Your unique call to growth is ringing. Now what? How do you take the call?
You make the choice to observe precisely and experience deeply.
You keep in mind that your attention is medicine for your anxious body, medicine that pours into your physical self from your heart and your frontal lobes in your brain, the seat of reflective consciousness.
There are three steps to answer your call to growth: locate, name, and experience. You proceed step by step to be with yourself: you locate the sensation, you notice and name it, and then you fully experience it.
- Locate: We cannot take care of anxiety until we identify where it is located in the body. Localizing anxiety changes it from an idea of anxiety to an experience of anxiety.
- Name: In naming your sensations of anxiety you are activating a different part of the brain from that which simply registers the tension, and that begins a process of integration. Putting your physical experience into language begins to bring some reflective consciousness to what has been an unconscious sense in the body
- Experience: In this third step you feel yourself make the choice to come even more closely toward the bodily experience of anxiety, to enter in to what it feels like. Here you make contact with the parts of your body that are communicating with you. In order to do this you will need to go much slower than you think. The body goes much slower than the mind.
These steps need to be repeated again and again, with warmth, interest and nonjudgement, as you grow your ability To Have and To Hold.