Listen To Your Body

My college crush described me as stoic once and I spent the rest of my 20s reading and re-reading Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. Correlation isn’t causation, is my only defense.

While I kept my quarter life crisis in check through Stoicism, I realise after 2 years of building a meditation and journaling practise that it's starting to feel a lot like spiritual bypass.

This is a term I learnt recently.

It basically means you do anything but feel your feelings. In my case, I thought knowledge would help me. But I just learned how to intellectually speak about my feelings, not sit with them.

As I've noticed this hypocrisy within myself, I've started noticing this in others too.

I can't even say I judge them because…it's really hard to sit with your feelings. It's really hard to listen to your body's signals about situations, people, relationships and…act on it. It's easier to scroll tiktok/hinge/netflix and distract yourself till you fall asleep.

Then rinse and repeat.

I like to be productively creative. Or creatively productive. That's a major point of tension because they're both at odds with each other. And when I let myself feel my feelings, I get derailed from my mission for a bit. It's frustrating.

But I have this nagging sense that going slow now might be needed to go fast eventually. Listening to my own needs helps me have higher EQ in life, with people, on sales calls and in business, generally.

I'm writing this as I dash to my first day at a new job. Right now, I feel a bit of nervous energy. Mostly calm.

Wish me luck,

Shubhu