Day Two — Sensitivity
It comes and goes in waves..
I crossed into Belgium two hours after Calais and something began to move through the body that I have spent most of my life trying to manage.
Waves.
Not metaphor. Actual waves.
Moments of complete freedom. Then overwhelming fear. Then a kind of clarity that arrived for no reason and left just as quickly. Then a sense of panic. Then joy. Then a stretch of unwavering faith that felt like it had always been there. Then doubt about everything. Then a sudden hit of love that brought my eyes to water before I knew what was happening.
All inside the same hour. All inside the same body. Crazy! All while doing nothing more than driving forward on an open road.
If I had been asked to describe my state at any single point during those hours I would have given a different answer every time. And every one of them would have been true.
This is what the body is actually doing. All the time. Underneath the performance of being steady.
We are not steady.
We were never meant to be.
The story most of us were sold is that the work of becoming a competent adult is the slow mastery of our internal weather. That the goal is composure. That a person who allows their state to fluctuate visibly is somehow less developed than one who has learned to maintain a single steady frequency through every meeting, every challenge, every conversation.
It is one of the most damaging cultural inheritances we carry.
Because the body does not work like that. It was never designed to.
The body is a system that responds to everything. Music. Memory. A piece of road that reminds you of somewhere you used to be. A view that takes your breath. A sudden thought about money. An old grief you thought you had put away years ago.
All of it produces a wave. All of it moves through.
And the cost of teaching ourselves to override the waves is that we eventually stop being able to feel any of them clearly. We become numb. Composed on the outside, distant from ourselves on the inside.
The high performers I work and have worked with with most often have one thing in common. They are exceptional at managing their outer presentation and increasingly disconnected from what is actually happening inside them. The disconnection is the very thing they were rewarded for in the first place.
And then they wonder why their leadership feels flat. Why their relationships feel thin. Why the room registers them but does not feel them. Why their performance doesn’t match what they know they are capable of.
It is because the channel has been closed without realising.
Somewhere past Cologne the music shifted in the car.
A powerful piano piece by Einaudi. The kind of music that does not perform itself but quietly reaches in and rearranges something in the chest before you can mount a defence against it.
Particularly on that stretch of road moving further and further into the unknown.
I was driving on a road that stretched ahead of me through hundreds of miles of countryside I had never seen before. And the music brought a memory. The memory brought a sensation. The sensation became tears flowing down my face for reasons I could not explain other than to say that something had been waiting a long time to move through me and had finally found a moment when the body would let it.
This is what we are when we let the channel open.
A piece of music creates a thought. The thought creates a memory. The memory creates a sensation that moves through the whole body before the mind has finished forming a sentence about it. We become permeable to the world again, the way we were as children, before we learned that being moved was something to manage rather than something to honour.
The leaders, athletes, coaches, parents who actually move people are not the ones who appear most composed.
They are the ones who have allowed the channel to remain open. To allow the waves to flow just as nature shows us.
What they say is not what carries the weight. The energy that moves through them as they say it is what carries the weight. The room can feel the difference instantly. The room has always been able to feel the difference. The room was never confused about which version it was sitting with — only we were confused, by training ourselves to override the very signals that would have told us.
The body is not the problem to be solved.
The body is the channel through which everything real travels.
It registers truth before the mind has finished forming a sentence about it. It knows the meeting is not safe before you can articulate why. It knows the relationship has shifted before logic admits the shift. It knows when you are performing a life rather than living one.
And when something genuine wants to come through you — into a room, into a conversation, into a piece of work — the body has to be available for it. Open. Permeable. Channel rather than container.
This is the second stage of any honest journey.
The willingness to come back into the body after years of overriding it.
Not the dramatic version. Not the breakdown. Just the quiet recognition that the tightening in the chest is information. That the weakness in the legs before a moment that matters is information. That the tears that arrive in the middle of a drive across a country are information.
The body has been telling you the whole time.
You just have to be willing to let the channel open again.
Day 3 coming tomorrow…
Quote
‘The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift’ — Albert Einstein
Question
What is your body telling you right now as you read this that your mind has been overriding?
And what would it cost — really — to listen to it instead?
Action
Find a moment today where you would normally override or distract from what you are feeling.
The tightness in the chest maybe before the meeting or the challenging conversation.
The exhaustion that does not lift after rest, after a game.
The lift in the body when something arrives that genuinely moves you.
Do not override it this time. Just notice it.
Place a hand on the part of the body that is speaking, breathe once, and say aloud — I am listening.
You do not have to do anything else.
Listening is the practice.
What can you hear?
Music
Waves (Acoustic) — Dean Lewis
Louis 🙏🏼
louis@thesharingexperience.com