I am building this renewed writing practice as an extension of my ongoing mediation focus on learning to deeply feel my body.  Each morning I bridge the dream world with a guided meditation deep into the felt sense of living inside myself.  Breath work is foundational in every meditative practice, because it is the one autonomic function that is also at our command. Just learning how to pay attention to air moving in and out of the body slows the mind, and with time and practice pulls you into a quiet rhythm in your belly.

Learning to feel is more than just breathing, though.  After you are settled and quiet in your body, the sensations of living inside are plentiful and intense. Physical pain becomes clear when you can stay with it. Anxiety and stress have actual physical forms that reside in the belly. You can actually feel the weight of the blocks behind your heart. Scanning the body in this quiet place teaches you what your ideas of living in the body feel like.

This past year I have had an ongoing shoulder injury. At its worst, I can’t type or actually do anything without feeling the sharp, unrelenting knot in my back.  My meditation practice failed for a long time during the acute phases of the pain because I couldn’t get quiet. The whole thing changed when I stopped trying not to feel it.  Instead, I decided that I would just try to feel it and not want it to go away. The most amazing shifts occurred as I lay there breathing with my pain. Slowly, the quality of the pain shifted from a searing, stabbing feeling to a slow dull ache. The ache over time would stretch out and just feel like weakness.  Every now and again, all that was left was an empty space there in my shoulder.  My shoulder taught me a lot about learning to feel and remains a consistent physical signal of too much stress. I pay attention when it comes back.

I remember years ago, when a mentor tried to teach me about the power of learning to feel as the primary mechanism of creating our reality.  At the time, I was overrun with feelings so I thought I was already doing it. But there is a huge difference between the feelings as thought forms that emerge in us, often running our lives and the space of  sensing those feelings  as the physical reality that we embody. The subconscious mind, which is the true driver in our life, listens to the deeper physical embodiment of our feeling state, in fact you could call this feeling body the translator for the subconscious. It is not fooled by our thoughts or words. It is always listening to the actual feeling body.

So it is no surprise that even though I had been meditating on creating abundance for many years, it is only recently since I have been working at sensing the feeling state of gratitude in my body that I have created any real message of abundance for my subconscious. Gratitude. like anxiety or any other emotion. has a real physical presence.  Learning to cultivate the feeling sense of these emotions takes them out of the head where they just confuse us and gives them the potential to release pain and generate more of what you want in life.