What Calm Actually Feels Like

I used to be a meathead about my body the same way I was a meathead about everything else, all force, no maintenance. I chased two hundred pounds for a while and could never quite hit it, stalled out around one ninety seven, and somewhere in that chase I lost most of my mobility. The pain that came with it was unbearable some days, the kind that doesn't stay in your body. It leaks into your patience, your temper, everything downstream.

I'd been exposed to meditation and breathwork and yoga eight or nine years before any of it stuck. I thought it was nonsense for a long stretch of that. I'd sit down, get distracted within a minute, spend the whole session arguing with myself about whether I was even doing it right, which is its own kind of joke when you think about it.

It got serious for me this past summer, when I joined a coaching program called the Embodied Entrepreneur, run by Jordan Candlish. Fifteen of us on a Zoom call every week, homework, guided breathwork, group meditation. It built a habit I'd never managed to build on my own, morning and night, every single day. I noticed the shift before I could name it. My watch noticed it too. Resting heart rate coming down, heart rate variability climbing, numbers that told me something my body already knew and I hadn't been listening to.

I didn't know what calm actually felt like. That's the part that surprised me most. I'd been operating at one speed for so long that the speed itself had become invisible to me, just the water I was swimming in. It took an outside program and a stranger's watch data to show me there was another gear.

The practice looks different now than I expected. I used to force myself into visualizing some future version of me and kept hitting a wall, because I was trying to force a feeling I hadn't earned yet. Now I spend the first half of any sit just accepting where I actually am, mentally, physically, financially, in my relationships, all of it, exactly as it stands. The visualization comes easier once I stop fighting the starting point.

The mountains do something the meditation cushion can't. Cell service dies out there, and so does most of the noise I carry around without noticing. I'd go every week if I could manage it. Right now it's closer to once a month, which still counts as steam let out of a pressure cooker that's been running a long time.