What happened when I turned off my security system

Also, did you know we push away what's good for us?

We were two blocks from the hotel when we heard a sharp whistle followed by the command, “YOUGIRLSGETINHERE!!” It was coming from a yellow taxicab that had slammed on its brakes in the lane closest to us. Bewildered, we hopped in the cab to be met with a tiny woman of indecipherable age. Her hair was a dull reddish color, the kind you get with a kit from the drugstore. Her face showed decades of living in the California sun coupled with a pack a day habit. Her eyes were kind, but they were also giving us a particular type of stink-eye that indicated what bimbos we were. As we piled in back seat, we quickly learned why she pulled over as she exclaimed how silly we were, that we didn’t have a clue because we could not be out after dark on this particular street, and that we needed to get a grip.

So much for the Hotel California.

This Hotel California is in Palm Springs so not the one we stayed in. 📸Photo by Bob Osias

You see, I’d found us a great deal on a room at the Hotel California in downtown San Franscisco. Now if you’re thinking of lux swankiness or a cool Boho-Cali vibe let me tell you this place was the opposite (as our driver so clearly pointed out!).

When one of my Canadian besties came to visit while I was going to school in the San Francisco Bay Area, we toddled off to good times at the Hotel California – on a student budget. After we got ready to go out (an event unto itself as it was the early nineties and we had just escaped the big hair of the 80’s) we headed down the street totally oblivious to the garbage, the urine smell and the many bodies who chose the sidewalk to snooze off their recent twister or start indulging in a new one. We didn’t get very far before we were rescued by this interesting looking angel in the yellow taxicab.

The miracle of this story isn’t that this woman chose to pull over of her own accord and save us from navigating a very undesirable neighborhood while we were oblivious to possible danger, but that it happened twice in the same night! Yes Lovebug, against all odds we came out of the bars in the wee hours of the morning, having drowned her warning in a bucket of rose, and decided (there was no actual thinking involved) we were fine to walk back to our hotel. Sure enough, a couple blocks down the road, we get the same sharp whistle and demand to get in her cab. There she was! The exact same driver, many hours later, in a totally different neighborhood in a very busy city. Coincidence or an angel coming to save our ass?

But this story isn’t about miracles or angels in hippie clothing. It isn’t about the detriment of a discount hotel in a seedy neighborhood when you just rolled off the turnip truck. No, this essay is about paying attention in our own lives which is something I was not doing this night.

This hotel is at the Santa Monica Pier, also not the one we stayed in. Can you imagine how many Hotel California’s there are and none of the are the one from the Eagles song as far as I know. 📸Raphael Camacho Grielberger

I was distracted, absorbed in the hustle of the city, excited by my friend’s company, and unmindful of my Self and my surroundings so I was simply not listening. Had I been paying attention - less cocky - it’s likely I would’ve been aware of my body giving me signals that I was taking a wrong step. Thankfully this woman did it for me.

It’s easy to lose our bearings, or to have never found them in the first place.

It doesn’t only happen when we are excited and distracted. I’m using a dramatic incident from my past, but the more common story of my self-betrayal happens in my daily life…I show up when I don’t want to, or I agree when, inside, I’m screaming the opposite. We do this in our living rooms, sitting in a meeting, and in conversations with the people who know us best. At times like this our internal alarm bells, in the form of our nervous system, are giving us direction but we silence it, sometimes without meaning to and other times on purpose.

We tend to reduce the nervous system to mechanics — the system that regulates heart rate, joint mobility, digestion, and more. I talk about it this way with patients all the time. But that explanation leaves out something essential. The nervous system doesn’t just run the body; it interprets our lives. The sensations we experience are signals about whether something feels safe, aligned, threatening, or true in our conversations, our commitments, and our choices.

When we ignore our nervous system (how we feel on the inside) long enough, we can drift gradually, almost imperceptibly, away from our own truth. Sometimes the disconnection is so complete we no longer recognize ourselves. That kind of shift is not mysterious, it’s physiological. When we repeatedly override our body’s signals the system adapts. It might get quieter but often it simply gets louder and louder until we finally pay attention. Whatever happens, it doesn’t disappear.

I know this sounds like some kind of baloney but it’s true that the answers to our questions lie on the inside. This is not woo, it’s physiology and it’s what ‘they’ mean when they talk about regulating our nervous system on the internet. What our internal systems are doing in the moment is our very own guidance system, yet we’ve been told that all the answers live outside of us (with the church, our boss, Prince Charming, our government, those last 10 pounds…you name it). This has left us without a reference point for what wholeness can feel like internally. Many of us don’t know what that IS, never mind how it feels or where to find it.

Let’s put it this way…right now, at this point in your life, when the world is in chaos and the Snake has turned into the Fire Horse (a very exciting, and much needed, turning point on the Chinese calendar) do you know what peace/joy/contentment feel like in your daily life? I’m talking for real Dear One, not just the Instagram snippets. Is there an internal setpoint that exists within that you can consistently turn to?

Do you know what peace feels like in your body?

Let’s say that, like me, your answer is “I’m not really sure but probably not” then we need to create an internal landmark of this sensation so our nervous system can recognize it.

We could begin by reframing snippets during our day. What I mean is if we’re having a moment of feeling safe, peaceful, or joyful REALLY PAY ATTENTION to how our body feels. How’s our breathing, have our shoulders settled down, what’s the sensation we feel in our gut region? Stay with it because THIS is what it’s about, this is why we do the inner work. We want to feel like this much more often, so we need to get familiar with how it feels.

Then we can take our noticing deeper by increasing our awareness of what feels bad to us, what disappoints or angers us. You might be thinking, “of course I know what makes me mad,” but often we recognize what the outside world has told us to feel instead of what is deeply true for us. It becomes easy to create a story around these yucky feelings or push them away because they suck so much and, in doing so, we stop listening to ourselves.

If we’re feeling bad, we could take a step back to allow the feeling to simply be there because feelings don’t stick around - they come and go. If we can be tender with ourselves and sit with what our body is showing us we might see that, underneath the kerfuffle of these lousy emotions, there might be something deeper trying to come through, some unseen part of ourself that is asking to heal.

Another thing that surprises me is that sometimes we push away what makes us feel good. I know, this sounds crazy! Why would we ever deny ourselves the good stuff? Smart psychologists tell us there are a ton of reasons why we unconsciously do this so I won’t go into them, but it helps to know that not recognizing when we feel good is one more way we ignore the signals our body is sending.

Inner peace, or choosing the path that is best for us, is the result of knowing ourselves and we can only do that from the inside out. It doesn’t come from thinking harder, it arrives for most of us in tiny little bits and by listening closer.

Lean in, my friend, lean in.

xoxo Donna

P.S. In my next essay I’ll be exploring what we can do next - after we’ve noticed the signals from our body. What do we do with that?

How does peace feel in your body? Drop it in the comments or at least leave me a ❤️ so I can feel contented. Just kidding, I know it doesn’t come from all the likes but they do show Substack that I’m still working over here!

Stay awesome Baby, xo