Looking for Ease

I often use the example of your crush in high school getting a car and suddenly you start to see that kind of car everywhere. Or when you have a number you always see. Our brains are a search tool, always scanning for what it recognizes or has meaning to us. This is the idea behind a gratitude practice - if we notice over and over again what we have, we are less focused on what we don’t have. So we can train ourselves to notice what we want to see.

We may not always feel at ease, but knowing what ease or safety feels like to us and looking for those sensations tunes our frequency to that wavelength. We are capable of feeling many things at once, and ease may not be the loudest of those sensations, especially if our life trained us to be alert to the opposite. The continual outward orientation to what might go wrong in our environment is hypervigilance. That outward scanning behavior developed because it was needed at some point in our lives and we are not in the business of shaming the skills that helped us survive.

Instead we can practice adding the skill of noticing more than one sensation. Of letting our minds scan and feeling our sensory experience too. Noticing how a deep breath feels in the body. This is what we practice in yoga and meditation, especially in the styles I teach - Kaiut and Nidra. When we get an idea of what ease can feel like physically, we begin to notice the people we feel it around, the circumstances that foster a feeling of ease - and that gives us agency in our experience of life.

Ease is not the only worthwhile sensation of course, but it indicates a nervous system that responds accurately to each moment. Most of us do not need any help feeling effort, but we can intentionally use effort as a contrast especially as we begin to get to know our own inner ease and peace.