As a child, I was given the nickname Alice in Wonderland because I was always in my head. My love has told me a few times, “Sometimes you disappear into your thoughts.”

Today, while I was talking to a friend about food, she said that the thought of food or eating is not something that necessarily brings her joy, but rather just something she does. I got curious and asked what makes her feel alive then, since great food is one of the things that makes me feel alive. And she simply said, “I just wake up and I’m happy.”

I thought, wow! she just wakes up happy. What a beautiful thing to experience: to wake up with enthusiasm about life, to feel such aliveness in your body by default. And it made me realize: yes, I’ve always known that certain things make me feel alive: food, touch, nature, art. But I hadn’t fully noticed how much of my life I just walk through analyzing it more than experiencing it. I thought I was present, but I was mostly observing, thinking, comparing, and planning. My inner world has always felt richer than the outer one, and I hadn’t been conscious of how much I’d been living there instead of in my body.

For me, being in my body doesn’t always feel easy. The moments I do enjoy it are when I experience joy through my senses: eating great food, having great sex, getting a massage, being in nature and feeling calm and safe, sharing life with my love and my kids, creating art and being in the flow. These are the moments that make being incarnated feel worth it.

But most of the time, I live in my head. That was my normal. Now, fully aware of it, I see how much I detach, like an escape, like a walking zombie, watching life from the outside, only choosing to engage when it’s pleasant. Because when I do feel fully in my body, it’s overwhelming: the pain, the chaos, the weight of the world.

Now that I’m aware of this, it makes sense why they called me ”Alice in Wonderland”. The little Alice who found safety in her imagination when the world was too much. Realizing this leaves me emotional, because it hits me that I’ve spent so much of life outside of myself. Or, she might argue, closer to herself, refusing to engage in a world that never made sense.

With love always,

R-D