NOEMAYA

We manage life often from the cognitive office, the space of the mind. It’s useful, no doubt. It helps with tasks, decisions, planning. But it’s not built for handling the spontaneous current of life, the one we actually live through as feelings, moods, and shifting states of being.

The mind works in narratives. Clean, structured, almost prose-like. But feelings don’t obey that structure. They’re closer to poetry: fluid, continuous, hard to pin down. And when we forget this difference, things start to go wrong. We try to force feelings into rigid stories, and suddenly they become overwhelming, confusing, unmanageable.

A simple analogy helps. The mind works like a digital system. It samples. From a continuous stream of experience, it takes a few data points, then fills in the gaps through interpolation. Like low-resolution imaging, it fabricates detail that was never actually captured. It’s efficient, but limited.

And that’s exactly what happens psychologically. The mind builds a version of reality from incomplete data and calls it truth. Feelings, on the other hand, are not sampled. They’re continuous. You don’t observe them, you’re inside them. They don’t need reconstruction.

So when we apply this discrete, narrative-making tool, i.e. the mind, to something continuous like feeling, we inevitably distort it. We create stories about ourselves, about others, about situations, and those stories are never the full reality. Sometimes that distortion is harmless. But when life gets intense, real joy, real pain, that’s when it turns on us. At the high end, it becomes addiction. At the low end, anxiety and fear.

Most of our avoidance strategies come from this mismatch; from using the wrong tool on the wrong layer of experience.

Even traditional psychotherapy has often leaned heavily on the mind. It tries to identify and fix the core stories behind anxiety. And there’s value there, no question. You should become aware of your patterns. But there’s another way in. One that doesn’t go through the mind at all.

If you watch yourself during anxiety, you’ll notice something obvious, if you’re honest. There’s confusion in the head, yes. But there’s also a tightening in the body. Shoulders rise. Breath shortens. Jaw locks. Posture collapses or stiffens. And yet, we ignore the body completely and focus on the mental stories. Why? Because the body is where the discomfort actually lives.

We escape into the head because we can’t tolerate what’s happening in the body. That’s the move. That’s the habit: A sensation arises, say tightness, heat, pressure, restlessness. Within a split second, we’re already in the head, trying to interpret and explain it, label it, fix it. The mind spins stories, usually fear-based. Those stories amplify the sensation. The sensation pushes us deeper into the story. Now you’re in a loop. And once you’re in it, it feels like the problem is “out there” or “in the situation.” It’s not. It’s this loop.

There’s a way out, but it doesn’t start where you think. It starts at the level of sensation. Instead of managing the story, you stay with the raw signal. The discomfort in the body, before it gets translated into narrative. If you can do that, if you can resist the urge to immediately interpret, you interrupt the loop. Not eliminate it. Interrupt it.

So the shift is simple, but not easy: change your relationship with the sensation itself. Stop treating the difficult sensations like threats, things to avoid, or as a signal that something is wrong. Build tolerance. Let it be there without rushing to escape. Because the real storm isn’t in the sensation; it’s in the story that follows.

Practically, this means catching it early. Staying with the body before the mind takes over completely. Accepting the discomfort at that level, where it’s actually more manageable than the chaos it turns into later. When you find yourself in an anxious state, sit and relax and scan the body; see where the difficult sensations are concentrated or how they move; lean into them slowly without interpreting them or assigning them a meaning. It’s much like the initial discomfort of stepping into a cold body of water; at first there’s resistance due to the contrast in temperature, but when you immerse yourself in what you’re trying to avoid, you’ll realize it’s not bad at all: when you unite with what you previously considered your nemesis, the enmity would disappear.

It is the same with sensations: when you pass the initial discomfort to embrace and lean into the difficult sensations, without the need to interpret them, you’ll realize they’re not harmful at at all; they don’t carry a message of threat or a story; they just are sensations, and they just want to hang around and savor your attention for a little bit. But when you deprive your attention from parts of yourself for years, mainly the sensations of the subtle body, they will try harder to get that attention, and that might seem like a nuisance in your life but it simply is the result of avoiding your own parts for years.

During this practice, thoughts will still rise, and so does the urgency to interpret sensations into stories. That’s just the result of habit; we have always done that: running urgently to address every little thought in our head without learning to say no. But we can undo this habit, with an attitude of curiosity: while practicing embodiment and faced with the urgency to take care of thoughts, I can gently and with grace (her favorite state) say, “Ok! I see you but I am just going to let this one thought go; I don’t have to address it now; it can wait,” and then simply return to the sensations.

We don’t have to follow every thought to address and resolve them. Imagine if you had a booth in a bazaar and you engaged with anyone and everyone who stopped by for a small chat, people from neighboring booths and what not; then you won’t be able to do your business. To mind your business, you must learn to say no, and that practice always starts from our internal life, from the way we encounter our thoughts and impulses: to say YES to something is to say NO to something else. So, when you pursue every little thought, you are saying no to another part of you that needs that attention, and that’s usually your subtle body. So, we must always ask this question, “is it worth it?”

Back to the practice: Stay with the body. Let the thoughts pass through like background noise. This is training, nothing more mystical than that. Like learning an instrument. You’ll drift. You’ll come back. Over and over.

One important thing: don’t turn this into another performance. Don’t do this practice in order to “feel okay.” That’s just the mind sneaking back in with a new strategy. You’ll create an image of what “okay” should feel like, calm, relaxed, peaceful, and then try to force yourself into it. That’s just another escape. The point of embodiment practice is not resolve anything, but let them remain unresolved and instead focus on the sensations, to be OK with staying with the unknown.

Instead, redefine “okay.” Okay means what is, right now. Even if that includes tension, discomfort, restlessness. Especially then. Otherwise, you’re just playing the same game with better vocabulary.

It is important to approach this practice with an attitude of curiosity. As sit down to focus on sensations without bending to the urgency to interpret them, ask yourself, “what happens if I don’t react? If I don’t immediately fix, analyze, or escape?” Nothing dramatic. Thoughts will still come. Urgency will still show up. You might react anyway. That’s fine. Notice it, and return. The real shift is becoming less obedient to every thought that demands your attention. Let them come. Let them go. Stay with what’s real, i.e. the body, the sensation, the immediate experience. That’s the ground.

In the final analysis, an attentive and story-free return to the body is the beginning of integral living. Patterns of sensations in the body are patterns of energy distribution; when you urgently try to force every sensation into a story, you are in a way abandoning that part of yourself. You cannot actively listen to someone and at the same time interpret/analyze what they are saying; these two acts of consciousness cannot run simultaneously.

When it comes to our bodies, to embrace it is to actively listen to it, to let all sensations, difficult and as well as pleasant ones, to run through the playground of the body and just be, be accepted as they are, without us trying to force-interpret them; there is not story they are trying to say; they just need gentle attention. Not every unpleasant sensation is a messenger of threat, but if we treat them like that, then we find ourselves running into the attic of the mind and to weave more stories, to try to fix, manage, and control. We will end up living most of our lives in that tight space, instead of dwelling in the expansive space of the heart which is open and free of the need to interpret, judge, and read into the spontaneous flux of life.

And if we can succeed in this practice within ourselves, we can extend it to others too, to be open and attentive to others without analyzing every thing about them, without the urgency to force them into identity-narratives that are understandable in terms of our own experience. After all, this whole world is one body, and to be open to the world, to existence, is, like Martin Heidegger said, “to let beings be.”

I must add here that I was introduced to this practice through the book Already Free by Bruce Tift, which is a Buddhist approach to therapy. Highly recommend it if you want to dive deeper into incorporating this practice into your daily life.