Coming Home to Your Body
There is a profound difference between occupying your body and inhabiting it. One is presence by default; the other is presence by choice.
You may not understand how I feel—I don't think too many people do. For most of my life, I didn't understand what it meant to be human in my own body. I lived as a visitor in my own skin, constantly managing the world around me while being completely disconnected from the world within me.
The Disconnection
I didn't understand being tired. Not really. I understood the concept intellectually—fatigue as a signal that rest might be needed. But I couldn't feel it in my body until I was already on the threshold of complete nervous system collapse. I had trained myself to override every signal, to push through every sensation, to treat my body like a machine that simply needed to keep running.
I didn't get the signs of moving toward exhaustion because I had been living in a state of chronic override for so long that emergency had become my baseline. What trauma therapists call "hypervigilance" had rewired my entire relationship with physical sensation¹. I could read every micro-expression on someone else's face while being completely illiterate in my own body's language.
Learning the Language of Sensation
The journey back to my body began with the simplest recognition: I had forgotten how to feel the weight of sitting in a chair. The actual physical sensation of my body making contact with something solid, something that could hold me.
This might sound strange to you if you've always lived connected to your physical self. But when you've spent decades floating above your own experience—managing, strategizing, solving—the simple act of feeling your back against a chair becomes revolutionary.
I had to relearn what it meant to lie on my bed and feel the mattress beneath me, not as a place to plan tomorrow's meetings or replay today's conversations, but as a surface that was holding my actual, physical body in this actual, present moment.
The Relationship Between Brain, Heart, and Body
What I didn't understand was the relationship between my brain and my heart, or from my heart to my body. I had been living as if my mind was the CEO and my body was merely the employee—there to execute orders, not to provide information.
But your body is not just the vehicle that carries your thoughts around. It's the sophisticated intelligence system that processes information your mind cannot access. What neuroscientists call "interoceptive awareness"—the ability to sense and interpret signals from your internal body—is fundamental to emotional regulation and decision-making².
I had to learn that my heart wasn't just a pump but an information-processing center. That the tightness in my chest when someone called wasn't just physical tension but emotional intelligence. That the heaviness I felt after certain conversations wasn't just fatigue but my body's way of telling me something important about that interaction.
The Practice of Simple Existence
Learning to come home to my body required developing what I now call "the practice of simple existence"—moments of being present to physical sensation without agenda, without trying to fix or improve or optimize anything.
It started with yoga nidra, a practice of conscious rest where you learn to simply witness your body without trying to change it. Lying still and feeling the weight of my limbs against the earth. Noticing my heartbeat not as something to monitor or regulate, but as the rhythm of being alive.
These weren't meditation sessions or wellness practices in the traditional sense. They were lessons in basic human existence—learning to inhabit the body I had been borrowing from myself for decades.
The Revolutionary Act of Feeling
What I discovered was that feeling your body—really feeling it—is a revolutionary act when you've spent your life disconnected from physical sensation. Every moment of simply existing in your own skin becomes an act of coming home.
The weight of your body in a chair. The sensation of your feet on the ground. The feeling of air moving in and out of your lungs not because you're trying to breathe correctly, but because breathing is what bodies do when they're allowed to simply be.
This isn't about becoming more "mindful" or achieving some state of zen. This is about remembering that you have a body, that you live in it, that it's been trying to communicate with you all along while you've been too busy managing everyone else's lives to listen.
The Precious Moment
Now I understand what it means to exist in a precious moment without having so much going on in my head. To feel the simple pleasure of physical presence without needing to do anything with it, about it, or because of it.
Your body has been waiting patiently for you to come home to it. Not to improve it or optimize it or use it more efficiently, but to simply acknowledge that you live there. To recognize that beneath all your thoughts and strategies and plans is this intelligent, feeling, breathing being that deserves your attention.
The Invitation
So I invite you to pause right now. Feel the weight of your body wherever you are. Notice what it's like to simply exist in your own skin for this one moment. Not because you're trying to achieve anything, but because this is what it means to be human.
Your body has been your faithful companion through every experience of your life. It has carried your sorrows and your joys, your fears and your hopes. It has breathed for you when you forgot to breathe for yourself.
Coming home to your body isn't a destination—it's a daily practice of remembering that you don't just have a body. You are a body. A feeling, sensing, knowing body that has been waiting all this time for you to come home.
Welcome back.
Footnotes:
¹ Van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Penguin Books.
² Craig, A. D. (2015). How Do You Feel? An Interoceptive Moment with Your Neurobiological Self. Princeton University Press.