guess i'll listen to the body or whatever

a last resort // the only option

this is the free post for June. well, most of it is free. there’s a small part of the bottom that is for paid subscribers. if you want to get access to everything, including what’s down below, consider becoming a member. substack offers free seven-day trials!

i found five dollars this week! i was walking along and saw a dime but didn’t pick it up, thinking about what message that would send to the God / Universe / the Divine and how there was a time when i would pick up ten cents but now i’m telling the Universe that i want more. and then a few minutes later, i found a five dollar bill.

sidebar: one of my favourite bits comes from 30 Rock, the episode where Kenneth stages a reunion of that olde timey tv show, Night Court. He’s talking about how well things are going for him and mentions he found a quarter, and Charlie Robinson, who played the court clerk Macintosh "Mac" Robinson on Night Court (yes i had to look that up), says ‘uhm, i lost a quarter!’ and Kenneth hands the coin over to him begrudgingly, but quickly. with no questions asked. it still makes me giggle. i secretly wish for a chance to play out the same gag in real life but i’ve told you all about the five so don’t email me anything about “losing $5” now, it’s too late.

i’ve been noticing these moments recently. i’ll think of something i want and then it shows up, sometimes out of my own will, but a couple times as a very pleasant surprise. like the money. on sunday it was a bus on a route that i didn’t know existed. i just thought, ‘it would be great if a bus would take me right there’ and within a couple minutes found a bus that did exactly that. i want to think of a third example but the only thing that came to mind was a work thing and—excuse me—it is 7:55pm on a Monday, we are not thinking about work stuff right now.

it’s like how from certain angles, a leaf in the wind could look like a star from a distance. there’s an answer for everything. the bus route always existed. someone is looking for the five dollars they swore they had. someone dropped ten cents on the ground and probably doesn’t know it’s missing.

i am lost trying not to force something to happen. i am lost not doing the same things i’ve always done. i am lost dropping old habits and attachments.

i was at home in my head even though the place was a mess. i am lost seeing anew what it means to live in my head. and what i mean by ‘live in my head’ is constantly thinking. thinking around everything or at least all of the things i could mentally grasp, is what i thought would keep me safe. and now i am lost understanding that i am safe without forcing, thinking, or going back to old habits.

everything is weird. i can spend a weekend in detroit at movement, dancing but not enjoying myself. it is possible to relax while the air around me feels tense. i can doubt what i want to do and still move forward.

even in ~stressful!! strange and uncomfortable!!!~ i can appear still and quiet.

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i hear that it is important to be in touch with the body. it’s the channel. they say things like ‘the kingdom of heaven is within you’, and ‘your body always knows’. this past weekend i had an experience of that at acupuncture. my body very clearly had a reaction to a treatment. it was interesting being in the middle, between what my body was telling me and the words i had access to to explain.

so i’ve been working out the details of an experiment, kind of living inside of a question. i am asking what if being in the body is the way forward.

i don’t know what it means when people say to ‘be in the body’, so part of this experiment is noticing the sensations, which is the practice of grounding that i learned studying magick and in therapy. noting what i see, hear, taste, etc. what i feel inside: back pain that’s been with me for over ten years, the differences between breathing in my chest and into my stomach, the weight of these extensions on my head. surprise and delight at finding a dime on the ground. the sensation of clearing when i take a deep breath. where my body is tense. when it is tense.

after being disconnected from my body for years, i think of this as something like starting a conversation again. what i had to understand first is a relationship with my body isn’t like a relationship with another human being. my body is not angry with me, it does not hate me, it is not and will not be annoyed with me. this is where i found a flow of endless love, this is the part that ‘feels good’.

the part that doesn’t feel good is that my body is not in the misery my brain enjoys so much. it doesn’t care about the day job or what i’m going to do with my life or a yearly salary. it is not afraid of the nightmares i create in my head. my thinking brain finds this annoying and humbling and annoying because it’s humbling.

this is the part about being in the body where i learn about discomfort. it’s easy to say ‘being in my body is uncomfortable’. every day there is some discomfort and the automatic response is to stop it somehow. instead of actually stopping it, i’ve created a habit of ignoring. we are taught to take our hand off the stove when it burns. but this is like putting your finger on the burner and saying there’s something wrong with your finger rather than deciding to touch a hot stove.

as part of this experiment, i am exploring the idea that the discomfort is not a bad thing. to say the discomfort is ‘good’ feels like such a weird judgment to make on it, but what i am saying is that the discomfort contains important information and what is ‘good’ is that i can use that information. i am testing out gathering the info instead of labelling the first thing my mind can grasp.

in the context of a scientific laboratory, the discomfort is nothing more than a reaction. it doesn’t require any judgment. and if my usual choice was to repeatedly ignore the discomfort or push it away, now, out of plain old not knowing what else to do, i notice it. make a note in my lab workbook.