Hi ,
Last time, we explored the idea of “gravity” and how easy it is for people to find “coherent” belief systems outside of themselves.
We ended with the core proposition: If a person doesn’t have a sense of who they are in their bones, then someone else will provide that for them. (There is a corollary to this: “If you aren’t managing your attention, someone else is doing that for you.”)
This leads to the next logical question: How does one develop one’s own center? How do people develop their own gravity?
I love this question because it is at the core of what it means to become human (or, I should say, what humans can uniquely become).
There are a few ways, and all of them require heat. (Yes, another metaphor from physics applied to our inner work.)
Heat, in this sense, means infusing your system with energy that it did not have before. When enough heat is infused, there is enough energy to build new neural connections. This is a fancy way of saying, “when you study, you learn new stuff.”
For example, practicing a musical instrument.
When you practice, that is new energy in your nervous system. The energy I’m talking about is the choice you make to sit down, stop doing what you were doing, and get your fingers to do things they don’t normally do.
It takes a force of will. And that is experienced as effort.
“I am going to struggle with my clumsy fingers to play these notes until they don’t feel clumsy anymore.”
Simple enough when talking about learning an instrument, but how does this apply to developing more gravity or presence? There are two big ways.
One is on your own, like sitting down and practicing the piano. There are simple but powerful practices you can do that help. I’ll provide a few not-so-common ones in the following letter. Traditional yoga practices, meditation, mindfulness, martial arts, or sports can help here. It has to be somatic and repeated often.
But the key point is – takes EFFORT. That’s the heat.
And sometimes, the world gives you a hand. It can be painful.
Another way you can break out of an orbit into a higher octave – happens to you.
Things happen that shake up our world. A car wreck. An illness. A divorce. The world can shake you hard enough to break you out of your current orbit, giving you an opportunity to recalibrate around your own center or find another one outside of you again.
Let’s say a person is a member of a group, and the leader does something so unethical or even violent that it causes them to question, “This is so out of alignment with the ethics I thought this was about! How can I be associated with something so obviously not ‘walking the talk’?”
And often, even this isn’t enough unless you personally become the victim. That’s why people stick by leaders with egregioius behavior. It’s neuroglically easier to ignore the harm, than willfully go through the pain if figuring out who you really are (and shedding the skin of what you though you were.)
That’s a big-deal question. It’s very hard to “leave your religion,” and it often takes a big blow like this to put enough energy into the system to shake you out of your orbit.
To be clear, it takes a LOT of heat to break this orbit.
The heat doesnt have to be painful but frequently is.Sometimes people break out of orbits when they experience overwhelming grace, luck, or have a spiritual insight that changes them. Eckhardt Tolle and others tell storeis like this.
But you don’t have to wat for bit calmaticy or a grace.
You can make your own heat.
You can test your understanding, as I have many times, by studying your own senses and your relationship to them. When I was a young man in Oklahoma, there was intense social pressure to dislike Black people. I remember studying my direct experience rather than what people told me I should be experiencing. All I saw was a man like any other person. It didn’t make sense to “hate” someone because of that. And honestly, it felt more like making yourself feel special than being connected to what is true. I wasn’t going to put on their beliefs in order to get along. That decision had a big cost for me in terms of my safety and “belonging” in that culture, but it has served me well over the years.
Instead of looking outward for answers, one can begin to ask profound, internal questions: “What is my experience of beauty?” “How much love will I allow?” “What is the relationship of my thoughts to my wellbeing?” “What do I know is true about this teaching?”
Many people have heard of Wim Hof, who promotes experiences like intense ice baths as a way to find clarity and groundedness. I haven’t studied him personally, but I saw one video where he was in an ice bath saying very passionately, “Let the cold be your teacher.”
From this, I knew he could help people. He was directing people to experience—not an idea, proof of devotion, or dramatic enlightenment—but rather, “What is my direct experience of cold?”
These are things that cannot be learned from a book or another person. They can only be learned from one’s own experience.
So, where does a person start?
It starts with the simplest possible action: connect to your senses. Simply and directly.
Look at the sunset. Look at the sky. Look at the trees and the nature around you. Let that and 10,000 other simplem moments be your teacher.
If you find you can’t stop thinking long enough to sense into the moment, that is not a failure.
It is simply a clue about how much heat you need to bring.
And that’s number one thing people fail at when working on this – they dont bring enough heat.
The practice is to keep coming back ON PURPOSE, even for a moment, to the simple, direct experience of the world. Frequently.
That is where a person begins to build their own gravity: grounding in your direct experience of now.
Because underneath this all, is a direct exprience of you.
When you orient that way, no one can tell you what is true about your experience, and by extension, your world, because you know.
And not because of what you read in a book, but becuase you did the hard work of finding out what is so.
You become undeniable, and as a result, a lot more grounded.
People and circumstances don’t knock you off your axis because you’re simply more stable than you were. And people notice.
Stay present, and remember—the body knows, the mind wonders.
– Brett
P.S. Next time, in the final part of this series, I’ll talk about the practices of centering, which I love very much, to help you somatically connect to your core.
P.P.S. If you’re interested in a personalized plan to bring the heat, you can transform your life in 8 weeks. That’s what I do.