Ever felt listless?
For me it’s that experience of feeling flat, empty, or bored. That experience of drifting from one thing to the next, without being really excited about anything. I wind up feeling detached from my life, and nothing seems to really matter. It’s a kind of quiet hopelessness, that doesn’t actually feel like much.
It’s a way of being that makes life seem grey and bleak.
And when I’m feeling this way it has a tendency to propel itself. The emptiness leaves me feeling like I don’t really care about anything, so it becomes exceedingly easy to do things that I don’t really care about. I drift around on the internet for hours. I binge watch shows that I have already watched 3-4 times. I get lost in video games for twelve hours at a time. It’s from this place of boredom that I have felt driven to smoke cigarettes or do drugs, looking for anything to change the monotony.
I get so bored with what I’m doing, yet it feels almost impossible to do anything else.
Yet there is a pattern behind all of these activities. Most all of them take me away from any sense of myself. It becomes easy to put all my awareness and experience into a video game, or a show, or some other distraction. None of them have anything to do with the direct experience of me, and more often than not are actually overriding my awareness of myself and the immediate environment.
By not feeling my experience I am left with not feeling much of anything at all.
This is why time in the wilderness has consistently had such a dramatic and potent impact on me. By cutting myself off from distraction I am left with nothing but my direct experience. I am consistently and easily engaged by the beauty of nature. My time is consumed by tasks that have a direct impact on my next few hours: measuring my pace, consulting a map, setting up camp, collecting water. When traveling with a heavy pack on foot for hours it becomes impossible to not feel the painful aliveness of my body.
It’s exhilarating.
And you can feel this too. It doesn’t have to be wilderness, though there is a lot of science that supports how good this can be for your nervous system. If you prefer there can be a much simpler way to get back to a sense of vitality. To reclaim both a sense of purpose, appreciation, and inspiration for your day, a method to counteract the dull, blandness of an unending series of distractions. The secret?
You have to get into your body.
That can be a loaded sentence for a lot of people. We live in a culture that focuses a lot of time and energy on telling us how our bodies aren’t good enough. There is always the promise of some diet, some exercise, or some pill that will revolutionize your life all by changing your body. The ultimate message here is that your body isn’t good enough, and that any problems you have likely stem from an inadequate body.
We form habits of criticizing our bodies, and staying out of them as much as possible.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. There is so much more to our bodies than physical strength or sexual appeal. They are the literal chariots of our lives, working 24/7 to keep us living in one way or another. They are the seat of our emotional and perceptual experience, the intricate system that gives rise to our consciousness.
Your body is who you are.
And you should be allowed to love it. I’ve written in an earlier post about how feeling my heart led to finding inspiration, connection, and joy. An experience which crystalized the potency of connecting to my body in a direct way. By literally feeling ourselves, we get access to the whole range of human experience. All too often we throw out the body due to anxiety, criticism, sadness, or simple fear of the unknown.
I want to help you reclaim yourself.
Whether it comes through working with me or through some other venue, I encourage you to begin building a positive relationship to your body. By loving your body you are quite literally loving yourself. This love is the root of confidence, intuition, sensitivity, and care. This love can provide a life full of vibrant colors, incredible meaning, and intimate connections that make life worth living.
You already have everything you need. Are you willing to risk finding it?
