Week One: Inhabiting yourself

One of the pleasures – and great gifts – in my life is my morning walk across Central Park. To be able to begin each day in the company of trees, grass, and birdsong is a tremendous blessing. On my walk one day, as I was in the throes of a particularly challenging emotional experience, I wasn’t completely in my feet. Because I was up in my head and not paying attention, I fell at a curb along the way. My immediate thought – after I knew nothing was broken – was that I hadn’t been all the way in my body, that I wasn’t inside myself all the way down to the bottoms of my feet.

As a result of this experience, I now begin my walk each day with a reminder to fully inhabit myself. Many times along the way, I reconnect with my feet, which prevents me from becoming lost in my thoughts or feelings. During times of stress, I pay particular attention to experiencing the bottoms of my feet, and the movement of each foot at I walk along, so that I don’t again need to meet the pavement face to face as a reminder.

And so, because I had this lesson reinforced the hard way, and because being all the way inside ourselves effortlessly brings us into the present moment, here, at the inauguration of these weekly explorations, I’d like to offer the following, which is a basic beginning point. Spend the next week being aware of the bottoms of your feet. When you walk, become conscious of your feet under you, of the support they provide, of the sensations of really planting yourself solidly in your feet. When you walk, be aware that you are walking and notice whether or not you are moving along at a comfortable pace . . . or rushing without paying attention to what you are passing . . . or have some other “out-of-body” experience that takes you away from the sensations of being grounded in your feet and firmly planted under you.

Then, notice how your body connects from the bottoms of your feet all the way up to the top of your head. Your body, as is also true with your consciousness, is a continuous whole. Being aware of the bottoms of your feet supports both a sense of being grounded and affirms that you have a whole body, head to toes, including everything in between. If, for any reason, you can’t walk, feel the bottoms of your feet anyway. If you have no sensations in this part of your body, or if you don’t have one or both of your feet, imagine what it would be like if you could feel the sensation of inhabiting your body all the way down to the bottoms of your “imaginary feet”.

That’s it! There’s nothing else to do . . . just bring awareness to the process of living in your body and moving through the world aware that you are moving through the world.

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