Staying with yourself
The Studio: an actionable practice to navigate your own guided self-inquiry — on creating space to meet yourself and learning how to stay in it
You know yourself deeply and still can’t get out of your way.
This is the practical companion to the essay series on self-sabotage and the work of getting out of your own way.
In that series, we explored three ideas:
that the self who understands is not the self who governs,
that discomfort in a new place is not evidence you made the wrong choice, but confirmation of real movement,
that belonging is not a condition to stay, but what comes after you learn how to stop reaching for something else
The essays name the what and the why. Here, we look at where and how it’s running in your life, and we start the actual work.
Part one is a somatic audit. You’ll identify where you are reaching instead of staying, and you’ll move past the story about it into the felt sense.
Part two is a targeted EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) tapping sequence that will change your orientation toward the pull.
PART ONE
A somatic audit is not a list of stressors, complaints, or things to fix. The goal is not to analyze your life but to learn how to observe your experience.
It is an awareness diagnostic that helps you navigate beyond the stuff happening in your life and shifts awareness to what’s happening inside you in response to it.
Its purpose is to identify where the nervous system is still oriented toward a place you have already left.
We begin here.
STEP ONE: IDENTIFY
Prepare a quiet space with writing tools and guard 5–10 minutes of uninterrupted and undistracted time.
Start by taking a long inhale through your nose. Breathe in as much as you can. When you think you’ve taken a full breath in, reach for a tiny bit more by really expanding your lungs to the maximum.
Then softly open your mouth and let the breath slide out of you slowly without trying to measure or control anything.
Breathe again. (Actually pause your reading and do this.)
One more time.
Now ask yourself:
Where am I reaching for, instead of being here?
What am I checking, rehearsing, or returning to that is not this life now?
Write the first thing that you feel. What arrives before you start trying to make it make sense?
This is a practice about honoring sensations before editing them into neat or cohesive thoughts. Remember, this is a practice for you alone.
Notice what is actually there when you stop performing every layer of identity that you’ve built in the external world.
What stays with you when let it all go and just stay with yourself?
If this feels uncomfortable, good, that’s a signal that you’re getting a glimpse of whose still there, underneath it all. And it’s normal to rush from the discomfort of seeing yourself by jumping back into character.
This is not something you need to witness as a measure of how ‘good’ or ‘bad’ you are at the practice, but notice if you start trying to assess your skills.
This is a practice of creating space and being in that space.
You cannot be in the space in any evaluative way without some former orientation to somewhere else. In the space, you are just there. There’s no measure, just you staying with yourself in the space you can hold.
Being in more space for longer is not better than being in less space for shorter. The quality of the space and time is not conditional on the traditional metrics, but rather the intention and desire to allow yourself to be yourself is the only goal.
If this feels weird, that’s normal. Exhale your judgment for not ‘getting it’ right away. There’s nothing to get and there’s no where to go.
Breathe.
And ask yourself:
Where am I trying to be instead of being here?
What am I repeating that is not real to right now?
Write what you honestly feel. It doesn’t need to make sense and it’s okay if it surprises you or has no context.
Notice where your attention keeps going when it leaves the room you are actually physically in. Where are you trying to go?
Stop forcing a dramatic expectation and stop editing to make it more than what it really and honestly is. The reach is rarely revolutionary. It is often very ordinary and mostly automatic:
• Thinking what it’s like right now, how’s the weather in the place you left.
• What time is it? How much time has passed?
• Imagining the experience of being on that beach, at that party, in that life you are not living.
• Rehearsing the conversation with somewhere not present now and revising what you could have said.
• Romanticizing a version of yourself that you keep returning to because at least you knew how to be that person.
Write whatever comes up first. Where do you keep trying to go?
You can be entirely committed to a decision and still feel your body preparing to go back.
That’s why this question is harder than it looks. The mind wants to defend the choice you already made. Instead, the goal is to notice where the nervous system is still orienting. Not the story about it, but the reach itself.
The most common resistance is answering from the head instead of the body.
A few common scenarios:
A. You might defend your decisions instead of describing the pull.
“I know I made the right call.”
“I don’t actually want to go back.”
Both can be true, and the reaching is still happening.
B. Or you might minimize it.
“It’s just nostalgia.”
“This is normal, it will pass.”
Yet your attention keeps returning to it.
C. You might immediately jump to the external:
“Everything around me is harder than I expected.”
“Everything is so different.”
“I miscalculated.”
You might notice a mix, a flash of feeling muddled with rationalizations.
Try to release the common sense explanation your brain wants to find and really sit into the question: where are you still living, if not here?
A useful sign that reaching is present is when there is a strong urge to explain why the old place was better, or to prove to yourself that you were right to change. Both are the same reach, in opposite directions.
The honest answers are often much simpler than expected. For example:
This instinct to check social media as an escape from where I am.
This lean forward, always, like I’m about to be somewhere else.
This rehearsing of what I’d say if I went back.
This bracing, every time something here doesn’t match what I pictured.
Most people don’t struggle to find the answer. They struggle with allowing it, because naming the reach often comes with a judgment or evaluation where we label something in us as wrong, bad, not enough.
It isn’t. Keep going. In a world increasingly full of places to spend your attention, learn to pay attention to yourself.
Your attention is a valuable resource. And attention is not just what you give to the world, but it’s what you use to build an inner world.
If you lose the ability to be alone with your own mind you will know a lot about the world out there while understanding very little about the world within.
STEP TWO: INHABIT
Take a moment to read your journal and process what you’ve just identified. Close your eyes for a moment, take a breath, and bring to mind without jumping into explanation about what you just named. Just bring it to the centre of your focus and hold it there.
Then being awareness to your physical body and ask yourself:
Where do I feel this pull in my body?
Don’t try to locate it in your mind. You don’t need to be able to name the place or even describe it. Try to be an observer of what sensations your body experiences when you think about the pull. Sit into the feeling and explore where in the body something shifts when you search for it.
A pulsing tug in the back of one shoulder. An ache in the elbow. A lean forward in the chest. A twitch in the finger. A tightening at the base of the throat. A hollow under the ribs. A restlessness in the legs.
There is no wrong answer. The body is always responding, even when the mind says I’ve made my peace with it.
Ask:
Where do I feel it?
Do not try to describe what it means, just record how it feels, just the raw sensation.
It may be in one place or multiple places as the body rarely experiences things in a single location. Let yourself map it without simplifying it.
Ask:
How long has this sensation been here?
Is this new? Did it come after the crossing? Or is this the same pull you have felt in every new room, but recycled through this one?
That last question is deeper than it appears.
A pull that arrived with this move is telling you something about this move.
A pull you have carried into every room you have ever entered is telling you something about you.
Once you’ve located where and how it shows up in the body, there’s one more question that does most of the work in this practice and it’s also the one most people skip.
The rest of this practice is available to paid subscribers inside The Studio, the paid practice space of Strong + Sovereign. Subscribe below to unlock the full audit + tapping sequence.
