It

was a result of a combination of things. Standing meditation practices coming from Tai Chi, like in the Qigong tradition, have been good for me. But a lot of things in general, from bioenergetics, from shaking movement, from deep breath work, and mostly staying with my body throughout the day as much as I and bringing my felt energy down into the center of the body, the lower Dantian, things like that. Dance. Really a concentrated experience of allowing what's here and tracking the flavors

of what appears. Wow. Okay, so through this practice, you notice there were certain stories, as you called them, that would direct the texture of your experience, and that they would take your energy away. Help me understand how you know when this happens. Because I think there's a lot of people, myself included, who sometimes the, you know, it's like the cup game. It's like all of a sudden, I just don't have the ball under the cup, where did it go? When did I lose it? I'm not sure what happened. So how did you recognizing that this drainage was happening?

In that particular moment, so I suppose building up the gradient of experience, and here, you know, being able to tell difference between what is more truly myself and what is less truly myself. And

is that a subtle difference? Or is that a really obvious difference? I

would say it's a subtle difference, especially at the beginning of the practice because of identification, right? So identification, as we know, we are fully submerged into thinking and perceiving that we are the thing that is being felt thought of right now, we're seen, etc. Right. So that identification is we are collapsed and tethered to that. And so with the somatic practices, I started experiencing that these discomforts, tightnesses and constrictions, and usually in the torso, were not actually me, but were some sort of constrictions. I couldn't still, I'm dealing with some of them. But we're not really me. Because when I inquired what I'm, you know, the whole who am I practice as that deepens, you see that anything that is changing, anything that is ephemeral, anything that comes and goes cannot really be me because the I that is here is something deeper. And of course, that's a living question. But through that living question, because, you know, none of us have an answer, we can verbalize, we can poetically point to it. But the more that I was getting to that anchor point, which is anchored on dry land, and then gets submerged by stormy waters, we're under the waves, we come up for a breath, back in the waves, then we can grab onto land and start feeling more and more that there is firm land, and that we could actually get onto it and sometimes stand on it, and then be washed back by the waves and the water and forget about the land. More often, we start remembering what it feels like to be in firm land, what it's like to have it between our feet and its stability. And there's permanence to that. And so I started being able to tell more of the difference of when I'm being submerged, when I'm drowning, and when I am on land or at least holding on to something stable. And so in those moments, that's where that pause and space is created to see that an invitation into a disempowering loop is once again coming up. And the choice is, oh, okay, maybe I don't go with it now. And that's the very first step. And that very first step creates that little bit of space. It's like, oh, whoa, whoa, whoa. Okay. I truly am not it, because I just stood from it. And it I didn't go with it. And it kept trying to go. It kept trying to come at me. But that wasn't me. Yeah, you just used it.

You just used a word that that really poignantly points to this realization that you don't have to. And the word was invitation. You said, Oh, it's an invitation into a disempowering loop. Yeah,

you're

like, Holy fuck, this is an invitation. After all. Yeah.

Yeah.