When You Don’t Know What You Need
One question, asked with kindness. A short check-in for any state — and the one to reach for before all the others.
For the first move of every practice. A way to find where your nervous system is right now, without having to fix it, change it, or get it right. This is the one to reach for first, and the one everything else is built on.
Listening note — you can do this sitting, standing, or lying down, eyes open or closed (open if you are anywhere you need to be), anywhere at all — at your desk, on a train, in a doorway. Nothing here asks you to be in a particular place or to feel a particular way.
Transcript
Wherever you are, you can begin from exactly here. You don’t have to sit in any particular way. You don’t have to close your eyes, though you can if it is safe to. This is plainer than most things called meditation, and there is nothing in it to get right.
Here is the whole practice. One question, asked with kindness.
Where is my system right now?
Not where it should be. Not where you would like it to be. Where it actually is, this minute. You are not grading it. You are looking, the way you might glance out of a window to check the weather before you decide what to wear.
So let’s look. There are three rough directions your system might be leaning. You don’t need to name it exactly. You are only feeling for which way it tips.
It might be revved. Wired and quick, an engine running with nowhere to drive, the body somewhere between alert and on edge. If that is you, you don’t have to calm it down. Just notice it is there.
It might be away. Flat and far off, turned down low, the world held at arm’s length. This is not laziness, and it is not failure. It is a system that has pulled back to save fuel. If that is where you are, you don’t have to push yourself up out of it. Just notice it is there.
Or it might be settled. Here. Breathing easily, in no hurry, the body more or less at home. If that is you, good. Notice it too, so you know what it feels like from the inside, for the times you will want to find your way back.
Maybe it is some mixture of these. Maybe it is none of these words, and something only you would know how to name. That is fine. The words are only here to help you look. The looking is the thing.
Now notice something quiet. Just by asking the question, just by turning toward your own system with a little kindness instead of a verdict, something has most likely already begun to shift. A small loosening, somewhere. This is not a trick. Attention itself is one of the things a nervous system reads as safety. So the noticing is not the warm-up to the practice. It is the practice.
And where you are right now is not who you are. It is the weather, not the climate. Weather moves. You have just learned to read yours, and reading it is the first thing that helps it turn.
That is all of it. One question you can carry anywhere.
Where is my system right now?
Ask it whenever you remember to. Then let the asking be enough.
These practices come out of the same work as the book. Read about Prismatic Soul →