If I’m not thoughtful and deliberate about staying present and embodied, I default to snoozing and I forget myself and my life. It’s easy to do and sometimes feels like relief. Right? Sometimes reality feels like too much. But, the price is too high; I don’t want to miss my own life.
Adopting some spiritual practice is compulsory for staying present and aware of reality in real time. For me, running has given me a space to access all three intelligent centers (mind, body and heart) and watch them harmoniously inform one another. Running and creating are two activities that I often walk away from having some sort of new insight or wisdom, thus these have become spiritual practices for me.
This was the case yesterday. I was listening to some song lyrics and became acutely aware of the meaning of a line in a song that used to be something I just sang along with and enjoyed the sound of. The line hit me right between the eyes! The particular line was, “And I never stepped on the cracks ‘cause I thought I’d hurt my mother” (So Real by Jeff Buckley).
In the context of the song, I began to think about how much energy I spend diverting imagined pain. I realized it is a lot more than I feel comfortable with. Our lives are driven by this energy unless we become aware of it. Everyone’s heard of the saying, “step on a crack and you break your mother’s back”. I don’t know the origin of that saying, but I have spent time noticing the cracks in the sidewalk and avoiding them. Mostly it’s an unconscious habit adopted during childhood somewhere, obviously not really thinking I’d inflict harm upon my mother.
But wow! What a metaphor for how much energy we put into innocuous situations where we think we might head off painful events or confrontations that only exist in our minds. We begin to relate to an alternate reality and check out of what is really happening. We do this so automatically, where we tell ourselves stories that may or may not be true and pour energy into those narratives and abandon what is real. So much energy is spent protecting and fortifying ourselves by doing mental cartwheels, that we become unavailable to the real pain and events in the present. We can’t be fully happy or sad, because we’re absent.
We all do this. It’s part of living in a body and having a human brain. What if we could do the work of awareness and notice when we head in that direction? Perhaps we spend less time in the made-up reality and more time in the now, being present and holding space for all that is actually there, even if it is painful? I believe this is an important work in staying wakeful and aware. Drop a note here and let us know what practices help you stay embodied, aware and present.