This Week's Mindful Morsel 🍪 | August 6, 2025 — brain business vs. body presence

Happy good Wednesday to you 💜

Lately I’ve been experiencing this very big energy emanating from my heart center — it feels both foreign and not, and my first reaction has been to be in my brain about it. I’m asking myself all kinds of questions trying to figure out the why, what, and how of it. 

But the more I’m in my head, the more panicked I feel, like some panic lens is getting repeatedly layered over the first sensation I’m feeling, and then it’s like all these things are going to easily overwhelm me. Have you ever been there?

And then I remembered my work of being present in my body instead of my brain: breathe and just see what it feels like. 

And that feels so much steadier. So much more exactly what I need. There’s no panic. In fact, the sensation seems to expand outward and not necessarily dissipate, but become sort of lovely and edgeless.

Isn’t that something? All because I turned toward body presence rather than brain business.

It’s really easy to confuse brain business with body presence. Brain business (or brain presence, if you will) is you trying to tangle intellectually with whatever’s happening — trying to puzzle over it, work it out, or solve it. Body presence is literally being with it. Noticing the sensation and your breath, and then whatever happens next. Not trying to exert force or make it into anything in particular. It’s riding the wave with wide open inner eyes. 

I think this is especially tricky when you’re new at a practice like this or when you encounter an intense sensation in your body, and I’m going to let you in on a little secret — I don’t think the trick for me specifically is to “quiet my mind” like we tend to hear. That doesn’t work for me because my brain doesn’t respond well to commands like that, plus it requires a certain level of stimulus from various sources to function. 

One thing that usually works for me is imagining turning up the volume on my breath or whatever I want to shift my focus to, while also turning down the volume on the other things. But I still have to let those other things run through the back and sides of my mind — they need a playground or they’ll make tire tracks all over everything. So I urge what I want to be loud forward, repeatedly, and with intentional attention. 

For my neurodivergent brain, I’ve learned that quiet is something that can happen, not something I can make happen. I can create favorable conditions like with this practice above, but there’s no guarantee. And quiet is kind of inaccurate too. It’s more like quietER. And I just try. Over and over. And over.

What’s it like for you to shift from brain business to body presence? Are there any little tips and tricks that work for you? If so, send them my way, and I’m happy to share them forward (and give them a whirl myself). 

With expansive heart energy,