What A Little “Woo” Does For You…

How does it feel when everything in your life must be defensible before you’re willing to move towards it?

Achievement culture - particularly the practice of law - loves a “right” answer. It loves you on the “right path.” And, at some point, achievement goes from a source of possibility (yay, law school vibes!) to it’s own kind of miserable Groundhog Day (AKA burnout). 

It makes sense because the achievement economy sold you a story of success and economic stability. And you’ve been living that story long enough that it subconsciously dictates what you notice, what you expect, and what feels possible. 

Achievement culture teaches you to strive. And strive you do! Your efforts are rewarded: good grades; positive attention; fancy letters after your name; titles; respect; money; benefits; opportunities; connections. It sounds good. It looks good. A lot of it feels good too. 

So you do more of that. You metabolize achievement-based strategies. As a lawyer, or other high-achiever, you learn to filter out irrelevant nonsense. You focus on facts that matter. Defensible facts. Billable facts. You learn to analyze potential outcomes and make decisions in ways that limit risk and get reliable outcomes. 

Maybe those strategies don’t feel very exciting, but who cares?! Excitement is not a learned skill. Not a degree. It’s unreliable, fleeting, and hard to value or explain. Those achievement strategies also don’t quite align with being in love. Or choosing to do things simply because they bring you pleasure. What is the value of pleasure? And why should you have it without earning it anyway?

But, if you only experience love, pleasure, and fun once they are rationalized, what do you experience? Is it real love? Is it actually pleasurable? Do you have fun? 

The longer you live in that narrative, the more you believe it to be true, the less likely you are to notice other forms of possibility and success. The scarier it feels to step off that path. The blinders come on. Tunnel vision takes root. 

Knowing something defensible, supported by facts and science and precedent is great. Useful in a lot of contexts. Essential in some. But, there are other ways of knowing that are equally, if not even more valuable. Knowing what you can defend is very different from aligning with what matters. 

Getting out of your evaluative, cognitive patterns and strategies widens your attention. You notice things that you previously filtered out. You make connections that weren’t available before. You listen differently. You relate differently. 

Take five breaths and notice how your body responds to the idea of just being. No demands. No deadlines. No analysis. No performing. You just are. And that’s enough. Five breaths to just be. How did your body respond? 

Intuition (the ability to immediately understand without needing analytical proof) and interoception (internal body sensations) are both neuroscientifically sound, AND exploring them can be mystical, magical fun.  It is a vast source of valuable information readily available to you. Wanting you to pay attention. 

Your body is constantly receiving, organizing, and integrating information. You don’t always experience that information as a thought or a conclusion. Which makes perfect sense because your body can receive roughly 11M bits of info per second. Whereas your brain can only receive about 40 bits per second. That’s some serious neural filtration. So, sometimes you experience it as a sensation, an impulse, and image, a sense of knowing, or a directional pull or desire you can’t quite explain yet. 

A willingness to explore things you can’t yet explain can bring you into relationship with so much more possibility than your well-trained achievement brain could ever think up. You might even be surprised how exciting and pleasurable the exploration can be. 

This is part of the work I love doing with clients at Undū. Somatic tools. Body analysis. Dream work. Imagination. Curiosity. To cultivate and explore a relationship with the wisdom that is already there. Allowing your overworked brain to rest and reset. Giving you the ability to sense and trust interoceptive signals, and incorporate them into your decision-making, relationships, leadership, and advocacy. And into simply being.

The Attunement Series is six one-hour sessions designed to reawaken and cultivate trust with your interoception and intuition. 

Give yourself permission to not yet explain what your body longs to explore.