Feeling love in your body

A few weeks ago, at the end of my wedding speech, I looked at David and said, "You are needed. You are worthy. You matter. You are loved. I love you, and I'm proud to be on this journey together with you."

Warmth radiated through my body, a tingle that vibrated up and down my limbs. And right alongside it, tears of grief for the decades when feeling stayed in my head.

I'd taught myself as a kid to shut it away. So I taught myself to read the room. I thought about the version of love others expected. I directed it. I performed it. At the holiday dinners growing up, I played the version of me expected at the table. I felt like an actor.

At the wedding, I paused for a breath. Then I finished.

What I felt in that room wasn't a wedding feeling. It's what life is. I'd been treating life as something to think my way through, an act, a strategy, a performance. It's an embodied experience. I'm a feeling being. We all are.

Life isn't an act, a strategy, or a performance. It's lived in the body, and we're meant to feel it.

This week, on the drive in, in the next conversation, in the middle of deciding something, notice what your body does before your mind has an opinion. Warm, tight, quiet, nothing at all. You don't have to name it or do anything with it. Just notice where it lives.

You're allowed to put the performance down.

The head was never the problem. It was just never meant to be the only one in the room.