I sometimes worry that I’ll never be able to reconnect with bodily sensations. I shut them down and out so hard for so long.

But I then I can realize that the worry is a bodily sensation and prove the worry false.

Today I was feeling a kind of resistance that is very familiar to me. It comes up whenever something I want to do lines up with something I must do.

I was able to let myself get past it this time simply by noticing the sensation. Not the story of the reason for the sensation, but just the sensation itself.

The story of the reason for the sensation is something like “As soon as I want to and must do something, a voice pops into my head, immediately applying thousands of pounds of pressure: I better do a good job. Underneath that voice is the whisper: ‘You aren’t good enough.’”

The story of the reason for the sensation is actually very helpful to understand, and the experience of the story itself is a kind of sensation, but I digress…

Thinking about/acknowledging the story can weaken it, but it can also strengthen it, unfortunately.

But noticing the sensation itself without the story—a tightness in the jaw, shallowness of breath, a sense of weight, heaviness, the desire to get the hell away from something unpleasant—really noticing it, I can sometimes break free from the power of that resistance.

Suddenly, I can find myself not only doing the thing I was resisting, but enjoying it. No negotiation, no dialogue, no fight. Simply noticing.

The bottom line, I think, is that a felt sense will always be more powerful, more interesting, more captivating than any language I can make up to describe it. Even a brilliant complex narrative will grow stale and bland and boring with time.

A sensation is always fresh, tingly.