My First Body Awareness Practice: Month One Inside RUIA

What happens in the first month of serious inner work? There is a special kind of person who begins something like RUIA. They are sometimes halfway convinced they don’t need it. Not because of arrogance or laziness… but because they have already done so much of this before.

The self-awareness prompts, shadow work, reading, and worksheets had all collected together like pressed flowers, each beautiful but no longer alive.

I was that person.

Until I began with the Body Gateway, Stage I: Awareness. I expected to learn surface-level things about myself. For instance, the porosity of my hair, the texture of my skin. The way my body tenses up or relaxes. Where do I actually feel emotions in my body? Why can’t I remember a philosophical theory as easily as I can remember the monologue of that one dark romance villain?

I expected to become a more attentive observer within the Body Gateway. However, I did not expect to meet my inner critic here during inner work tasks. I did not expect to identify three dominant patterns in the way I think. I certainly did not expect to have a first encounter with what actual stillness within my body feels like.

This first month became my first true body awareness practice: learning not just to observe my body, but to inhabit it.

What Body Awareness Practice Revealed About My Inner Patterns

During the fourth week, an experiment in stillness made me realize that what I thought was rest was anything but that. I realized that when I lie down to rest, I don’t rest at all. Instead, I relocate. I move the entire operation of my mind to a more horizontal “lying” position, and I call that recovery.

The moment I closed my eyes, my mind opened its own. Not anxiously, but naturally, which surprised me. There was no guilt, no restlessness that felt like dread, just a sort of ease that comes from habit. My mind didn’t go still; it read the stillness as an invitation. Replayed conversations, imagined scenarios. Drifted into elaborate daydreams. Someone’s expression from three weeks ago, reconstructed in unnerving detail.

And I lay there in what was supposed to be rest while my mind narrated events that were gone and scenarios I was still hoping for.

But then, and this is the part I keep returning to, something new happened.

I fell into my body.

I had been lying there consciously this time, following the exercise rather than simply calling horizontal thought “rest.”

One moment I was drowning inside a thought, and the next moment I was inside my legs. The heaviness, the specific weight of bone and muscle that I carry everywhere but rarely feel. The warmth where my back pressed against the mattress. The faint movement of air across my back and skin.

I twisted my ankles almost like a second habit, my wrists. That’s apparently something I do when I become too conscious, returning to my body. I reached for these small movements as a sort of compensation. (Did this mean I wasn’t as comfortable being in my own body as I used to think?)

As the session progressed, I became acutely aware of the sensations in my legs. It wasn’t painful exactly, but it did border on it. I realized that my body, when I finally gave it my full attention, doesn’t whisper. It released a flood all at once. It says everything at once, years of undelivered messages, all arriving in the same moment. And for me, it always started from my legs. I also noticed that I fall asleep faster when I’m in my body than when I’m in my thoughts. The mind, for all its speed, can keep me farther from rest.

The body, it turns out, knows how to let go. My mind is the one that keeps interrupting it.

Developing Self-Awareness: Dismantling the Stories We Tell Ourselves

What I found in this Gateway is something that I’m still sitting with. Something I can’t summarize, because I’m still arriving at it.

But I will say this.

Whatever you’ve decided you’re not, or whatever part of yourself you’ve learned to ignore, RUIA has a way of standing you in front of it and asking you to look without immediately turning away. This is what the first month inside RUIA’s Body Gateway did for me. The exercises and tasks are the curriculum. What mattered here was the territory they helped me move through.

In short, my experience was this:

I thought I knew my body. I thought I loved it and was in constant conversation with it. What I was doing, it turns out, was conducting a very sophisticated survey of something I wasn’t quite inhabiting. Somewhere along the way, I had learned to watch my body from a distance.

The work of this month was becoming aware of that distance: in what rest means for me, in my relationship with my body over the years, in mapping bodily patterns, and in noticing things I had previously been oblivious to.

Not yet to close the distance. Simply to see that it exists.

That is all Stage I: Awareness asks of you here: not yet to close the distance, but to see that it exists.

And that, somehow, is the hardest thing. If any of this feels familiar, you can enter deeper into RUIA here.

Your Body Awareness Practice: Enter the Distance

This Week’s Practice

A Question To Sit With

Your Next Threshold

♨︎ Not everything needs to become a curriculum immediately. Sometimes the same territory becomes clearer when you meet it through another language.

→ Feel the body through The Echo Series: read “A Gust of Ecstasy,” where awareness becomes instinct, tremor, appetite, and something almost apocalyptic.