Becoming more present for our lives requires something more than connecting with our bodies. It also requires that we become aware of and work through many of the patterns and issues that obstruct our consciousness. This is not to say that everything can be healed and resolved—sometimes it is all we can do to learn how to manage our emotional material—but it is to say that there is much to gain by devoting ourselves to healing that which can be healed. We are not built for suffering, but we are built for healing.
In this process, I encourage you to make a clear list of any patterns or issues that plague you in your life. To name them where possible, to note the experiences that (may have) created them (individually, culturally, ancestrally), to honestly note the ways that they impact your life, and to craft a blueprint for how you might work them through over time. Sometimes it is relatively easy to name our issues and patterns—they appear so frequently in our lives—but other times it is more difficult to identify them, because they are more subtle, or hidden, or utterly determined to remain unnamed. Because this is so, I encourage you to continue to actively engage your body, in whatever ways you find effective at bringing realities to the surface. Sometimes emotional release can bring us to clarity, and other times an energized walk in nature can bring us face to face with our stuff. Do anything and everything to excavate, identify, and explore the patterns and issues that live within you. And, once identified, to drop down even further into your body, to see where they reside. Simply put, where do your wounds, issues, and patterns make their home within you? And in what ways are they keeping you from an experience of yourself—and presence—as a whole being experience? In other words, how are the things you struggle with emotionally, relationally, and directionally, impacting your capacity to be truly here, on any level? And how can you work them through so that they no longer distract you or obstruct your consciousness? Is there a lesson needing to be learned, a healing, some other resolutional process? Or is this pattern, issue, or wound, something that I have to learn how to manage, so that it stops taking up so much space.