Have you noticed where you hold tension in your body?
I couldn’t see the forest for the trees. There was utter spaciousness for miles. Orange cliffs jutting towards the falling sun. Flies buzzing around evergreens in the dry air. Children playing across the campground. But I just felt lonely.
So I drove to Flagstaff to find something familiar. Ah, Barnes and Noble. There was a book that had been recommended to me by a former lover, Dharma Punx, by American Buddhist teacher Noah Levine. I bought it.
Back in my tent, Levine’s story of overcoming drugs and homelessness took the edge off. But what stood out the most — and what remains with me today — was his explanation of “soft belly”:
“I was doing a lot of soft-belly meditation, a body-centered meditation practice of relaxing the belly every time you notice fear, desire, or confusion arising, thereby making space and acceptance for whatever is present in the body rather than meeting it with aversion. The more I began to accept my emotions and mind states, the more my relationship to them changed. I was no longer a slave to my mind. I was gaining the ability to respond rather than react. The soft belly taught me that.”
“Soft belly” has been coming up for me over and over again the past few weeks. I’ve noticed that, for me, tension in my stomach is a signal that I’m lost in thoughts and not present. It’s most obvious in the kitchen, when I’m cooking or cleaning dishes. I reach for a pan and my stomach clenches as I think about the next step — what should I do next, grab the butter or crack the eggs?
These thoughts are automatic and, to some extent, valuable. They produce efficiency, and in this society that demands so much from each of us just to get by, you can’t knock the hustle. But they also pull me from the present moment. They leave me skating on the surface of cooking, going through the motions rather than feeling the feels, tasting the tastes, and smelling the smells.
By “soft-belly meditation” Levine doesn’t mean relaxing the stomach while meditating, per se. Meditation practice provides a safe, simple space within daily life’s constant activity. Noticing where your body tenses up out of habit should be easiest there. Sit for a few seconds, watch your breath come in and out, feel your body and your breath dissolving into the space around you— odds are you’ll notice you’re tensing your stomach, or maybe your shoulders or jaw. Relax whatever part of your body is tight and come back to the breath.
But the whole point of meditation is for the mindfulness it produces to rub off into daily life — for every moment to become practice. Because that’s what you’re here for, and what the rest of us need from you, to show up fully as best as you can.
Practicing noticing when you tense up and close off while doing little stuff like cooking eggs will help you when the difficult stuff comes up. Eventually, your loneliness — or fear, or intense, insatiable desire — might even become no big deal.
