Still on dieta. Still bored.
I’m embracing it despite the annoyance because I know this is the work. The work we talk about in healing when we say you gotta “put in the work” to get results. It’s sitting with our Self long enough to move past the discomfort and dive deeper into the shadows.
It’s funny because I did a 10-day silent meditation retreat and sat with my Self for 240 hours with no stimulation, no tech, no human contact—not even meeting someone’s eyes—no exercise, nothing. It was stillness for 240 hours minus the few times I showered and took a short nature walk.
THAT was significantly easier than this.
This is harder because I’m not quarantined in the perfect conditions for enlightenment. I’m at my house. I’m still working to some degree. I’m still navigating the complexities of living in a relationship with my spouse. I’m still responsible for other creatures’ well being. There are temptations everywhere.
It’s harder to have to choose every moment than to make one choice and have the rest curated for you.
At the retreat, I had no choice. Here, everything is a choice.
My work seems to be trying to listen to my body. It sounds simple until I realize how many things are talking at once. My body, my mind, my conditioning, my boredom, my fear, my desire, my memory of who I used to be, my idea of who I might become.
All of them live inside my Self, and they are all very comfortable using the intercom.
I think the silent retreat helped me reconnect with the obvious, basic signals I had long ignored, such as hungry, thirsty, tired, need to pee. I used to skip meals, avoid drinking water, not get nearly enough sleep, and ignore my bowel movements all in favor of productivity. Seriously, my husband used to have to remind me to urinate mid-day. Thank god for him. Otherwise I probably would have just started wearing Depends and kept right on strategizing.
Now, thankfully, my body is remarkably clear when my survival is involved. I’ve leveled-up. I will feed myself, bath myself, hydrate myself, tuck myself in, and 100% pee like a big girl.
This boredom is drawing up a more interesting layer to my sacral response.
Do you want to paint?
Do you want to go to surf camp?
Do you want to swim with sharks?
Do you want to study this?
Do you want to work with this person?
Do you want to make this thing happen?
Because my entire system seems to be screaming YES to everything.
Oh, why hello there, boredom.
But if I wait just a little bit, the yes starts to change shape.
Swimming with sharks sounds amazing right now. So does surf camp. So does getting on a plane and going basically anywhere someone will let me have an experience and sneak me a little bit of salt (part of my dieta is no salt, amongst many other dietary restrictions designed to remove stimulus from my physical body).
In all of these answers, my “body” is extremely enthusiastic. Except now that I’ve slowed down enough to hear the tiny nuance underneath all that enthusiasm, I can hear what is actually screaming: FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, GIVE ME SOME STIMULATION.
Fuck. That isn’t my body talking.
Or, more accurately, it isn’t necessarily my body answering the question I thought I was asking. Do I really want to go to surf camp? Or am I just bored and seeking stimulation? Those are not the same thing. And so this whole “listen to my body” exercise has gotten considerably more complicated in the last few days. Apparently I had only reached the first stage: Learn to listen. Now I’m in a new phase: Learn to distinguish the signal from everything that has learned how to imitate it.
I knew I was a fast learner, but I didn’t know my mind would adapt so quickly and then hijack my newfound relationship with wisdom.
The annoying part is that my mind isn’t separate from my body. It can create sensation. Anticipation can make my heart beat faster. A thought can tighten my chest. A memory can make my stomach turn. I can imagine walking toward a cup of coffee and practically smell it before its anywhere near my nose (also not allowed caffeine on dieta, sigh).
The brain predicts, the body responds. The body signals, the brain interprets.
Back and forth and back and forth.
I think this means sensation alone may not always equal truth. That realization is mildly inconvenient. I would prefer a giant internal traffic light.
GREEN. GO.
RED. STOP.
Instead, I seem to have been given a very sensitive instrument that requires calibration and I’m a shit musician.
Old instinct says: Become a better musician. My new instinct is annoyingly telling me: Ask better questions and the music will arrive. I’m whining because that latter seems significantly harder than just putting my pedal to the metal and learning to do music.
A friend recently asked if I would do a Human Design reading for her. My first response was yes. I like Human Design. I like her. I like researching people. I like patterns. I like translating a mountain of information into something that suddenly makes sense.
Easy. Yes.
Except we were communicating through voice memos, so I had a moment to really dig into my response. When I imagined actually doing the reading, something in me flattened. It wasn’t a hard no, there was no resistance, I couldn’t sense fear, it was just… meh. Which is the response I am currently the least fluent in.
Fortunately, something stirred in me. I assume this was little Bobinsana answering my morning prayers about shining light in dark spaces while I stirred my tea.
Instead of deciding that meh meant I didn’t want to do it, I started breaking the question apart.
Do I want to engage with this person around Human Design? Yes.
Do I want to research her chart? Yes.
Do I want to learn more? Yes.
Do I want to gather information, look for patterns, and synthesize what I find Yes.
Do I want to go away, prepare a formal reading, come back, and present my findings like I am the Human Design authority?
NOPE.
There it was. The problem wasn’t Human Design. The problem wasn’t her. The problem wasn’t even the research. The problem was the presentation.
So I changed one variable.
Look, Mom, my math degree is working!
What if I researched everything I wanted to research, brought all of that information with me, and then instead of giving her a “reading,” we had a conversation? What if she asked me questions? What if I responded to what she was actually curious about? What if I could pull from the well of information I had gathered without needing to stand at the front of the metaphorical room and perform certainty?
My body lit back up.
Ah. Okay. So apparently “Do I want to do a Human Design reading?” was a terrible question, Rocky. Because, for me, it was not one decision. It was like seven decisions wearing a trench coat. And my body had a different answer for each one.
I think this is where I have been getting tripped up. I keep asking my body giant conceptual questions and expecting one clean response.
Do you want to coach?
Do you want to teach?
Do you want to make art?
Do you want to travel?
Do you want to work?
Do you want to do Human Design readings?
Do you want to know what the fuck you are doing with the rest of your life?
And when the answer is muddy, I assume I am not listening hard enough. Maybe the question is just too big. Because “Do you want to coach?” contains:
Do you want to sit one-on-one with someone?
Do you want to listen?
Do you want them to ask you questions?
Do you want to tell them what to do?
Do you want to research beforehand?
Do you want recurring appointments?
Do you want to build a program?
Do you want to market yourself as a coach?
Do you want to hold space?
Do you want to help someone see something they couldn’t see before?
Those are not the same question. My answer might be yes, yes, yes, fuck no, yes, maybe, no, definitely not, yes, fuck yes. And I’ve been averaging all of that into: Meh.
Sigh. Maybe meh isn’t confusion? Maybe meh isn’t complexity? Maybe it is what happens when several different bodily responses are stacked on top of each other and I am insisting they become one answer…? Man, I’m such an infant in all of this. I need to figure out how to take giant questions and distill them into spoon-fed bites. Guess I need to learn how to feed my Self. Sheesh. Wasn’t not shitting my pants good enough? I wanted the dieta to show me new layers. I wanted this growth. Here we fucking go.
This also makes me wonder if my no is quieter than I thought. I know the dramatic no. Contraction, resistance, absolutely-fucking-not. But sometimes I also feel an absence of aliveness. Nothing in me moves towards something and nothing in me lights up. It isn’t awful, it isn’t scary. It’s just bland, and because it doesn’t feel definitive, my mind rushes in to save me and interpret it for my body.
Maybe I should.
Maybe I’m afraid.
Maybe I’m being lazy.
Maybe I need discipline.
Maybe I need to push through.
Maybe this is good for me.
Maybe maybe maybe.
My mind loves a vacancy. It will build a shopping center on an empty lot before my body has finished deciding whether it even wanted a park.
I think today has dredged up a new experimental space. When I get a muddy response, I don’t immediately force it into yes or no. I break it apart.
What part is yes?
What part is no?
What changes if I remove the performance?
What changes if I remove the obligation?
What changes if it is with this person instead of that person?
What changes if it is today instead of forever?
What changes if I do it privately?
What changes if I don’t make it productive?
What changes if no one ever sees it?
What changes if I am allowed to stop?
And then I listen again.
The humbling part? I already knew the body was incredibly precise. I suppose I just wasn’t ready to embody what that precision actually demands from me. I’ve spent years being praised for my ability to investigate, synthesize, find patterns, and ask good questions. Apparently I suck at asking sovereign, body-based questions of my own Self. My questions have been wildly imprecise. Historically, I’ve asked myself things like: What am I supposed to do with my life?
That is apparently 14,000 questions wearing an even larger trench coat.
And that’s probably why I haven’t been able to hear my body’s answer: it doesn’t have the right conditions for clarity.
The luxury I have right now is that I don’t need the answer to that one. I have the space to discover something much smaller. Do I want to pick up a paintbrush? Do I want to read this book? Do I want to have this conversation? Do I want to research this idea? Do I want to share what I learned? Do I want to share it this way?
Yes.
No.
Meh.
Okay… break it apart again.
For someone who has spent most of her life assembling things—strategies, businesses, stories, systems, identities—it is kind of funny that the work right now seems to be disassembly. Taking the thing apart. And apart. And apart. Until I can feel where the life actually is.
Is this what calibration means? Not forcing myself to hear a louder answer, but becoming precise enough to hear a quieter one? Not demanding that my body speak in the binary language my mind prefers, but learning the language it has apparently been speaking all along?
If that’s true, it means the goal isn’t to become a better shitty musician by playing louder or practicing harder. It’s to stop banging on the fucking piano long enough to notice that my body might be playing an entirely different instrument.
