The Practice of Noticing
I have come to believe that noticing is the first instrument, and that everything else I might offer is downstream of it. Before technique, before protocol, before any practice with a name, there is the simple capacity to register what is happening in the body while it is still happening. Most of us live a half-second behind ourselves, narrating sensation rather than meeting it. The work begins by closing that gap.
When I sit with someone, I am not trying to fix the nervous system. I am trying to help it feel felt. A held breath, a braced jaw, the small withdrawal in the chest when a certain subject arrives — these are not problems to solve. They are messages that have been waiting a long time to be received. The body does not speak in sentences. It speaks in tension and release, in temperature, in the willingness or refusal to take a full breath.
Noticing is quiet, and it is slow, and it resists the part of us that wants to hurry toward relief. But attention itself is regulating. To place steady, unhurried awareness on a sensation is to tell the oldest part of the brain that someone is here, that the situation is survivable, that we can stay. So much of dysregulation is the experience of being alone with what is too much. Noticing, done with warmth, is a way of no longer being alone with it.
So I ask people to begin small. Notice the weight of your feet. Notice where the breath stops. Notice, without changing anything, what it is like to be in this body in this minute. Change tends to follow, but it follows on its own schedule, and it follows best when we are not chasing it. The instrument comes first. We learn to notice, and the noticing does its slow work.