Practical Magic | A Simple and Powerful Tool to Become More Embodied
We all know we live too much in our heads, but how to shift the habit? Let me share a powerfully simple 2-question practice to start your day from a place of embodiment, not stress. When our mind and body are working as a team rather than against one another, magical living becomes effortless.
The Daily Alignment Check-in
In this episode, I’m sharing a tool called the Daily Alignment Check-in because I believe this simple practice is an enormously foundational piece of Magical Living. Connecting with the natural power and cycles of energy coursing through our bodies and flowing with those energies rather than against them, is one of the main reasons why life can feel so magical as a human incarnated on this planet.
In Align + Flow, the 29-day group program that I teach, I invite students every single day to start the day with this check-in. I invite them to bring their body and mind into collaboration by asking themselves two questions.
Question #1: What will I do to fuel my body today?
Question #2: What do I feel like doing today? How can I honor this in even a small way?
With this daily alignment practice, you are repairing the mind-body connection, retraining your mind to be back in conversation with your body, and most importantly, starting to defer to your body. By opening up this channel, your body can start to release some of its knowing; some of that 99.9995% of sensory data it keeps hidden from the conscious mind. You can start acting on it and moving through the world and through your life from a place of feeling grounded and legitimacy.
Let's unpack these two questions together because they are deceptively simple.
Question #1: What Will I Do to Fuel My Body Today?
We live in an output-obsessed society.
We have all been expertly trained and educated, often without choice, to organize our time and to be entirely focused on being productive. What are we going to do? What are we going to make? What am I? What are all the tasks I have to complete?
In my 1:1 Coaching Practice, a lot of women come to me initially because they say they need to organize their time and become better at managing their schedules. But after a brief amount of conversation, it becomes abundantly clear to me that they know exactly how to measure and manage time. The issue is that they're disembodied and are disconnected from their energy sources. They don't know how to generate energy, they don't know how to spend it well, and they don't know how to work with their natural cycles. Let's put aside organizing one's time because we all know how to do that.
What we have forgotten is how to raise our energy, so that we can output without ending up in a place where we're running on empty. In this Daily Alignment Check in, you're flipping that thinking on its head, because instead of jumping immediately into, “What do I need to output? What am I responsible for?”, your first order of the day is to bring your awareness to your input.
How will you fuel yourself?
How will you create energy?
How will you transform energy from one form to another so that your body actually has the best chance of being able to output all those things that you want to do?
In Episode 11, I shared the Could-Do List. As you do your Daily Alignment Check-in, I encourage you to use these two tools in tandem. If you look at the Could-Do List Trello template, the entire first column is for fuel and there's a very good reason for that. I want you to bring your attention to this column first thing every day. I tell my students to keep a running list of all the activities that fuel you with energy, self-care practices, things that others do for you. Make sure that your fuel column is not just filling up with things that our society tells us are acceptable or good types of fueling, which are often sneaky, output-oriented, or performance-focused hobbies or activities.
Put everything on your fuel list that feels really good to you energetically: things that are pure pleasure, things that you love but never indulge. Add anything to your ‘fuel list’ that helps raise your energy to rest, restore, laugh, or smile to complete a cycle.
Every morning when you ask yourself, “What will I do to fuel my body today?”, actually take a look at your fuel list. As you review your list, see how your body reacts and pick at least one. Fuel your body with one thing from this list before you start any output-based activities.
Question #2: What Do I Feel Like Doing Today? How Can I Honor This in Even a Small Way?
When is the last time you asked yourself that?
Seriously.
Imagine getting in touch with your body every morning, and ideally several times a day and going, “You know what I really feel like doing right now? What I have the energy, inclination and excitement for is that.”
This is what it means to let your body lead. To access the inner signal, the inner knowing, and practice right timing because you actively insist to do that which you have the ideal energy for. When you ask yourself this question, you are creating a pause of self listening. You’re opening up a space to hear that inner signal.
As we develop this practice and unlearn the way the mind has been trained to override and belittle the body, the inner signal may be quite faint and it may take a while for the body to speak. And our minds’ translation of what we're hearing may be a little fuzzy and may need a bit of refining and experimentation. So if you're starting this practice for the first time, and you feel kind of disembodied, please give yourself the space to honor that. I call it a self listening pause because you don't necessarily have to have a clear outcome or translation, you're just creating the space to hear.
Ask yourself, “Body, what do you feel like doing today?”, and then wait, listen, and see what emotions, sensations, images, and signals come up. The practice of starting your day by honoring that listening as opposed to rushing straight into the things that we think we should be doing or denying/postponing any body impulse or deep need or desire. By reversing this pattern, we begin to strengthen the mind-body connection. Once your body starts to understand that you're actually listening and keeping promises to yourself, your body will start sending you more messages. Clearer messages.
Give yourself permission when starting out. If you do not know what you feel like doing today or how you could even honor that in a small way, celebrate yourself for beginning this practice and taking a small step. This is another place where your Could-Do List can be so handy because rather than trying to have things appear in your mind, you can have your Could-Do List in front of you. You can ask your body, “What do I feel like doing today?”, and have your eye drift across the Could-Do List and see what calls to you. Run through your fuel list and see how each item on the menu lands in your body. Where do you feel a positive expansion or a sense of excitement or groundedness? Or where do you instead feel a contraction?
Let your body lead. Decision Making doesn't happen in the head. It happens in the body and the mind translates. Give your body a chance to do its job well, to be well resourced, to be approved of, to be accepted, and to be loved as a member of the team.
Excess Is Caused by Repression
I can't talk about the Daily Alignment Check-in without mentioning one thing, which is an observation I get when teaching Align + Flow. “When I ask myself what I feel like doing, I just get urges for excess. I do not want to do anything productive. I want to sleep all day. I want to drink two liters of wine. I want to eat chocolate. I want to take drugs. And I want it all in excessive amounts.”
Consider this: excess is caused by repression. Excess always comes as a result of repression.
In a non-dual universe, you can't have something without its opposite. So much of our culture is based on repression and the myth of control which leads to so much contained, pent-up longing. That longing creates the urge to excess and this inability to feel satiated, to know what's enough. Repression causes shame, and shame cuts us off from our feeling senses because the feeling of shame is so painful and uncomfortable that it feels safer to cut off all feeling completely. Without feeling, we're disembodied, and without embodiment, we can never feel satiated. This is how we end up in a place where we're not able to know when enough is enough. We don't know when we're full. We don't know when we're done with something.
If you find that when you ask yourself the question, “What do I feel like doing today?”, and you have urges of excess arising, please, please, please resist the temptation to attack or shame yourself.
Instead, I encourage you to first approve of that sensation. It is a legitimate sensation coming from your body. Do not gaslight yourself; it is there.
Then get curious about why it's there. Urges to excess can hold very powerful clues that point us to a part of us that starving. An urge to indulge in excessive amounts of alcohol can reveal a starvation of being able to truly relax and surrender. The urge to eat excessive amounts of junk food, sugar, or chocolate can reveal a dearth of nourishment, care, and sweetness in our lives.
If you have these urges to excess arise, consider instead asking yourself, “Where is the repression in my life? Where am I repressing my natural needs? Or where am I allowing others to repress my natural needs?” Start to engage with those natural needs and start to connect more with your body so that you can feel it and nourish it in the ways that it's asking you to.
This Daily Alignment Check-in is the medicine because you are reversing the pattern. You are getting back into your body and feeling senses. You're training your body to let it know that you're open to hearing from it; you want to have a relationship with it. You can go as slowly as feels right for you.
Disembodiment Is Not Your Fault
There are many reasons why we can end up disembodied. You may have deliberately disconnected from your body at a certain point in your life as a trauma response out of self-protection and self-preservation. If that is you, please shower yourself with love and approval as you go through this process and take care of yourself.
None of this is your fault. None of us arrived on Earth with this mind-body disconnect. It is learned.
It is learned through social policing, through the myth of discipline and control through shame, and through trauma.
But because it is learned it can be unlearned, and the best way to learn is not intellectually but through the body itself. Slowly strengthen your inner signal with a reverence for your own knowing and your own timing.
The journey to feeling like a magical time bender – where you're able to harness all of your cyclical and energetic states, the high-energy expanded ones that feel amazing, the low-energy contracted ones may feel more uncomfortable but are full of gifts – this is what it means to live magically. To be able to get to a place where we can flow and feel empowered by all of our energetic states, we need to become connected to the mind and the body. They're working as a team, rather than against one another.
This is the Daily Alignment Check-in. I say daily, but I encourage you to do it as many times in the day as you can. There is nothing more powerful than repeatedly checking in with your body to see where you're at, how you're feeling, what feels good, what feels off – and then acting on that.
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