Find your feet.
I have been saying this phrase to myself and my clients a lot lately. Find your feet. What are they doing? What do you notice about them? What do they feel like?
Try it. Yep, right now.
Close your eyes and find your feet. Notice the sensation. Wiggle your toes. Say ‘hi’ to them.
What do you notice? Most people find that they immediately feel a kind of settling. A little bit like coming into their body, or maybe remembering that they have a body, and for a moment we forget whatever we are thinking about, and just notice that mostly, here in the present moment, nothing much is happening.
Our brains are busy places. Our thoughts are constantly running a million miles an hour, thoughts are always churning. We are judging, predicting, worrying, storytelling, rehearsing, singing bad 80s songs. We are thinking, thinking, thinking. And all this thinking creates feelings. We feel happy, sad, scared. We feel fear about what is going to happen, we feel guilty about what already happened. We feel grief and remember nostalgic moments with loved ones. We feel anxious and worry about bad things happening to other loved ones. And we spin and spin and spin around these thoughts. And they feel real. Oh so real. We are pretty sure about that.
And then we find our feet. And most of the time, when I find my feet, I find out that in reality, in this moment, nothing much is happening. There they are, sitting on the ground, feeling not much of anything, just human feet being human feet.
And then I find my legs, and my stomach, and my chest. I feel my breath. And I realize that my body is just here, totally fine. With nothing much happening.
And I realize I'm okay. And when we realize we are okay, then our breathing slows and deepens, and my anxious brain slows and for at least this brief moment in time I'm just this breathing being and nothing is missing and nothing is wrong.
Of course, then my thoughts want to take over and tell me all the problems and I will probably go ahead and get lost in them again, letting all the feelings build and spill out all over the place again. At which point, if I can remember…it’s a great time to Find My Feet.
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