The Body and the Sense of Me

You know that lovely moment when you wake naturally, perhaps on a Saturday morning or when you're on holiday, and for a little while you haven't quite entered the day?

You're aware of the warmth of the bed, the light coming through the curtains, perhaps a bird outside or the distant sound of traffic. There's a lovely ease about it, before your attention gradually turns towards the day ahead and you begin thinking about what needs doing.

Perhaps you remember a conversation from yesterday, something you've forgotten to organise, or a problem that needs sorting out. Before long, you're running through the week ahead, the birthday to arrange, the car that needs booking in, the groceries that won't buy themselves.

You might notice a slight tightening somewhere in the body. Perhaps the belly contracts, the shoulders draw together or the breath changes. The mind has already moved into the day, and the body seems to have gone with it.

Much of the time we barely notice this happening. These familiar patterns of thought and feeling have been with us for so long that we tend to experience them simply as ourselves.

The body can give us a rather immediate glimpse of how we're experiencing ourselves, sometimes before we've even noticed the story running through our minds.

And we don't have to wait until we're waking up to notice it.

Later in the day, perhaps you're standing at the kettle, waiting for it to boil. Your attention rests on something in front of you, the sounds of the house come and go, and for a moment you're not particularly occupied with thinking. You might notice a little more ease in the body, something similar to that feeling you had when you first woke up.

These small changes in our experience are happening throughout the day, although we're rarely paying much attention to them. We're usually more interested in what we're thinking about than in how those thoughts are being experienced.

Yet there's something rather interesting here. A thought about tomorrow can arise while we're standing perfectly safely in our kitchen, and the body may respond as though the situation we're imagining is happening right now. An old conversation can bring with it the same tightening we felt when it first took place.

And sometimes, when our attention is no longer caught up in the story, that tension eases.

The next time you find yourself standing at the kettle, sitting in traffic or waking slowly in the morning, you might notice what's happening in the body.

Perhaps there's a contraction somewhere, a tightening that accompanies a familiar thought about yourself or your life. Perhaps there's a moment of ease when the thinking subsides.

We're usually so occupied with the content of our thoughts that we rarely notice how they're experienced in the body.

It's worth becoming curious about this, particularly that familiar sense of 'me' that seems to arrive with certain thoughts and feelings.

What is it, exactly, that we're experiencing?

Rather than answering too quickly, we can stay with the experience itself.

When the sense of 'me' feels particularly strong, where do you actually experience it? Is it somewhere in the head, the chest or the belly? Does it have a shape, a boundary, a centre? Is it something solid and continuous, or a collection of thoughts, feelings and sensations appearing together?

There's no need to change what you find or make the contraction disappear. Simply notice what is actually there before calling it 'me'.

We may discover that something we've taken to be so familiar and substantial becomes rather more difficult to define when we look at it directly.