8. Welcome the world

Summary

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 personal party.

Having found the up and down directions of the vertical axis, we can reach out into the world.

Hello world

Every computer programmer starts learning a new language with a short program that outputs "hello world". It is the most foundational building block. After all, where else would you start? In one or two lines, you've confirmed your own existence and reached out to others, the whole world no less.

When we greet the world, we are declaring two distinct facts: this here is my space and I am friendly. They are distinct, but related. I can afford to be friendly precisely because this is my space.

Living in 3D

We start as a dot (a basic biology lesson according to my mum), and slowly lengthen upwards and downwards in 2D. At some point, we fill out, expanding into the space around us. I'm not thinking in purely physical terms, rather I'm talking about developing a presence that extends beyond the limits of our skin.

This is something that happens naturally and we can also train to develop that expansion further. We already do it unconsciously depending on the context (reaching out to embrace our friends, saying hello to a friendly dog, bringing authority to a chaotic situation^[1]). Our task today is to learn how to do it deliberately. Consider it a non-physical muscle – ignore it and it'll atrophy, work it and it'll be strong for when you need it.

Think of someone you love

Imagine yourself apart from them for some time, and the anticipation of seeing them again. How does it feel? If you answer nice or excited, how exactly do those qualities show up in your body? What are your subtle physical indicators of anticipation?

Then, imagine the moment of meeting them again.

Perhaps you're a hugger (in a pre-Covid world), perhaps you're not. Either way, what happens in your body as you see them – do you speed up over the last few steps towards them, do you find your face breaking open into a large smile, what's happening in your chest?

By the way, when I ask these questions, I don't mean what do you think happens, I mean what happens. So find out. Explore for yourself. Get up and leave the room. Pause a moment outside, put your loved and long-absent friend in the room, attend to the sensations of your body – how would you label those sensations? what exactly is happening?

Then go back into the room and see the friend precisely where you expect them, and feel the full surge of sensation – joy? delight? love? – flow through and around you. Feel the space between you and them well up with, what?

We are animals, still

Our mammalian selves are very sensitive to our environment, both physical and social. We are sensitive to place and space, and sensitive to how the presence of others interweaves into the feeling of that place and space.

But this is a non-linguistic, non-rational, non-logical form of intelligence, so we don't talk about it much. And if we don't talk about things, we tend to forget that they exist. That also means it can be challenging to train this skill. We might end up thinking about it or imagining it when it's actually as much physical as anything else.

Nervous? You should be

Let me try it this way: we exist in our bodies and we interact with the world through our bodies ^[2]. My nervous system is constantly reaching out into the space around me to receive information, and constantly sending messages to parts of the body about how to respond to that information.

My task is to encourage the nervous system to get those messages about the world up into the consciousness, so that I become aware of what the body knows about the space around me. Improving channels of communication is something all businesses, offices, hierarchies recognise as important. So it is with us.

Two sides of a coin

There are two aspects to this: receptive and active. First of all, we want to improve the reception of the nervous system (like tuning a radio) so that we can pick up signals from the space around us. Then we want to make our messages out into the world more effective by (a) sending our signals out wider, and (b) making the signals themselves clearer.

To be clear, I am not talking about body language or speaking your mind. These are both important, but I'm not dealing with them.

To go back to the experiment above, when we reach out to greet our friend, our body is both sending and receiving signals of love, joy, etc. It isn't haphazard, but it is generally below our awareness. I want to become more deliberate in doing this and more aware of it happening. Why? Because it is a foundational method of communication that is always occuring. We are always interacting with each other, even without words, and I would rather be aware of and deliberate with that interaction than ignorant of it.

I'm sure you can think of a time when you've said I'm fine! even as you grind your jaw at someone. I'm sure you've wanted to challenge someone who says they're fine even when they are so clearly not. What I am striving for is to make whole my existence. If my body is sending out signals of frustration that others are picking up, I would like to be aware of that for myself. If my body is picking signals of love or hurt in someone else, I would like to be able to know and respond to them.

So many words

Imagine that friend in front of you again. Physically reach your arms out towards them. You are longing to hug and hold them (such a longing may be familiar in this era of lockdowns). Feel it. How does it show up in your arms? How does it affect your balance? What about your heart in your chest?

Imagine a group of vital friends standing around you like the hours on a clock face. Physically reach your arms out to the one in front of you (at 12 o'clock). Then, without turning round, reach out to the person behind you at 6 o'clock. Then 9 o'clock and 3 o'clock.

Take a moment extending in each direction. Make the reach as meaningful as possible. Love them.

I find that working around the clock quietly builds up the sensations until I have a distinct feeling of my nervous system extending into the space to make contact with those around me.

If we are ever allowed within 2 metres of each other again, you might try this for real. If you do get the opportunity, you might also notice the overlapping presences of their nervous systems too.

In other words, you are both receiving and outputting information through your nervous system. Give some attention to the subtleties of the effect in your body. How would you describe the details of that?

The keys to practice

It takes time to learn a new physical skill. We can encourage that through contrast, exaggeration, and repetition. So here's the exercise:

1. Stand in the middle of the room
2. Breathe up your spine and allow your posture to lengthen
3. Exhale softly, allowing your ribcage to ease downwards
4. Reach out through your hands to the wall in front of you.
5. Reach out through your back to the wall behind you.
6. See if you can reach as far backwards as you can forwards.
7. Reach out to the walls on the left and right. Even out those reachings with in front and behind.
8. Notice how this feels in your body. How do you know you're doing it and not just imagining it? What are the sensations that make this clear?

For contrast, start by standing in the same spot but making yourself as small as possible before extending out. Think invisible. For exaggeration, maximise your physical expansion (but without taking yourself off balance in any direction). For repetition, do this whenever you come into this room. In due time – when your body is familiar with the feeling of expansion and can create it easily, you might extend out to the four corners of any room as you enter it.

Part 3 of 4

• Lift me up
• Don't bring me down
• Welcome the world
• Gather yourself