July 2026 : What are you Practicing (inside)?
What are you practicing inside? Right now, in this moment?
Do you know?
Notice in this moment, as you read, what are you practicing inside?
Rushing? Tensing against feelings? Presence? Pleasure?
And what about what you are practicing inside in your life today?
A survival pattern? Healing?
Fear? Compassion?
Catastrophizing? Living in the past/ rumination?
And what about this week?
Resting in awareness in the moment?
Swirling in loops of worry? Joy? Connection?
Many of us are unknowingly practicing thought and emotional habits that we would never consciously choose.
These habits impact our sleep, our sense of well being, joy, connection and just about every system in our bodies.
We have an idea of what we are committed to in our lives and yet in the dimly lit deep brain, old survival patterns are running on cruise control.
Bringing what we are ‘practicing’ to conscious awareness is a powerful step in healing.
When I was sick with CFS/Fibromyalgia (and more), I thought I was ‘working on healing’ and in fact I was ‘working’ a lot. I can now see I was working at the same patterns of anxiety, fear, distress, that had always been alive in my system and in my family lineage for many generations.
I was practicing distress, trying to figure things out, efforting, over-riding the vulnerability of my emotions and avoiding sensing and bringing connection to my felt experience.
I was digging the ruts of those patterns deeper in my deep brain while not actually consciously aware that that was what I was doing.
Loops of worry, fear, orbiting symptoms and thinking about how bad I felt and how was I ever going to get out of this [even as I was ‘working on healing’ with the help of multiple practitioners, supplements, and daily ‘self-care’ routines] were so familiar I didn’t even recognize them for a while as ‘the problem’.
The title of Audre Lorde's essay “The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House” says this all really.. ‘The Master’ is the unconscious shaping of our cultural conditioning.
Trying to heal in the same frenetic, fear-motivated way that is the very root of our challenges is a heartbreaking contradiction.
What we are practicing inside can perpetuate a reality from which we would like to be liberated but it can also lead us into a reality we want for ourselves. The first step is noticing what it is we are actually practicing!
Slowly recognizing the fear and worry that was driving my actions and choices was a pivotal point in my healing. The truth is that I did not have the support or ‘know how’ to do anything different.
I had been meditating for 20 years and in therapy for about as long and here I was - constantly practicing the very thought and emotional patterns that were driving my symptoms.
I was practicing ‘being unwell.’
Now the good news!
Remember the Law of Inertia from middle school?
“An object will remain at rest or continue moving at a constant velocity in a straight line unless it is acted upon by an external, unbalanced force”
Conscious awareness and attuned presence internally and externally are ‘external’ to the inertia of the patterns that ‘practice unwellness.’
Here are some examples of those patterns to help you recognize when you get caught in them and need some ‘external, unbalanced force’. Let's substitute ‘connection’ or’ presence with’ for ‘force’ in the context of healing.
[Human relational efforting and force are actually practices of unwellness and symptoms of what grief worker Francis Weller calls a ‘rupture in our sense of connection’ that is the very epicenter of unwellness.]
Signs that you are practicing unwellness:
Fear of pain/symptoms/your own emotional experience, thoughts/voices
Focus of mental awareness on and identification with pain/symptoms / your internal emotional experience, thoughts/voices [distinguished from relational contact with and resourcing of these from a sense of presence]
Frustration with pain/symptoms/ your internal emotional experience. thoughts/voice
Fighting or trying to get rid of pain/symptoms/your internal emotional experience, thoughts/voices
Trying to 'fix' or ‘figure out pain/symptoms/ your internal emotional experience, thoughts/voices
Because we are starting with the epicenter of the movement or inertia of these patterns in ourselves we begin to mend the rupture in-house.
When we reconnect consciously and with care to the patterns of unwellness [borne in experiences where the scarcity of care meant disconnecting was better than staying connected], we reconnect ourselves to external relational care and circles of support.
In the beginning as we bring more conscious awareness and connection with ourselves in, the symptoms of the old trajectory may not feel ‘unbalanced’ by the new resources. But, as we build our ‘orientation to ‘presence with’ support systems, the symptom-driving patterns’ movement is actually ‘unbalanced’ by the movement of the resources of connection and presence into these dimly lit places where disconnection was the way of managing overwhelm.
And, a new trajectory emerges - a return toward wholeness, a healing of the rupture of connection that underlies ‘unwellness’ and more meaningful and authentic relationships.
Using an app like Mindfulness Bell or some other cue like when the phone rings or when stand up or sit down to notice ‘what am I practicing right now?’ can help us develop and build our witnessing awareness that includes everything just as it is, without trying to make it change.
Then we can simply, with presence and care, name “I’m practicing fear.”
How would it be to practice care this week in the form of bringing the patterns running in the dark into the light of welcoming awareness?
The question “What are you practicing?” (in the context of how we are creating our life) was introduced to me by Staci Haines the creator of Generative Somatics which brings somatic healing and social justice work together.
