In November, I stopped reading The New York Times.
Reading the Times and doing the crossword puzzle was a habit that I’ve had since high school. Over the last few years, though, it has felt less like enjoyment or taking in meaningful information and more like subjecting myself to the dopamine hijacking of the media cycle.
For a while after I discontinued the subscription, I wasn’t sure what to do after my morning tea.
In December, I started reflecting on my current practices. I decided to experiment with a replacement for the newspaper habit: a short qi gong-based lymphatic drainage and breath practice.
Willing to Be Surprised
I’ve never been a morning person, so I wasn’t sure how it would be to start my day with active movement. By the end of the month, I was surprised to discover how much I was opening to a greater depth of dialogue with my body.
It feels like a new flowering, a new way of honoring the vessel of my being, and essential nourishment. It feels like kicking off a process that allows for a layering-in of other attuned action, like “Hey, I actually feel like going for a walk!” or “My scalp could really use some more loving atttention right now.”
To be fair, my body does not like the first couple of minutes of practicing at this time of day. Some teenage part of me is complaining that it has to move at all so soon after getting out of bed. I hear that preference, but I don’t let it run the show.
Because once I cross over a certain threshold, something shifts.
The other morning there was a unusual rumbling happening in my belly. It was such a potent sensation that I had to stop for a second and make sure that it wasn’t coming from the external environment. It wasn’t. Apparently, the breath practice from the night before had taken on new life around my navel. This sense of unfolding and generativity feels exciting.
What if the Intention is Listening, Responding, and Relatedness?
The new year is, of course, the time when a kind of wishfulness for creating change sprouts ideas like a many-headed hydra.
What feels different this time around is that my actions are less about driving toward a concrete goal, and more about the quality of relatedness within myself. Of course I want to be healthy; of course I want my clothes to fit; but most of all, what I want is to be in contact with myself with reverence and curiosity and kindness.
Contact with what nourishes ourselves and others and the more-than-human is foundational to what affirms life. It’s not “self-improvement.” It’s not about arranging a spa day (although that, of course, might be enjoyable). It’s about trusting that if we cultivate a quality of relatedness with ourselves and others, we can more naturally participate in the flow of receiving and offering.
It’s easy to look out at the world these days and to find ourselves in a state of grief and despair. We are a species veering toward nihilism, dehumanization, commodification, and mechanization, caught in a fantasy of infinite upward growth. Far too many of us don’t have our most basic needs cared for.
Those of us who do have the resources to expand beyond the basics might feel scared to be in greater contact with the needs of our bodies and other bodies, including the body of the Earth. We might worry that deeper listening and relatedness would feel unbearable.
We need to move slowly.
The Pace of Intrinsic Satisfaction
One of the tenets of my training as a coach was “Change happens in biological time.” Human beings are wired to seek a dynamic homeostasis, and the state of our bodies controls the pace at which sustainable change can occur. Anything that moves us too far or too fast from baseline will usually occur to the nervous system as problematic, regardless of whether it’s pleasurable or painful.
I’ve started many practices in the past where my mind decided that I should be farther along than my body could handle. When I was younger, my body really liked the sensation of pushing and going hard, and that has not worked for me as I age. That pattern of pushing—getting injured—needing to rest — and then pushing again (because I’m so far behind where my ego thought I should be) has only kept me on the endless loop of egoic delusion, going nowhere.
Slow, simple, and repeated actions are much more likely to grow the capacity of your organism in a sustainable way. This might occur to the goal-oriented ego as humiliation or boredom. If you can let those feelings be, without reactivity or judgment, something different will eventually arise.
This also doesn’t mean that you never need fast or intense movement. The emphasis is on listening for and allowing what is needed rather than impulsively trying to “make something happen.”
Taking the time to sense your body while you’re practicing, rather than rushing through to check it off your list, can feel intrinsically satisfying, maybe even decadent.
This is how nourishment becomes a radical act.
How Do You Deny Yourself the Flow Of Authentic Nourishment?
As I work with clients, I see how humans are conditioned to deny ourselves the flow of authentic nourishment. Here are some of them, organized by Enneagram type. You might find that you recognize more than one of these patterns in yourself:
- Eight Treating myself and others as a tool or machine. Machines need maintenance, but they don’t need nourishment.
- Nine Disappearing myself as if my physical presence does not matter. No one there to sense or receive nourishment.
- One Constricting and starving myself (figuratively or literally) and not allowing the natural flow of nourishment.
- Two Trying to nourish everyone else to uphold my self-image, and blind to/fearful about the extent of my own needs for nourishment.
- Three The perception that stopping to sense the need for nourishment and to attend to that need will interfere with getting things done.
- Four Nothing and no one could possibly be attuned enough to my real needs to nourish me.
- Five Feeding my head with conceptual models and not allowing for embodied nourishment.
- Six Not trusting that I do know or can know what nourishes me.
- Seven Chasing the continual stimulation of false nourishment.
The Invitation
My invitation to you in 2025 is to experiment with simple ways to be in relationship with your body, and to let yourself flow from there.
It’s possible that when you start being more intentional and simple, you may become aware of sensations and emotions that you have been avoiding. This is totally normal — as you increase your capacity for presence, what has felt unloved and ignored will often show up to be welcomed and tended to.
Here are some guiding principles about how to approach this invitation:
- Be curious and nonjudgmental about any ways that you deny or avoid the flow of nourishment, and notice what the effect is on your being.
- Slow down, and ask for help from your support network if you need it.
- Be kind to yourself in this exploration, and experiment with the countercultural act of discovering and tending to what actually nourishes you.