Learning to Observe: How You Can Start Making Space
Before you can learn to understand your body, you need to make enough space to hear what it's trying to tell you.
The importance of learning to observe
Being in conversation with our own body is an extremely powerful skill.
Our organism is not static. It is constantly adapting to what is happening around and within it. You may remember the word homeostasis from school: the body’s ability to maintain a stable internal state despite constantly changing influences.
Maintaining that balance is the body’s full-time job, and self-observation can help make visible some of its responses to changing influences. The earlier we notice our organisms’s responses, the earlier we can decide whether and how to respond in turn.
For example, if I notice that I feel agitated and have a hard time falling asleep shortly after reading the news in the evening, I have a useful clue. I can try reading the news earlier, reading less of it, or leaving it until the morning — and then see if my body seems to prefer it that way.
Self-observation matters for several reasons:
- For prevention, because small symptoms can sometimes be noticed and addressed before they become disruptive.
- For better conversations about your health, because knowing how your organism responds can provide very useful information for a health professional.
- For experimentation, because whenever you decide to change something in your lifestly, observation may help you notice what difference that change is making.
In other words, observation gives you a better starting point for action.
The issue is, before you can understand your body’s language, you need to be able to hear it “speak” in the first place.
The essential practice: making space
Your mind may convince itself that it has solid reasons for wanting to read the news in the evening: a habit, a promise of stimulation, a personal belief… Your body, however, may file a very different report once you’ve done it. If you’re not listening, you’ll never know what’s in the report.
Unfortunately, our body doesn’t speak English, so we need to learn its language. But even before learning its language, we need to be able to hear it talk to us. How are you supposed to hear the doorbell when you’re blasting your progressive rock playlist at full volume?
You can’t.
Most people fail to observe because their lives contain very few moments in which observation can happen. We wake up and grab our phone to scroll through the news. We eat while watching TV. We are so intent in meeting a deadline that we can even tune out something as basic as hunger or the urge to go to the bathroom. And somewhere underneath all that noise, our body may be trying to get a word in.
So what to do?
How you can start making space
If you do only one thing in this series, do this one: create a few spaces in your day where you can actually hear your organism. If you’d like to record what you notice, here’s a 7-day journal you can print or use digitally.
Pick one moment that already happens every day, from the cards below.
Stop for 30 seconds, take a breath, put your phone down, and check in.
For this first week, your job is to notice, not change. Approach yourself with the same curiosity you might bring to observing something in nature.
You can simply notice and carry on with your day. But if you write down a few words, you can make something visible later that you might otherwise forget.
Natural transition options
Wake-up time
Before getting out of bed, give yourself 30 seconds.
- How rested do I feel, regardless of how long I slept?
- How easy or difficult is it to get myself moving?
- What is my energy like right now?
- Do I notice any particular discomfort, or ease?
Before eating
Pause before the first bite.
- Am I physically hungry, or do I want to eat for another reason?
- How strong is my appetite right now?
- How long has it been since I last ate?
- Am I sitting down to eat feeling relaxed, rushed, distracted, or tense?
After eating
Before moving on to the next thing, pause for 30 seconds.
- How satisfied do I feel ?
- Has my energy gone up, down, or stayed about the same?
- How does my abdomen feel now?
- Do I feel ready to continue my day, or do I feel like slowing down?
Leaving work
Before moving into the rest of your day, pause.
- How does my energy compare with when I arrived?
- What is my mind doing now?
- Where am I holding tension in my body?
- Do I feel ready to leave work behind, or am I carrying it with me?
Around elimination
Take a moment before or after going to the bathroom.
- Do I tend to go at a similar time of day, or does it vary a lot?
- Does elimination feel easy and complete, or do I have to strain, wait, or rush?
- How does my abdomen feel before and after?
Before sleep
Once you’re in bed and before reaching for your phone, pause.
- How tired am I?
- How does my body feel compared with when I woke up?
- Am I feeling settled and ready for sleep?
- Is there anything from today that my mind is still carrying?
Remember
- You don’t need to answer every question. Pick whichever question catches your attention, or simply notice what comes up.
- Nothing in particular? That’s an observation too. There is no need to force an answer.
With practice, you may begin to notice things that previously passed under your radar. Patterns become easier to see when you have given yourself enough moments to notice them.
And the more familiar you become with your own baseline — how you generally feel, function, eat, digest, sleep, recover, and respond to everyday life — the easier it becomes to recognise when something changes.
Your only task this week is to become a witness to your own experience.
It may seem like very little.
But learning to pause is the beginning of learning to listen.
Know someone who’s always rushing from one thing to the next? Send them this — it might be worth 30 seconds of their day.
Note: comments are disabled on this blog in order to preserve a space for reading and reflection without active moderation.
I am not able to monitor or respond to public comments. For any remarks, reflections, or exchanges, you can contact me via the contact page or by email (contact@consultationsayurveda.com).
