Speaking with both feet on the ground
November 7, 2009
Several weeks ago I gave a workshop on this topic with the intention of, for the first time, beginning to clarify what I mean by the phrase “embodied presence”. Here is some of the thinking that went into the workshop.
Where we put our attention, that’s where energy goes. This is probably the core principle of embodied presence. When we are anxious all our attention is focused on the thoughts that are fueling the fires of the anxiety. All our energy is concentrated in our minds, and we end up having an “out of body” experience. This is especially true when the fear of public speaking flares up.
If we can divert our attention, even for a moment, away from all that thinking, we can then lessen the experience of anxiety. The best way that I know of to change the direction of energy is to fully occupy ourselves, to be more aware of all of our experience as physical beings, not just thinking beings. This means to drop our awareness down into our physical experience: feeling our feet on the ground, coming into our center of energy in our bellies, staying loose and easy, noticing physical sensations. All these practices serve to divert energy away from anxious thoughts and bring us more fully present in the moment.
There is a difference between self-consciousness and consciousness of self. When we are self-conscious, all our attention is focused on our concerns about how we look and how people will respond to us. When we are conscious of ourselves, our focus has dropped into a more holistic sense of self which, paradoxically, frees us up to be more available to others. When we speak, then, we can focus more on how we can be of service to our audience, rather focusing entirely on how we will be of service to ourselves.
I have found that yoga, tai chi, authentic movement and meditation are all practices that help me stay present in my body. And, I use these practices to help the people in my courses speak “with both feet on the ground”.
Contemplative practices reduce anxiety
April 4, 2009
Several weeks ago, I gave a talk with Dr. Sara Lazar, neuroscientist and researcher at Mass General Hospital, a Harvard teaching hospital. Sara’s research is centered on changes in brain structures that result from meditation and yoga.
Her results are very interesting! Basically they show that regular awareness (or contemplative) practices like yoga and meditation thicken those parts of the brain that have to do with self-awareness, well-being and embodied presence and decrease the size of those parts of the brain that are most active when we feel anxious.
Now, those of us who do any of these practices on a regular basis already know this from experience. Personally, I’ve certainly recognized that after 20 years of meditating, doing yoga and practicing tai chi (another contemplative practice not currently part of Sara’s research), my general state of anxiety has significantly decreased.
This became very clear to me several years ago when I stopped my daily practices for about 3 months because of some health issues. I began to notice that a background level of agitation which had been so present when I was younger was beginning to resurface. It was only then that I realized just how much calmer I had become because of my daily contemplative practices.
A common principle that runs at the core of each of these contemplative practices is “Where we put our attention, that’s where energy flows.” If we become preoccupied with our anxious thoughts, we actually strengthen our anxiety. If, instead, we focus on our breath, the contact we make with the ground, a mantra (a calming phrase), or any other anchor for our attention, we begin to quiet the mind and become more present.
So, how can we apply this understanding to reducing the anxiety that comes from public speaking? I think there are two ways to support ourselves through contemplative practices.
First is to commit to some minimal degree of daily awareness practices. Many of my clients start out with 5 minutes a day of simple meditation (I might do another post some day on developing a meditation practice to support your public speaking). Meditating on a regular basis, even in very short increments like this, can help to calm that sense of floating anxiety that might always be there in the background.
The second is to practice what I call a relational meditation whenever you speak, whether it be at the dinner table with your family, in the check-out line at the grocery store, on a phone call, in a meeting with your colleagues, or in a formal presentation. Rather than focusing on the situational anxiety that can arise in a stressful speaking situation, we focus on our audience, asking ourselves how can we be of service to the people in our audience. In effect, we anchor our attention on the relationship and not on our anxiety. Paradoxically, this can help calm us down, steady us, and help us be more fully present in the moment and responsive to the needs of our audience.
By strengthening our self-awareness through our daily practices, and then regularly anchoring our attention on our audience when we speak , I believe we are actually making changes to the structure of our nervous system that can have a long term impact on our degree of comfort speaking in public.
The Tai Chi concept of Sung
March 28, 2009
This has been an interesting week for me and I think I’ll create separate posts to allow my thinking to develop.
It began on Monday night in my Tai Chi class where we explored the experience of Sung. There is no literal translation for Sung. It seems the closest we can come to it in English is relaxing or sinking. In my mind it has something to do with allowing my weight to drop with gravity while at the same time experiencing the accompanying rebound that comes from fully experiencing the support of the earth. When I do that, I’m no longer “uptight” but rather deeply relaxed, flowing and grounded at the same time.
I’ve often been curious about why it is that when we feel nervous and anxious our muscles try to lift us off the ground, causing us to feel that uptightness. I think it has something to do with all our energy flowing up into the anxious thoughts in our head, the highest point of our physical self. Where we put our attention, that’s where energy flows. So if we’re focused on all our anxious thoughts that are up in our heads, our muscles lift up to meet that energy.
When we feel anxiety speaking in public, that uptightness gets amplified and there’s no sense of being grounded. So, I’m always trying to help people experience Sung when they speak. How can you drop your weight down to the earth? How can you give your weight over to gravity and allow the rebounding, upward flowing energy to happen naturally?
To me this has something to do with learning to trust ourselves and to trust that when we let go, let down, relax, we will have far more access to all of ourselves and consequently far more access to both our audience and the message we want to convey.
(I hope to post the second theme of the week tomorrow.)
