What does it feel like to be you? Not your biography, personality description, or behaviours. But the immediate, moment-to-moment experience of existing, as you, in your particular body and mind.
Stop for a second – there’s something always there. Maybe background hum, a pressure in the chest. A restlessness our steadiness. Your lungs filling and emptying, your heart beating. Thoughts moving across the screen of your mind… planning, remembering, worrying, anticipating. There is a texture to being you. Maybe it feels smooth or jagged, calm, buzzing, heavy or light. But it’s never not there.
Maybe most of us spend very little time noticing it. We are pulled outward into work, conversation, screens, ambition, obsession. Attention is constantly directed at what is happening “out there” or “then”. Meanwhile, the ongoing primary fact of our own aliveness goes largely unacknowledged. An elephant in the (inner) room.
But this room is the only place from which you ever meet the world. You cannot step outside of it. Every success, every disappointment, every relationship however close or meaningful is outside of it. Your achievements remain outside you. Your possessions remain outside you. But your experience of them happens on the inside, always.
That can be sobering. It means that no matter how well things go externally, your contact with them will always depend on the state of this inner experience.
If the underlying feeling of being you is tense, brittle, or quietly intolerable, you may find yourself unwittingly driven to fix, improve, or escape it through external means. More achievement. More reassurance. More distraction.
So perhaps it is worth getting to know what is already here. To notice the subtle vibration of being alive without immediately judging it or trying to modify it. To recognise that the uncomfortable hum is not an ailment or an inconvenience. It is what it feels like to exist. As you.
The better acquainted you become with that inner tone, the less you may need to run from it. And the more you can navigate the external world from a grounded acceptance of the fact that this breathing, sensing, thinking presence is the only place you can actually ever stand in.
Image credit: Egor Kosmachev
