When You Eat at the Refrigerator, Pull Up a Chair by Geneen Roth

Author:Geneen Roth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 1998-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

27. More About Presence: The Practice of Sensing Your Arms and Legs

When I talk about presence in my workshops, students give me suspicious stares. Some of them decide they don’t like me or want their money back. Presence sounds dumb. “C’mon, Geneen. You make it sound so simple. What about my lousy relationship or the fact that I have three kids under the age of five and not one second for myself the entire day? How can I ‘be with my life as it is,’ if that life makes me unhappy?” Good question, I say. And it is.

In the beginning, practicing presence needs to stay very simple, which is to say that presence is not sexy, is not glamorous, is not exciting or dramatic. In the beginning, presence is not about changing relationships or going to therapy or making yourself crazy in the middle of a hectic day by having to go off somewhere and Show Up. You start exactly where you are, with all the ingredients and distractions in your life that drive you crazy. When you practice presence, you learn to be with those things in an entirely different and spacious way.

The main practice of presence is to sense your arms and legs. Another way of saying this is that you become embodied. The reason this is helpful is because your thoughts can drive you insane. There is no particular pattern to them; in a split second, they zing crazily from the time you fell from your swing when you were five to what you are going to say to the person who insulted you yesterday. If you try to follow your thoughts, you get lost in fantasies, resentments, anticipated disappointments. There is no ground beneath you, nothing solid to hold on to, no way of bringing yourself back to what you are doing now, this very second. You get to the end of a day—or the end of your life—and you wonder where you’ve been. And the answer is, Lost in thought!

You are already in your body, but you hardly ever realize it because you get so lost in thinking about the past and the future. Since your arms and legs are with you now, they are a perfect place to land. Also, they are not usually a place that is filled with emotion (like your heart or your throat or even your eyes), which makes them a fine place to place your awareness.

In the mornings, before you get out of bed, begin sensing (i.e., focusing your attention and paying attention to the sensations that arise) your right foot—the toes, the ankle, the back of your foot, the arch. Then, as if you were squeezing a tube of toothpaste, move your attention up through your calf, your shin, your knee. Continue moving your awareness all the way up through the right hip, and then the right hand, the fingers, the wrist, the elbow. When you get to the shoulder, move across to your left shoulder and down this arm to the hand, and from the left hip to the left foot.

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