Exercises to Practice Connection to Origin, Part 2
Learning to listen to your body
There are moments when your body knows something long before your philosophy can explain it.
Some people have a lot of practice ignoring their bodies.
If you’ve done sports in school, you’ve been yelled at by a coach to do exercises that might have been too hard. You learn to override hunger and override exhaustion.
In college, you probably ended up at parties that you really wanted to leave, but your friends were driving and so you had to hang out and wait until the driver was ready.
Listening to your body is the skill of noticing what you are doing before you rebrand it as something else to make other people happy.
Sometimes you might be happy with the rebrand! But it is good if this is intentional.
Often people build up habits of “automatic” rebrands. You might have heard of the Fight, Flight, Freeze, or Fawn.
This shows up as:
Saying “yes” to make somebody happy because you are nervous about entering a back-and-forth about your feelings
Calling something “just feelings” and ignoring the information you are sensing.
Fortunately there are tons of practices you can do to expand your awareness of your own body, so that you get the training in to notice what your body is doing.
Noticing the Tiny Sensations
People wait for a big panic to count it as data.
By the time you are sobbing in a bathroom at a bar, the interesting information was already available several hours earlier, when you felt a something and overrode it.
Some early signals:
A very specific tiredness that appears in the middle of a conversation.
A “fuzziness” in your head when you try to imagine a scenario you are supposedly okay with.
Your body going stiff
You can get better at noticing these things.
Going into your body on purpose
“Go into your body” is one of those phrases that sounds poetic and useless until you give it a job.
In practice, it can be extremely literal and boring: you pause the meta‑conversation about values and check what your actual physical organism is doing in real time.
You can ask:
What are my hands doing right now? Are they relaxed, gripping, picking at something.
What is my breath doing? Am I breathing all the way down, or am I holding my breath? Am I doing doing little high sips?
Where, exactly, does this conversation land—throat, chest, gut, back of neck.
Am I already dissociating.
If the answer is “I feel fine, but my body feels like it is bracing for a fall,” then you can try to notice what information you are ignoring, starting from the “biggest thing” first.
Situational Awareness for Body Language
Chances are, other people are also trying to please you and so are also ignoring their bodies. Paying attention to what they are doing can be helpful to both of you.
This is especially true of somebody under the pressure of pleasing you, keeping you, or passing your tests.
Part of your job is:
Noticing when their words and their body are out of phase (bright yes, flat affect, micro‑freeze).
Treating their fidgeting, silence, or sudden politeness as information, not as them “being confusing.”
“Listening to your body” becomes “listening to the bodies in the room.” Your nervous system and theirs are both data sources about what is going on.
Over time, this becomes to feel natural, and not rude.
Overwhelm in the Face of Pride
“What may you yourself find overwhelming?”
You are not above this.
You can be the person who is “experienced” in something and still have moments that capsize you. Advanced practitioners still end up in situations where they need their advanced skills, and this means they can be in territory where they see things that are new and complicated.
Listening to your body as a skill means:
Expecting overwhelm as a normal part of any challenging dance, not as evidence of moral failure.
Allowing the sensory data to slow you down to a level slower than your general “philosophy” — which could be very fast — so that everybody’s emotions have time to “catch up” with any generalized schema.
You can train yourself to enjoy the slower thing as a tantra exercise.
The Importance of a Somatic Practice
Everybody has areas in which they “pop” or “run out of steam” or “run out of bandwidth” quicker than others, with less internal resources to “make more bandwidth.” Sometimes, the inability to “imagine the body as having more bandwidth” is part of the blocker for people. This can relate to trauma, or from not having had certain experiences.
When it comes to “proofs,” some kinds of “seeing proof” can be “basically impossible” if one cannot imagine a body state for themselves in which “the proof lands in their body and creates some kind of ease”
For example, “proof of safety” or “proof of love” or “proof of commitment” or “proof of appreciation” that another person is trying to display, may actually be outside your sphere of imagination in the moment such that you cannot receive it.
If someone literally cannot imagine a certain kind of safety in their body, there is no place for proof of that safety to land, and any safe feelings that one may expect to come from the proof of safety wiggles away.
This can keep a person from “accepting” what they want most, even if it is nearby, or right in their face.
For these reasons I think everybody in serious relationships should have some kinds of somatic practice.
yoga, jiu jitsu, dancing,
beat saber
wii fit, tennis
hiking
whatever you want
“Creating new wells of bandwidth and imagination” in the body that you and your partner can use when you both inevitably grow is really important.
I used to tell people, “I don’t want to get married until we are in super good shape. If we can’t make a commitment to be super hot for the wedding, what else will we not do for each other.”
I am not sure if I completely believe this, for everybody. But part of me does believe in the ethos of, “we will do something, together, that feels uncomfortable for both of us, but that has objectively good outcomes, and we will keep track of the quest for good outcomes together.” I think that is more important than reaching some ideal of fitness.
I think there is something good about starting a marriage healthy physically, and doing what you say want to do.
I think there is an additional element of doing it together, and accomplishing a shared goal together.
Outside of the above consideration, maintaining a somatic practice means continuing to expand your physical capacity to store new information. It means that as you grow intellectually and gain new experiences, you also gain new physical experiences that can prepare you for new emotional experiences.
Often people gain weight in times of stress because the body needs more calories for the brain and body to work, and also more “storage space” for the information. Weight lifting so that your muscles serve a similar purpose during hard times can be a good idea.
“Tiny Sensations”
Do these 1–3 times per day, 2–5 minutes each, for a few days, until it feels like a habit.
60‑second micro body scan
Set a timer for 60 seconds; slowly move attention from your crown → jaw → throat → chest → belly → pelvis → legs → feet, labeling neutral sensations (“warm,” “tight,” “empty,” “buzzy”) without trying to change or fix anything.“Pause before override” experiment
Any time you notice “I should stay / keep working / say yes,” add a 30‑second pause. In that pause do the above scan: jaw, throat, chest, gut. If any area is clenching or going blank, mark that as “data,” even if you still choose to override. But ask yourself if you really do need to override it, or if there are other options than you are used to.
Interrupting Automatic Rebrands
Pick 1 pattern you suspect you run (e.g. fawn/people‑pleasing).
Pre‑commit a “buying time” line
Script a sentence that feels like you, that you can say instead of an instant yes:“Let me get a drink and then get back to you.”
“One sec, I need to think about that.”
“Freeze detector”
Once a day, ask: “Where was I slightly numb or checked out today?” Note what was happening and what your body did (staring at a wall, holding your breath, zoning out online, etc.). The goal is just to notice freeze as data.
Situational Awareness: Listening to Other Bodies
You can do this without becoming creepy or over‑interpreting.
5‑minute “body language observer”
In a café, meeting, or show, quietly pick one person and track only: posture shifts, fidgeting, breath speed (roughly), facial tension vs relaxation. Then guess: “More comfortable now or less?” without needing to be right.Words vs body mismatch game
Whenever someone is saying “It’s fine” or “No worries,” quickly scan: eyes, mouth tension, shoulders, hands. Internally tag if there is a mismatch between what they are saying and what they are doing. If there is a mismatch and it is appropriate, point offer to slow down or talk more.
Overwhelm as Normal, Not Moral
These normalize hitting your edge instead of shaming it.
Overwhelm scale
Make a 0–10 scale where 0 = “super chill” and 10 = “fully flooded.” Add your personal markers at 3, 5, 7 (e.g. 3 = distracted, 5 = mildly nauseated, 7 = can’t track what they just said). Check what your number is at various moments over the course of a day.“Half‑speed” button
When you hit a relatively low number, such as a 3 or a 4, practice deliberately slowing whatever you’re doing to half speed: slower speech, slower movements, longer exhale. Imagine dragging the whole scene into slow motion. A version of this includes playing a song, and moving around specifically at half-tempo.Write down what happens in your body at the 3 and the 4, and what your most effective ways of deescalating are. You’re training for earlier exits or earlier slowdowns.
Once you are used to the procedure, notice the moments that are a 5+ and practice with the more intense moments too.
Deep Wells of Discipline
People have a deep well of discipline they draw from, even when they don’t call it that.
For some people, the well spreads out wide and thin. Everything they do requires a touch into this well.
For others, the well drops straight down, deep. Often they do not think about this well at all, but when it is needed, it is bottomless.
Some people have a deep well in one place and a broad one in another, like they had built up a backup system.
Some people have one deep well, and then a second spare deep well to use when the first one runs dry.
Most people have a favorite well that they reach for without thinking too much when something hard has to get done.
We forget this when we look at each other.
We assume everyone “does discipline” the way we do it.
We assume that everybody has the same well that we do.
If you’re someone who keeps a tight schedule,
the person who has a lot of free time can look careless, even dangerous to rely on.
It can be hard to see how they manage to stay employed, to care for their people, to keep any kind of promises at all.
What you might be missing is that they do keep those things going—
they just don’t anchor it to a 9–5 or a color‑coded calendar.
Their well might live somewhere else entirely. Something in them is keeping the structure intact; you’re just not looking where the discipline actually comes from.
Most of the time, we judge people who are different from us without checking whether they have their own version of a superpower, some very specific place where they are steady and tough and reliable.
We don’t think:
“Maybe I could learn from that particular strength,”
or, “Maybe, if I chose to respect this, this person could be someone I trust instead of someone I write off.”
This matters in couples, in partnerships, in any situation where two people are trying to coordinate.
If you decide ahead of time,
“I can’t coordinate with anyone unless they do things this way,”
or, “Trying to talk to them about that is too risky, so I won’t even try,”
you give up before you find out what’s actually possible.
The chance that someone knows how to coordinate in exactly your preferred style is very low.
The chance that they have some workable way of coordinating
with many different people, in a way that more or less keeps their life from falling apart, is actually pretty high.
That doesn’t mean they don’t have blind spots.
They might still be missing out on things they want from life, or undermining parts of their life because of how their coordination skills are shaped.
But saying “they’re just not disciplined” skips over the very real places where they are disciplined, and those are the places you can often build with.
There’s another layer here:
we treat certain habits as if they are someone’s entire identity.
“Running late is just who they are.”
“Being scattered is just who she is.”
From there, it feels like the only way to change your relationship with them is to make them into a different kind of person, through pressure, shame, rewards, threats, or just staying what you think you need from them until they understand you.
Often, though, someone isn’t doing a thing for you because they literally don’t know how yet, or because they are already doing something else with a lot of effort, that you haven’t noticed.
If you can connect something you care about to their existing well of discipline, often you see they become “more disciplined” very fast—their character did not change, but your are guiding what you care about to their existing well of discipline that was already there.
If you want to get better at noticing and using other people’s wells, you can start by looking at yourself:
“Where am I unusually reliable compared to the people I know?”
“Where do I run out of energy or attention very quickly?”
“In what areas is my reliability often misunderstood?”
Then you can play with this as an experiment.
Make a small list of people you know, almost at random.
Next to each name, ask:
What is their oddly specific well of discipline like?
If you sit with that question, judgment often softens just enough for a different kind of relationship to become possible.
1. Mapping Your Own Wells
Make three headings: “Wide and thin,” “Deep in one place,” “Spare well.”
Under “Wide and thin,” list areas where you show up pretty reliably without much drama (answering texts, paying bills, cleaning, emotional support, being on time, etc.).
Under “Deep in one place,” list one or two domains where you consistently show up more than other people, or where you will crawl over glass to keep a promise (showing up for a friend in crisis, finishing a creative project, keeping a daily practice, protecting alone time).
Under “Spare well,” write about times when life was hard and you suddenly discovered you could keep going in a way you didn’t expect.
Circle the one that feels like your “favorite well”—the one you reach for without thinking when something hard needs to get done.
Prompt to end with:
“What am I actually drawing from, when I say I am ‘disciplined’?”
2. Daily “Well Check”
At the end of the day, write out one or two lines only:
“Today my well of discipline showed up in…”
“Today I noticed someone’s well of discipline when they…”
You’re building the reflex to see wells instead of just seeing flaws.
3. Misunderstanding the Terrain
This one is for places where other people misjudge your wells.
Write: “People think I’m not disciplined because…” and finish that sentence three different ways.
For each one, ask: “What well am I actually using here that they don’t see?”
Example: “I’m late a lot” → “But I almost never cancel once I commit.”
Write one short paragraph starting with:
“If they saw my actual wells, they would notice that I am steady in…”
You’re practicing the move of seeing your own discipline before asking others to see it.
4. Spotting Other People’s Wells
Do this with 3–5 people you already know.
Make a small list of names: friends, coworkers, family, there is no need for special curation.
Next to each name, answer:
“Where do they keep showing up, over and over, even when it would be easier not to?”
“What would be a a cruel and unnusually wrong story about their discipline?”
Then, for each person, write one line beginning with:
“Their oddly specific well of discipline is…”
This trains the eye to look for structure where you would normally only see “consistent” or “careless” or “chaotic.”
5. Rewriting the Story “They’re Just Not Disciplined”
Pick one person you’re currently frustrated with.
First, write the harsh version, unfiltered:
“They’re just not disciplined. They always…”
Then, force yourself to write an alternative story that assumes they do have a well somewhere:
“If I assume they have a deep well of discipline somewhere, it might be in…”
Add one concrete question you could ask them, that fits that guess:
“What’s something in your life you are weirdly consistent about?”
“Is there an area where you never drop the ball?”
You don’t have to actually ask them yet; just practicing the imagining is part of the exercise.
6. Connecting to Someone’s Existing Well
This is for when you want something to change between you and another person.
Choose one change you hope for (e.g., “I want them to tell me earlier when they’re overwhelmed”).
Ask yourself:
“What do they already show up for reliably?”
“What values or habits seem to drive that?”
Then write:
“If I framed my request in terms of that existing well, it would sound like…”
(Example: “You’re really good at checking in with your team at work; could we borrow that skill once a week for us, just a 10-minute check-in?”)
The point is not to manipulate them, but to aim your request at a well that already exists.
7. Coordination Constraints Audit
This one addresses the “I can’t coordinate with anyone unless…” ideas.
Write down your current rules, honestly:
“I can’t coordinate with anyone unless they…”
“Talking to people about X is too risky because…”
For each rule, ask:
“Is this about my actual safety and sanity, or is it about my preferred style?”
Mark each rule with S (safety/sanity) or P (preference).
For one rule marked P, experiment with loosening it by 10% in your imagination:
“What would ‘good enough coordination’ look like with someone who doesn’t meet this preference, but has a strong well somewhere else?”
You don’t have to act on it right away—this is a rehearsal for seeing more options.