13. It's all in the anticipation

tl;dr

1. Breathe a long, slow inhale up the length of your back, feeling it encourage your head higher.
2. Allow a long, slow exhale to stroke down your front, releasing your ribcage, and encouraging a soft smile.
3. Reach out to the corners of the room in front of you, as if welcoming friends to your party.
4. Allow your arms and body to settle whilst that expansive state continues.
5. Ask yourself, what would it be like in my body, right now, to have a little bit more ease?

This 4-part opening and centering process has a secret fifth step. Everything else is a set-up to this, the all-important query: what would it be like to have a little bit more of my chosen quality?

The body will respond in its own sweet time, but the query invites us to open up to the possibility of further sensational input.

Recall a moment when you were just about to taste something that promised to be delicious. Your mouth is open, you're salivating, your tongue is tasting the air, and the morsel is just below your nose releasing its flavour scents up to your nostrils to tantilise you. Do you recall that feeling, that thrill of anticipation?

Or, recall when you first gazed on your lover's naked body, knowing that all you had to do was reach out to it. Can you remember that feeling, that electric thrill of anticipation?

Or, perhaps, your first leap off the high-dive board? Or strapped in for a bungee jump? Or waiting to be called into your headteacher's office? Or waiting for the midnight call to say your father had died?

True enough, anticipation isn't always excitement, but it is always fully sensational.

Where does that level of sensation show up in your daily life? When it does, is it haphazard, or can you encourage it?

Listen, carefully

The secret to the centering process is not to end it (steps 1, 2, 3, 4, and done) but to take an open-ended fifth step to encourage the adaptation to continue. Ask the question and then just hang out in not-knowing. That gives the body time to explore and formulate a response. It's all in the anticipation.

What would it be like to have a bit more ease?

Be humble. Assume that there is always a response and that you might not be awake enough to recognise it or understand it. Remember that the body doesn't speak in words. Be patient. If not today, maybe tomorrow, or next week, or next month – the body will answer. Just keep asking the question with real curiosity and anticipation.

A little bit more ease?

Ease is my placeholder quality: when I don't have a specific quality I'm working with, I enquire about ease. It's a familiar to-and-fro so both my body and my conscious awareness are sensitive to the signals of ease. As such, it's a really good starting place, as if I am knocking on the door of my body to ask for help.

What's an embodied quality?

So, what is it a placeholder for? Certain qualities are cerebral; others are of the body. I always try to choose a quality that my body already has experience of. After all, I'm asking it to look the quality up in the archives and re-create the structure for that quality. It won't help if I'm asking for something that the body has no reference for.

For example, part of this writing is to get myself used to greater visibility, so that may be the word on my mind at the moment. But it's not exactly the quality that my body has archived away. Visibility requires a bit of unpacking.

Why have I chosen visibility? Because I know I have something of value, but I feel uncomfortable standing up to announce it or offer it. Why? Because others will look at me, will assess and judge me, and my previous experiences of that haven't felt safe. Fair enough.

With a bit of digging, it seems that being more visible is the context that I wish to hang out in, but it's not the quality. Perhaps it's being more at ease with people looking at me. Perhaps, it's learning to be more comfortable with discomfort. Perhaps it's developing greater resilience in the face of judging eyes. Perhaps it's steadfastness, or courage, or invisibility^[1].

Should haves, would haves, and ought-tos

Sometimes we think we should have more of a particular quality. I ought to be more patient with my children. So we ask the body for that quality. But can you hear the pressure of that request? The should-have can weigh too heavily. If so, that's not the quality for you right now. Maybe another time, when the injunction has lessened somewhat.

Anything worth doing is worth doing well

The body is responding to your question, but it needs time for that response to become clear to you, and for the body to adapt around the response (i.e. to make it meaningful and functional). So take time. I work with my chosen quality for a year.

For the first two or three months, my enquiry is just surfacing the quality so that I become aware of the body's response (if, by the end of the third month, I'm still not aware of a response, I choose a different word). Then the investigation deepens, as I become more familiar with the body's reply, and the body becomes more adept at structuring that quality into being.

By the end of the year, my body is adding the quality before I've asked the question.

In my humble opinion

Asking the question and waiting for a response, is itself a re-balancing of the relationship between mind and body. It takes some humility to sit with not knowing and to allow the body the time to shape its answer. That's a good thing.