We’re thinking animals. Most of us run through our day head first. We think about the things we’re doing, the things we’re supposed to be doing, and the things we’ve already done. And some of us even spend a lot of time thinking about thinking.
Our brain is marvelous, but it lives in a body that we can sometimes forget about a little bit when we live in our thoughts all day.
Our body is where our emotions live, where we feel them physically. Getting connected to our body brings us into the present moment, and helps us get in touch with how we’re feeling.
Focusing on the sensations in your body is often practiced in meditation, which can help us reduce stress and anxiety, and move around our day a bit more mindfully.
Today, we’ll get in touch with our body and the sensations and emotions we’re feeling, and put them down on paper.
The Activity - Draw a map of how you’re feeling in your body
You can draw in any medium you like.
Step 1: Draw the Outline
Take a piece of paper and draw the outline of a body. It doesn’t have to be anatomically correct. You can draw the body standing, sitting, or lying down. You should be able to draw in the different body parts.
If you want, you can also find an outline of a person online to copy or print.
Step 2: Connect to your body
If you have any background sound running, I would suggest turning it off for a moment. Close your eyes, take a few deep breaths, and focus your attention on your body. You can start at your feet and go up. What are you feeling on your feet? Do they feel cold? Heavy? Light?
Move through your body slowly. Pause in each body part and see how and what you’re feeling there. Which physical sensations are you noticing? Tightness, pain, temperature? Which emotions are living there? Excitement, stress, worry, happiness?
Give each part a few breaths to really check in.
Step 3: Draw what you’re feeling
Fill each body part of your drawing with the colours, shapes, or patterns that represent how you’re feeling in this area. Nobody else needs to make any sense of what you’re drawing, so don’t worry about the “right way” to represent what you're feeling, just go with what comes to mind first.
You can go back and forth between steps 1 and 2, checking in on an area, drawing what you feel, and then moving to the next area, until your drawing is complete.
My Examples
I did this exercise for the first time in 2016, which feels like an eternity ago. I was a different person then, struggling with a lot of anxiety that felt like a knot in my stomach. It was wrecking my guts and poisoning my heart.
I was trying to manage it with meditation, trying to keep my body grounded, my mind open, and breathing out the negative emotions.
I managed to get rid of my high anxiety years ago, so today I feel very different in my body. Today, my hands and feet feel a little cold, but that’s nothing unusual this time of year. There is a warmth in my belly that’s nice and comforting. I have a bit of pain in my shoulders, my temples, and around my hips—the tolls of sitting at my desk too much.
When I focus on my chest, I feel a bit of tightness, and what I can only describe as depth. Like it’s a deep deep well, or a black hole I could dive into and disappear if I wanted to. I have the same feeling behind my eyes.
In the depth in my chest, I can feel my heart beating. The beat is rippling out from my chest, like the patterns drawn in sand from a drumming sound.
Or the water in the cup on the dashboard in Jurassic Park. But fortunately, there are no dinosaurs here.
And no more poisonous snakes either.
No matter how you’re feeling in your body today, I hope you felt the benefit of connecting to it and checking in on yourself.