Photo for this article is by Ana Medieta.


There’s something that I keep hearing over and over from people. This isn’t just with clients but with people I run into, people I have personal relationships with. If you’re said this to me before, please don’t feel called out. I hear this from around half of the people I get to meet. That’s right. Around half of everyone I talk to has said something like this to me.

“I’m not connected to my body.”
“I’m so bad at body stuff.”
“I’m always in my head and not my body.”

I’ve gotten some training in somatics work and practiced in it. I’m not sure what my opinion is about everything yet. It feels like there’s something happening with qi gong practices and rebranding but I can’t put my finger on it.

What if we don’t feel all or most of our feelings inside of our bodies?

Sometimes, closing your eyes so that you can focus on a feeling or sensation is useful. You stop looking around and you’re just in the cavity of your chest or the bowels of your stomach. You feel an ache, a spark, a rumbling that you’ve always had but never noticed.

But what if the feelings in our bodies are only a limited portion of what we are capable of feeling?

What if, by focusing on the body, we’re cutting ourselves off from most of what we experience?

I don’t know about you but—don’t you feel things when you look around outside of yourself? The love that you feel warming your chest when you gaze upon your cat’s sleepy face—can you say that the love is safely sheltered inside of your heart or does it exist between yourself and your best friend feline? Would you still feel that love if she weren’t in your life? Doesn’t she control some of the love that you feel? Your love isn’t only yours. It belongs to her too.

What about the freedom that you feel when you see the wide expanse of the sky? Is that freedom not located in the sky? Who’s to say that freedom has to be found in the heart or the lungs or the legs? And the terror of seeing a storm whip across the air? Why call that terror psychological? Terror isn’t psychological. It’s environmental.

Our psyches are not contained within us. We don’t get to tuck them away into corporeality. We live inside of our psyche the same way we live within the seasons and the ecologies that we can’t sustain life without.

Basically, life isn’t lived only in your body. Life is found outside too.

Maybe that’s what astrology is about in the first place. We look out and around and we see a world around us. We see that this world is shaped by time and weather. We see that the sky is time. We then find ourselves through all of those things moving in perpetual motion.

I remember taking this whole class on Freud. I actually didn’t want to at the time but I needed the credit. Anyway, I’m glad I did because I had to read through his whole work and I ended up liking him a lot. Freud had a whole theory around projection and transference. He focused mostly on people to people relations since he corresponded with his clients isolated in a room.

When I see Freudian stuff get tossed around, I always see people talk about how we have to all stop projecting. I mean—projecting is not something that you can stop. Maybe you can be aware of patterns in projection but projection itself, witnessing your emotions not just in your own being but also around you, isn’t something that you can help. It’s also not a toxic trait.

I’m not sure that I like the word projection at all. The world isn’t mirrored. The world is alive with us and we see and feel that life concordantly.

Usually, projecting is seen as negative because we’re supposed to own our own feelings as though feelings are possessions.

What if our feelings were not ours in the first place?

Life is internal too. If closing your eyes and sensing into your body helps you feel something, then by all means do it! But if you look up at the sky and you see and think freedom without feeling too much internally or even while being uncertain if the thought that rings through your head comes from you personally, maybe that’s fine too.

Maybe you’re still feeling a feeling when your freedom is in the sky rather than your knees. It’s just that you know freedom to be the sky and sky freedom is a different freedom than the freedom located inside of your bicycle, different from the freedom held within a dark and private room. Why should you trim down your feelings vocabulary to the gut, the heart, and the pelvis? There’s so much more out there.