24. How Do You Know When You Are Fully Present?

In this episode, we expand on the idea of our emotions being a guide home to our true selves. Last episode we asked ourselves what happens when we stop trying to outrun our feelings, and this time we take that a step further by asking how we know when we are fully present? What does the proprioceptive system have to do with this? Which comes first, sensation or thought? Tune in to find out! 

Transcript

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Hello and welcome back to the round table this week. My name is Chloe, and we are going to continue on from the message of last week's episode. If you didn't already listen, that one is posing the question of what happens when we stop out running our feelings, especially when we really want to. If you haven't already listened to that, this isn't necessarily a formal part two, but it would probably be helpful to go back and listen to that one first. And today I'm going to pose a different question. That question is, how do you know when you are fully present? And then we will explore a couple of different perspectives that you could adopt so that you can access or connect to that feeling of presence when you find yourself feeling really scattered. So without further ado, let's get into it. Welcome to Creator Putty, a space where the invitation is always open to call upon the higher power that breathes you and remember that there is strength in surrender. Now let's go explore the expanses of consciousness. So in the last episode, we talked about noticing when you are feeling quote bad and to just give it a little bit of space. Now, I don't know if you have kind of practiced that since listening to that episode, but it is a really, really great place to start. And then the next thing is to define the qualities of bad. What makes a feeling or an emotion bad? Is it the way that it makes you feel physically? Is it the way that it makes you feel mentally, right? And then moving into a place of knowing that you can learn how to respond differently. So that's kind of um in a nutshell what we talked about last week. And again, this will be a very similar kind of continuation of that. And I'll be providing some more insight that you can really kind of apply to move into that next stage of um going from awareness to being able to feel empowered to call upon your presence so that you can respond differently whenever those circumstances come up again that made you feel that way before, and recognizing that at the end of the day, nothing and no one can make you feel anything. Those feelings can arise within you and absolutely be influenced by people and things that are going on around you. But whether or not we actually hang on to and stay in that energy of anger, impatience, whatever the case may be, that part is our choice. So this morning, I uh got my son off to school. I came home, I was hungry, made myself a protein shake. And I was like, man, I have been on my phone too stinking much. I've been committed and I'm feeling really good about the progress that I am making so far on the course that I mentioned I'm taking. Um, but I was like, man, I just have some eye strain and I need to get off my phone and get into my body. So I turned on some music and I'm like dancing around in my kitchen. And uh I was thinking just about how important proprioception is. And then it kind of dawned on me how that relates to this idea of uh thoughts and feelings and how we respond to them. The proprioceptive system, for anyone that is not already familiar, is the way that our body maps out where we are located in space at any particular time. So, as I mentioned, I had been on my phone a lot, and vision is actually one of the primary drivers of the proprioceptive system. So your depth perception can be thrown off, and different things can happen when the proprioceptive system is not functioning properly. And because I had been staring down, kind of in this cross-eyed position, looking at this tiny blue light screen, it was throwing me off. And so I knew I needed to get into my body. And I always kind of just um assume that I'm grounded because I live and breathe this kind of work for the last few years. But the truth is that I'm not, and that is the point of this work and why I want to share it. As I started to dance, I was like, you know, moving my feet and different stuff, and I realized like how far away my feet felt, right? And that's kind of a funny thing to notice, but truly, like when you start to dance, especially in an unstructured way, like not having to think and follow choreography, but when you just turn on music and bust a groove, then you start to naturally proprioceptively map out your body in space. And when you proprioceptively have a good map of your body, you're less likely to do things like stub a toe, run into a wall, things I've done a million times, and that's why I learned this. Um so anyway, as I danced, I started to feel better and better. And then, as I know happens with regulation, my energy moved into a receptive state. And so once I was in that receptive state, then all of these thoughts kind of started to flood in about um how this relates to our emotions. So when again, when our nerves and our body are able to recognize where we are in space at any given moment, then we feel like we have better command over our energy. And in the beginning of the episode, I asked you, how do you know when you are fully present? For me, I honestly did not know what it meant to feel fully present until I was sitting in front of a practitioner who was able to gently walk me back into my body using different regulation tools. And it felt like being plopped into an expansive field where I could just move freely, like in a spiritual sense, without this fear of what other people were thinking or how I could possibly fail. And it was like recapturing something from childhood. We all know what it feels like to have been connected to ourselves at some point, whether in childhood or adulthood, like that peak pinnacle moment where everything was right in the world. And then I think a lot of us believe that that's just a fleeting feeling that comes around every now and again. And while, yes, different circumstances can enhance that feeling, I invite you to consider the fact that maybe it's a state of consciousness that you can attune yourself to and access simply by becoming more in tune with your bodily sensations and your feelings and making conscious choices about how you respond to them and use that energy to propel you forward. I think I've said it before on the podcast, but when we don't know better, I think I said this the last episode actually, when we don't know how to respond better, we are gonna choose or act out what is familiar every time. When you are present, you can make conscious choices. You can choose how you respond to different things. And when you are scattered or you're feeling dissociated, when you're feeling burnt out, overwhelmed, touched out, whatever out you're feeling, you're feeling out of alignment with your mind, body, and soul. I again like to relate this back to science because to me, I am all for the woo-woo. I'm all for um placebo effects because science has shown that it can be just as effective, if not even more, than medicine sometimes. That is the power of our minds. And just because I live and breathe, this work doesn't mean that I don't still have a healthy dose of discernment or skepticism within me. And so I love to look at the science behind it. So that's where I look at things like proprioception. Why do I feel better after I have gone for a walk? Why do I feel better after I have just busted a groove in my kitchen while I make a protein smoothie? Right. It's because we are giving our nervous system some nurturing and some love when our nerves, and if you've not seen the human anatomy, I'm sure that you have, but like the nervous system, right? It's like the brain and then all these little root stem systems that go throughout our whole body. And in our hands and feet are the peripheral nerves. Think about like peripheral vision, far away. Proprioception helps us map those parts that are far away. And so when we become restricted in our fascia, in our muscles, in our posture, then it can start to um, I don't want to say cut off, but impede or hinder the ability for those nerves to send and receive the electrical signals that they send. And considering the major part of the nervous system is sending and receiving information to and from the brain to the rest of our body, this is so important. Now, there's another concept that I want to introduce, and that is what's called the said principle. When I was working in a gym for a couple of years after high school and later received my personal training certification, I learned about the said principle, and that is specific adaptation to imposed demands. Now, what that meant in the sense of fitness is imagine, like, let's say, a um an athlete that does a lot of repetitive movements, like a baseball player. When they swing their bat, they practice that swing over and over and over. And their body is going to produce specific adaptations for that imposed demand of swinging the bat most efficiently and with the most power behind that movement. But the said principle doesn't only apply to athletes, it also applies to us everyday people. So if you have a desk job that requires you to sit a lot or a long commute, or in my case, for many years when I worked in an insurance company, both a desk job and a long commute, you are sitting in such a way that is hinging at the hips and impeding the energy flow, circulation, all of that from your upper half to your lower half. And that's why something like a walk is so often recommended, especially for not just everybody, but for people with desk jobs, is to increase that circulation, that blood flow, um, and the ability for your nervous system to send and receive communications with your lower half. Now, this is where sensation and thought kind of enter the chat because it's kind of a question of which came first, the chicken or the egg, the sense or the thought. And I am going to pose that this sensation comes first and the thought is secondary to that. Okay. Um, this is why I believe that like things like EFT, the emotional freedom technique, also known as tapping, are so helpful. Um, also, there are a lot of other practices like Qigong and Tai Chi to move energy through different meridian lines. They're the same lines used at by acupuncturists to move and open up those highways of information within our body because it allows for optimal functioning just as a person. So, to take last week's question of what happens when we stop outrunning our feelings, well, like I had suggested in that episode, once you notice that you're feeling bad, take the time to sit with it and explain what bad means, especially if you can give it different qualities, like I feel tight, I feel heavy, I feel scattered. And when you can describe a sensation, then you can kind of better communicate with that sensation to determine what it needs for relief, uh, for release, whatever the case may be. This is why I believe that in the chicken egg quandary of which came first, I believe that sensation comes before thought. We must feel something from sensory input of some kind, internal or external, in order to create a thought about that thing. And that's not to say that our thought cannot create um physical sensations. It absolutely can. That's why uh, you know, I had posted a forel about this week. When you look at somebody who is smiling, it can communicate to your nervous system that it is a nonverbal cute, that it's safe to relax. It's the same kind of mirror neurons that affect us in the way that when we're watching, like um, if you see a video of somebody taking a really hard fall, you kind of cringe because your body produces this physiological kind of imaginative effect of what that would feel like for you. So therefore, our thoughts and our minds are powerful enough that if we feed it the same input or see something or experience something strong enough, it can create physical sensations. Um, so it works in both ways. Today, the specific question is how do you know when you are fully present? And again, I will say that for myself, that feeling is when I am able to harness my mind, my body, and my spirit all into one little moment where they can communicate with each other. And then I can access a higher functioning, executive functioning of my brain to make conscious choices about the way that I express the energy of that I'm feeling, whether that be anger, grief, joy, I want to know how to build a healthy repertoire of ways that I can express these things without self-sabotaging, hurting the people I love, uh, damaging my finances, my career. And while not everything is a controllable, I firmly believe that this is one of the best investments of our time is to learn our own library of sensation and tools for regulation so that we can become attuned to that frequency of being fully present. We can command our presence and we can act in a way that aligns with our values and in a way that stops us from feeling like a victim to everyone else's decisions, actions, or inactions. That to me is where true power comes from because it's not about trying to control. It's about saying no matter what kind of, you know, turbulent waters come across me, I am going to be the boulder in the center and let those things wash over me. I am going to be okay regardless. There is power in that. I have felt that. I want you to feel that. If you never have before, it's going to be wonderful when you do. And if you have, I hope that you are able to build a practice that you can access that in times of stress so that you can kind of better float through them. Thank you so much for tuning in this week. You can find me over on Instagram at Chloe.being.human. You'll see me sharing a lot more practices to release the physical energy of emotions from our body. And if you like what you're hearing on the podcast, it would mean the world if you would hit subscribe, turn on the notifications, or send this to somebody that you feel might resonate with the message as well. Thank you again for being here. Until we speak again, see good, be good, and have a wonderful rest of your day.