking something much simpler:

Maybe our bodies are responding to the way we have learned to live.

Just take a step back an observe how we live in this modern life. Our attention is constantly being pulled somewhere else. Before the day has properly begun, we’ve already answered messages, checked emails, opened social media, compared ourselves with people we’ll probably never meet, absorbed headlines, and quietly collected expectations that weren’t ours a few minutes earlier.

As if being busy stopped feeling like a circumstance and became an identity.

Parallel to this, there are the quieter demands. Trying not to disappoint anyone. Staying in conversations longer than we want to. Remaining in environments that leave us feeling smaller because leaving would create discomfort. Feeling responsible for everyone else’s emotions. Trying to become healthier, happier, more productive, more disciplined, more successful, all at once… ufff! It’s exhausting. No wonder why there is a pandemic of existential burnout.

None of these things seem particularly significant on their own. Yet, the whole stack shapes the atmosphere we live inside.

As I write this, I find myself impressed that it is already mid-year, relocating, and juggling different life layers… feeling like I want to get off this fast ride. I wonder whether what we’re calling anxiety is, at least in part, the experience of a body that rarely gets the opportunity to fully exhale.

I’ve noticed this in myself.

My routines have become little anchors throughout the day. I love them. They genuinely change how I move through the world. They remind me that I can participate in my own well-being instead of waiting for external circumstances  to become less demanding.

Even so, there are mornings when something still feels unsettled.

That has made me less interested in finding the perfect protocol and more intentional in paying attention. I’ve started noticing how different my body feels depending on where I am.

There are situations that leave me carrying a weight I can’t explain. Or  people I care about deeply, yet I leave feeling unexpectedly drained.

For a long time, I ignored those moments because they didn’t seem reasonable enough. I thought every feeling needed evidence before it deserved my attention.

A chat I had recently stayed with me for days. I spoke honestly about something that had been unsettling me, and afterwards I questioned myself far more than I questioned the conversation itself. I replayed my words. I wondered whether I had been too emotional. Whether I had made things unnecessarily uncomfortable. Whether silence would have been easier for everyone involved.

The conversation ended in a peaceful way. But, my internal negotiation didn’t. That insight keeps lingering up to now.

How quickly I stopped trusting my own experience. Searching for reasons why what I felt couldn’t possibly be true.

The more time I spend exploring embodiment and somatic work, the more my attention returns to something surprisingly simple:

Presence isn’t something we think ourselves into. It lives in the body.

The body doesn’t need to be convinced that this moment exists. It already knows. It notices the shortening of our breath before we’ve named the emotion. It notices the tension in our shoulders before we’ve admitted we’re carrying too much. It notices the subtle contraction that happens when something no longer feels aligned, even while the mind is still trying to make it make sense.

I’ve come to appreciate awareness in a different way. Not as another practice to master or another item to add to the morning routine, but as a way of remaining close to myself.

Life will continue to bring uncertainty. Relationships will still challenge us. Grief, disappointment, change, joy, love…they all ask something of us. None of that disappears.

What changes is the place from which we meet those moments.

So as I reflect on this, I am coming to this hypothesis: When my attention returns to my body, I find my center more easily. I remember my own heart before I reach for someone else’s expectations. There is something profoundly grounding about inhabiting ourselves fully, especially when life feels loud.

Perhaps that is what I’ve been searching for all along. It might go beyond certainty. Or the promise of a perfectly regulated nervous system.

Just the ability to remain with myself, even when the ground beneath me shifts.

What if that is what the body has been asking for from the very beginning: to be heard, so it can guide us.

Simple, and so complex at the same time.