I need a moment.

I recount a closing in. Like I was disappearing inside my own body and having become completely invisible to the people and context around me. A desire to retreat that manifested in a version of a freeze. It was impossible to find the words to speak. It felt like I had eyes that went all around. A degree of alertness that felt necessary. An internal chatter that was too loud to ignore. At that moment, physically there, I was not.

Often and in that moment too, I resigned. I accepted with total defeat that I am to be invisible despite feeling the weight of my body on the grass. The choices I made available to myself are: Leave to your lodge and sleep, or get lost in dance. Both very well protected me from the embarrassment of going up to someone for a conversation. However absurd that belief was, it was an inescapable experience in my body I had to reckon with. 

I recount that moment in the heart of Los Morelos, one that is lodged in my somatic memory, in reflection of how far the relationship to my body has come since that moment. That moment, as anxiety inducing as it was, was in fact my most powerful. It was the fruit of my practice beginning to truly ripen. 

It was potent because I was aware of what was happening. I was witnessing my internal process in real time with so much compassion. Even though that didn’t translate into liberating me from the freeze in that moment, it awakened me to the third choice I intuitively made, and always have available. The choice of being with my experience without forcing it to change. 

I need a moment.

The freeze often renders me speechless and limits my capacity to do or say the thing I want. At countless times, I found myself unable to recite the sound argument in a meeting, speak to a man I’m interested in, break into a new group of strangers, ask a question, or profess my opinion. My body, despite my sound intellect of knowing better, refused to cooperate. In spite of all the empowerment jargon I consumed, it did little to shift my state. What I really needed was a minute to calibrate. To feel my feet on the ground. To track the charge in my body. To orient back to safety inside. To come back into my present somatic experience with greater capacity to hold everything that came up. To accept, and without question, my own limits at that very moment. 

‘I need a moment’  became the phrase I recited to myself countless times. A phrase that afforded just enough space to hear my body and let that lead. The length of that moment was irrelevant. A minute, a day, a month. It needed whatever it needed to find its own way to authentic expression. In a culture that prizes pushing past capacity to achieve things, the antidote I continue to find is in the pause. To be instead of do. To see slowness as in fact the fast lane. To power with my body rather than power over it.

Life as the ultimate Dojo. 

There’s a lot that goes around on the importance of meditation, breath, dance, and the myriad of practices that bring one into balance. Despite the evidential benefit, what tends to be missed is to what extent the body is brought along in that experience. If all these practices do is take you away from the present reality in your body, then we risk subscribing to the form of spirituality without our feet on the ground. 

The nuance is perhaps subtle but ultimately it’s the intention of going into these practices that either took me away or closer to myself. The intention to meet myself right where I am, attuning to what is alive in my body at that moment. If however the practice was a means to ease and escape what feels unbearable in my reality then I’ve done little to integrate the parts of myself that are calling out for my attention. 

Presence I came to learn is nothing more complicated than an embodied quality that asks us to witness our somatic response to life moment to moment. Cultivating that ability to meet the experience in my body is how I found myself sitting at the edge of the pool, in the midst of a crowd, in front of a screen presenting, with a whole different internal conversation and ultimately a liberated expression slowly but surely. One that carried humor, a lightness of being, and so much power born out of acceptance. 

‘Cool you’re freaked out now, you’re the only one standing alone. That’s got to be mortifyingly awkward. I think you’re a loser. Amazing, let’s do what losers do and continue this chat. Take a moment. Take ten. Who cares, you’re with you always. Now that’s cool. A cool loser.”

The potency of being with your experience as it is in total acceptance and total compassion is empowerment. Nothing more. Nothing less. It’s giving yourself permission to be enough as is. To let yourself experience the truth of your discomfort without thinking it’s all of who you are. 

Life as the ultimate dojo to practice moment to moment.