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In the last couple of weeks, we talked about how the mind — not knowing it's part of a team — defaults to overthinking, and how simple breathwork can use the body to bring it back. But if the mind isn't the captain, who is? And what else is on the team?
You are the captain. The consciousness riding around in your body, having experiences — somatic, emotional, intellectual. As you gain distance from your thoughts and let them pass through, you identify with them less. They become suggestions, passing interpretations, rather than facts about reality.
The other team member we're focusing on today: the body. This vessel we inhabit, the one that gives us somatic experiences and interfaces with the physical world. Most of us were never taught to communicate with it — we either villainize its signals or create so much internal noise we can't hear them.
We override hunger. We talk ourselves out of a gut reaction to someone. We ignore the body's quiet signals until it has to scream to get our attention, and over time, that pattern shows up as tension, illness, and disease. The tight shoulders, the wound-up belly, the recurring headaches — those are warning shots. They get louder the longer we ignore them.
And yet, the body is a finely tuned instrument that registers things the mind glosses right over. When you learn its language, questions like what do I do next, can I trust this person, and what do I actually want to eat stop being sources of anxiety and start becoming fluid, almost automatic. The mind isn't built to handle these things alone.
The challenge is that the body speaks in vague, abstract signals — and everyone's dialect is different. That's why there's so much contradictory advice online, and why the influencers showing perfect, shiny lives with their tidy platitudes feel so hollow. They're not speaking your language (or being real). So how do you learn yours?
Three starting points:
First — slow down enough to receive a signal. Find a sensation, and breathe with it. Let it be exactly what it is right now.
Second — ask yourself: if this sensation meant something, what might it be? Don't force an answer. Let it float through.
Third — trust yourself.
(I know. Clear as mud. Bear with me.)
Here's the more concrete version: tightening is usually a no. Opening — that sense of something expanding in your chest or softening in your belly — is usually a yes. Before you label a feeling, linger with the physical sensations for a few breaths. Instead of jumping to "I'm anxious," try: my chest feels tight, my belly is wound up, my shoulders are curved forward. This small shift creates room to sit with what's there without judging it — which is exactly what the body needs.
We were taught as children that listening to these sensations was dangerous, so we learned to judge them the way our families did. Breathing with them now — not needing them to change, just letting them exist — gives your tissues the space to have their experience and then tell you something true.
I've used this to dial in on what genuinely fascinates me, figure out what to work on next, and discover what my body actually wants to eat (spoiler: apparently not vegetables). On walks, I'll use it to decide which direction to go — and I've ended up at a techie art gallery in NYC on a Monday night that happened to be serving pizza. Exactly what I wanted.
This is a superpower most of society has been conditioned out of. The more you practice, the more fluent you get — life starts to feel less like an obstacle course, and more like coming home.
✨ ❄ 🌲 Audrey 🌲 ❄ ✨
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