Living from the inside out
For so many of us, our tool for perceiving ourselves is like being in a room full of mirrors.
We look for our reflection, in the form of actual mirrors to tell us about our health by showing us our shape, in the form of opinions of other people to tell us who we are, in the form of social media likes to tell us about our worth.
Most of us learn to rely on these tools so young, that our conscious memories cannot reach the before. We cannot remember how it felt to stand fully in our bodies, to enter a room knowing that we belong because we never assumed we didn’t. To fully trust our sensations for giving us information on how we feel in our bodies because we didn’t yet have that voice talking us out of it. Sadly, most of us did not have a chance to build on this innate capacity of knowing ourselves from within, because it got disrupted before we could bring it to consciousness, before we could cultivate it.
But this life, lived in this sea of reflections is a fragmented life, a fragmented sense of self. A lot of our energy is taken up by trying to mend the discrepancies between all this feedback into a cohesive sense of who we are, while also reconciling it with snippets of sensations reaching us from within.
To be fully alive is to live from the inside out. To exist, breathe and move through the world trusting who we are in that moment. No filters, no cover-ups, just being real.
So how do we do this? On one hand, we might not have access to what is happening, and SI bodywork can help with this through touch, dialogue, breathing, sensing and moving; we can learn to trust and claim our direct, felt, embodied experience. On the other hand, there is often a fear that if we actually felt more of what’s going on underneath the surface of our skin, we would get lost in this sea of constantly emerging and submerging feelings and intensities. And without a real, palpable anchor, without a developed way of orienting ourselves and maintaining a sense of coherence, this is an appropriate fear; we might find a lot in a place we haven’t visited for so long.
This is why living from the inside out means growing two pillars simultaneously:
Consistent connection to your inner ecosystem of feelings, thoughts, and sensations.
A real sense of self-support in your physical body so it can open up for more mobility.
With a sense of physical self-support and a heightened body-awareness, we build a reliable relationship to the wholeness of ourselves; we tap into our true potential.
This doesn’t mean that we aren’t constantly moved by the world around us. It means that in the midst of the waves of life, we know how to return home to our strong bodies and our innate resources. Sustainable strength is drawn from the intimate connection between our feet and the ground that stabilizes our core, holds our bodies tall and helps us move with functional mobility, with a sense of lightness.
This kind of strength is not a result of effort, but a result of ease…well, eventually. For most of us, this feeling of ease comes after some (or a lot of) experimentation: undoing the harm that the overculture has inflicted upon us. The dissociation. The undiscovered physiological connections in the body. The severed access to our sensations and feelings. The missing loving relationship with ourselves.
Somatic work and bodywork are some of the most effective tools in rebuilding these connections; to be IN TOUCH with what is happening. To listen and respond to our bodies. To move with what needs to move; physically, in the feeling realms, even spiritually. We can build these practices. Places of cultivated congruence that we move outward from, express ourselves fully and we radiate widely, cultivating the capacity for creative, spontaneous movement and play.
To be clear, building them does not negate or bypass the dysfunction we live in. The epidemic of disconnection from ourselves and others, the rationalization of felt truths, the backgrounding of aches and pains of our backs and hearts while pretending that all that is ‘normal’.
We double down on living in intimacy with ourselves not despite what surrounds us but because of them. There is a connection between creating change in our bodies, how connected we live within it and creating change in the world. More on this in the next post.