How to Feel Yourself. The Home-Body.

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Feb 2

Indwelling the Body in the Age of Abstraction.

Before I start on this topic, I want to get this out of the way: Feeling is already happening. The nerves are firing, the breath is moving, sensation is present. The question for many humans, alienated from the body and its genius intelligence through culture, trauma and habit, is more “am I able to be aware of this feeling”? or: Am I here for it?

Being absent from your own body looks like: using the body as a transport system for the head, dragging it from meeting to meeting, feeding it without attention, having absentminded sex, numbing from your own intuition, scrolling and forgetting you have legs. Note how often, even when someone says “tune in to your body,” the mind responds! It searches for the right answer (my body needs water, my body needs rest) rather than simply landing in the territory of direct sensation.

The original exile isn’t an external garden, it is from the garden we are, it’s from feeling our own bodies.

My friend and teacher Mark Whitwell, drawing from the Krishnamacharya lineage, puts it plainly: “You are the power of the cosmos arising.” This, he says, "is a simple statement of fact. What creates the human body? What grows a spine, coordinates billions of cellular processes without our conscious intervention? This intelligence is not separate from us: it is us. And yet we live as though we need to earn our place here. As though the body is a problem to be solved, transcended, or fixed before we can begin.

The body is already the miracle. There is nothing to achieve. The practice is not acquisition but participation. Moving and breathing with as much presence and feeling as you can muster.

The body is an energetic instrument, a feeling instrument, the whole body nervous system is the brain, these uncountable energy currents at the skin’s surface representing an intricate inner web of communication.

In my classes, I guide students through the constellation of sensitivity points: places on our bodies with peak clusters of nerves that are generally ignored. Fingertips tracing the inner arm. The outer rim of the ear. Behind the ear. The clavicle. The hollow of the throat. The lower back, the sacrum, the belly. Different pressures, different finger techniques. If you do this with breath and presence, you deepen connection with yourself and prepare to truly receive another. If your body parts were sized appropriately for how many nerve endings they have, you’d have this skinny little figure with enormous hands, huge lips, swollen tongue, huge ears: all these clusters of energy waiting to be felt. You can access more sensation by going slow.

Here is a simple exercise: Take your fingertips to the inside of your wrist, going as lightly as possible. First be your arm—concentrate on receiving the fingertips. Then be your fingertips—concentrate on receiving the arm. Go back and forth. What is the arm feeling as it’s receiving? What is the fingertip feeling as it’s touching?

This oscillation of receiving and being received is an incredible practice of relatedness of the home-body.

Pal Pandian, in the Tamil Siddha tradition, speaks of the Identifier—the primal urge within us that keeps creating a separate self. When we layer role upon role, image upon image: achiever, caretaker, seeker, wounded one, each layer of identity is an abstraction from the direct feeling self, from direct sensation. The Identifier has the urge to narrate, to claim, to make sensation into story. By conscious de-conditioning, we shed our acquired roles layer by layer. What emerges is an aliveness that was always here, obscured by the images piled on top of it. Without identity or story or narration, we are just presence. The identifier begins to relax, through simple attention. When we “feel ourselves” we are not adding a new skill, but coming home to one that exists innately.

All of yoga is a clearing of the lens of perception, direct participation in life itself.

In my own practice, sometimes when sitting in stillness, I become aware of the column of light running up and down the spine, a column of energy. I feel it moving laterally from the spine into the channels and tributaries of the nervous system to the edges of the body envelope—my electrical mycelial embodiment, awake, alive, perceptive, conducting, transmitting.

The awareness extends further: down below the body into the earth, above the crown and toward the heavens, radiating out from and pulling into the body in all directions. Receiving and perceiving and transmitting. Bumping into energy bodies. A deep pulsing bliss overtakes the mind body, the feeling body. I am resting at the center of a cosmic egg surrounded in light, as light.

When I move from a formal sit, I invite this awareness of the body as a conductor and participant in the energy field of life to move with me.

Direct experience, no filters.

Patrick Connor calls the body “the final frontier of illumination”. We may contact light in meditation, touch spaciousness in stillness, experience peace above the head. But the real alchemy is bringing awareness down into the dense, defended places of the body where our deepest conditioning lies hidden.

You cannot be fully in a body you are judging. You cannot bring light into a temple you regard with contempt. Imagine you’re at the beginning of a wild adventure of discovering this body’s magic. There isn’t a right way it should be. That collective hypnosis belongs to the old paradigm. When you bring fun, play, and ease to your body, it becomes a transmission a radiation from your aura that invites others without you doing it intentionally.

Light in the body feels like joy.

Part of this process is a rewiring of our relationship to pain. I was working once with a Balinese healer named Panmega, and it was like Exponential Rolfing, in other words, very painful. He told me: the mind doesn’t like the pain, but the body loves it. It loves being put right.

There is a moment in practice when you drop below the mind’s commentary and arrive in the body’s actual experience — and what you find there can be startling. The mind recoils from sensation it labels “pain,” constructing elaborate narratives of wrongness, urgency, something to fix. But the body itself, when you listen without the mind’s interpretation, often has an entirely different relationship with intensity. It opens toward it, even welcomes it, as if saying finally, you’re here with me. This is revelatory: that what we’ve been calling pain is sometimes just unfelt life, sensation that accumulated while we were elsewhere, waiting for our attention to digest it. The body doesn’t need you to fix it so much as to feel it — to stay present with what’s actually happening rather than what the mind fears is happening. So you learn to ask directly: What do you want to teach me? And the body, which has been holding its knowing in tissue and nerve and fluid, begins to speak — not in language but in release, in memory surfacing, in sudden clarity about where you’ve been out of alignment with your own life. The teaching is always specific, always personal, always waiting for the moment you stop resisting long enough to receive it. We begin to see that if we push away the pain, we crystallize it.

I invite you to open to the experiment of breathing into pain, into imbalance, into areas of your body you have previously experienced as impaired, and just bear witness, without judgement.

A simple practice: disarmingly simple and endlessly deep (listen to the recording at the top).

Feel your feet. Feel your seat. Feel the breath moving. Feel what is tight and what is open. Feel the temperature of the skin, the weight of the hands, the space inside the chest.

Do this throughout the day. In the car. In the meeting. In the difficult conversation. The body is always here, always available, always broadcasting information. The practice is tuning the dial.

Over time, something shifts. The body that was background becomes foreground. The numbness reveals itself as frozen grief, old fear, unexpressed joy. The container that felt solid becomes permeable, porous, responsive.