“We can cure physical diseases with medicine, but the only cure for loneliness, despair, and hopelessness is love.”
~Mother Teresa, Words to Love By~

In the therapy world (this drives me nuts) we’ll say thing to people like “drop into your body”. I can’t think of anything more vague and unhelpful. But ideally what I think it’s supposed to mean is to take a moment to turn your focus toward something other than the thought tape going on in your head. Notice your chest rising. It rises and falls with the breaths I am taking. Stay there for a while. Appreciate what is happening there.

Some books will have you place your left hand on your chest and your right hand on your lower belly, either over or just below the belly button. Your hands are now ears, like a stethoscope being used to listen. To those places you can say, “What is happening here?” We really do live so disconnected from the deeper parts of us. We can wait for someone to notice while misery fills in the gaps. Or we can listen to and with our bodies.

Until it’s no longer misery filling those spaces. The mind quiets down and pays attention to something else, it can listen, it can hear, it can speak to those places. “What you’re feeling now is old”, is what my mind would say to me and does. Every time you love it fills the gap a little more. The ruts that exist with raw exposure smooth out slowly, but not before the old is seen and felt again and heard, and spoken to with healing love.