Other ways to know

A few weeks ago I wrote about overthinking — how the mind tries to captain the whole ship when that was never its job. We talked about the team: your mind, your heart, your body, your consciousness. And how consciousness — the you that's actually living in your body, having your experiences — is the real captain.

Today I want to talk about what happens when you realize the team is bigger than you thought.

Because the mind doesn't just struggle with heart and body. It doesn't even know about some of the players on the bench, unless we were taught to listen to them.

I spent years in therapy. Good therapy — the kind where you gain real insight, name your patterns, understand your history. And it helped. But there was a floor I kept hitting. I could explain what was wrong and still feel stuck in it.

Things shifted when I started somatic work. Not because thinking was wrong, but because some things live in the body — in the tight jaw, the shallow breath, the way your shoulders climb toward your ears before you're conscious of being stressed. That roiling in your belly after a conversation that looked fine on paper. The heaviness you carry out of a room you just told yourself was fine. Those aren't glitches. They're communication. The body holds knowledge that was never verbal to begin with. You can't think your way to it because it was never made of thoughts.

I taught myself to crochet a couple of years ago. Nobody in my family handed it down — I learned from YouTube and a lot of frogging. But something unexpected happened as my hands found the rhythm. I started to feel connected to the women in my lineage who had done this same motion, in different rooms, in different centuries. Not because they taught me. Because the craft itself was a thread between us.

And then the craft brought me into community — stitch circles and fiber meetups where people gathered not to perform expertise but to sit together and make things with their hands. Ancestral knowing isn't always a direct transmission. Sometimes it's the recognition that you didn't start from scratch — that you arrived already shaped by people you may never have met, and finding your way back to what they carried can happen through the side door.

There are things you can only understand in relationship — to other people, to place, to season. The way a neighborhood knows something is shifting before any individual could articulate it. The way forest ecosystems distribute resources through fungal networks that no single tree directs.

We live in a culture that treats knowing as an individual achievement. But some knowledge only exists between — in the space where your experience meets someone else's and becomes something neither of you had alone.

None of this is a hierarchy. I'm not saying "logic bad, body good." Analytical thinking is exactly right when you're debugging code or building a budget. Somatic knowing is exactly right when your body is trying to tell you something your mind keeps overriding. Ancestral awareness is right when you're repeating patterns that don't seem to belong to you. Community knowing is right when the question is bigger than any one person.

Remember the captain — consciousness, the you living in your body, having all of these experiences at once. The captain doesn't play every position. The captain reads the moment, puts the right player on the court, and tells the others to rest until they're needed. Last time we talked about teaching the mind to step back. This time I want you to notice who steps forward when it does.

You've got a full roster. Most of us were only taught to play one. The rest of the team has been warming up for years — in your body, in your lineage, in the spaces between you and the people around you. They're ready when you are.

Creative Prompt: How can you listen deeper to your body, community and ancestors?

✨ ❄ 🌲 Audrey 🌲 ❄ ✨

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