Your brain has no business directing your life.

I am nearly constantly negotiating the edge between what I want to be doing and what my energy, time and space physically allow.

I’m one of those people that has a lot to say and does powerful work that benefits the collective. Maybe you are too.

I’m also incredibly tired. With 8 hours of sleep and a daily hour nap a day, I still find myself yawning throughout most of the day. Whether it’s recovery from burnout, a hangover from gemini season, feeling collective rage and grief or some combination, my body is tired.

My mind, however, is active. It thinks about pieces I want to write, workshops I want to hold, places I want to travel. It jumps from topic to topic, encouraging a deep dive wikipedia search on Glennon Doyle, the history of Cuba, Erykah Badu. It tells me to google things I already know the answer to and check my email hundreds of times a day.

A tired body and a frenetic mind makes for a system with little direction or focus to create the meditations and business plans I want to.

So I do things to release my energy without trying to be productive.

I take walks by the river.

I paint.

I turn on music and dance.

I do yoga.

I don’t try to analyze the why behind my frenetic brain too deeply. I have been in the middle place long enough to feel okay settling into not knowing.

I take long breaths.

And sometimes, my brain gets seduced. By the courses that people I respect are selling. By the promise of more business success if I do a, b and c.

My body, however, is still whole heartedly rejecting any outside input into my process. I can physically feel my heart close up when scanning those gorgeously written sales emails.

In this time of chrysalis, I have no room to listen to anyone’s voice but my own, no matter how brilliant or intelligent or wise those voices are. This morning as I was stirring a pot of oatmeal, I heard this voice say “write”. On Sunday that same voice said “take a walk”, and I walked by the river listening to jazz and blowing bubbles, getting a deep and necessary cleanse from a powerful summer thunderstorm on my way back.

That voice is a body voice. It’s the intuition that comes in the quiet space in between.

I will always trust that voice more than anything my brain tells me.

My brain has no business directing my life. My brain will tell me to do whatever feels the safest and least bothersome and most direct. That is how it is designed.

Your brain has no business directing your life either.

Here’s what I mean.

My clients will often come into a session saying “I don’t know what I want to talk about” or start a long winded story about something that happened over the weekend. Nothing wrong with either of these responses, but both are driven by the mind.

And so I invite us to pause. To close our eyes and drop into the sensations underneath. The heaviness on the heart, the tightening of the throat, the tension in the head. And instead of trying to analyze or interpret this with the brain (always trying to close the loop of understanding), I invite them to get curious about what the sensation is asking them to do. Does it need to yell? Run? Shake? Are there words that need to be said? Are there sounds?

And in this process of slowing down, listening to body and responding to it, the truth of what is actually happening underneath the surface gets revealed. Body directs the show. And then when body has had a chance to express itself, we invite brain in to make meaning, to do the job it was assigned to do.

In effect, the frenetic nature of my brain is actually directing me to back to my body.

It is telling me to center my own expression. To make room to move, sound, wiggle. It is only possible to make meaning and complete tasks after body has directed the show.

I’m off to wiggle now.

How will you center your own expression today?