Felt Sense Part Four: Ripples into the World

When we slow down enough to be the experience, to let our body’s intelligence move alongside the mind’s cleverness, it doesn’t stay contained in us. It moves outward, quietly but unmistakably.

Every interaction carries the traces of how we hold ourselves.
Tension we didn’t notice leaks into a glance, a word, a pause.
Curiosity we practiced internally ripples into how we listen. Presence we cultivate shifts the energy of a room without a single intentional gesture.

We can start to notice it in real time. The chest might stiffen when someone speaks in a way that registers in us as “sharp,” the belly could soften when we step back instead of staying and bracing.

We breathe. We feel. We let the story run in the background without letting it drive the interaction. The nervous system, finally awake to us after a lifetime of trying to get our attention, becomes our guide instead of our saboteur.

It’s subtle. It’s easy to miss. It’s like baseball in the sense that if we notice it three out of ten times, we’re at an elite level and deserve to be paid millions of dollars.

But instead of getting paid and being celebrated by a whole city of fans, it can feel lonely. Because noticing ourselves in this way means we also notice how often we aren’t present, how often we’ve been running on autopilot, how much of life we’ve filtered through fear, habit, or obligation.

There’s the grief again… and the choice and responsibility we have to honor it.

But that is the point. Practice is the sport.

Each time we meet ourselves and our sensations honestly, we are learning how to meet others honestly.

We aren’t fixing them.
We aren’t trying to smooth their edges or ours.
We are simply present with all that we are in relation with, alive and responsive.

And over time, the ripples grow. We begin to move through the world in a way that is aligned with what’s real in us. Not performative. Not curated. Not a story we tell ourselves about being “good” or “strong” or “smart.” Just raw, honest, and open.

Presence doesn’t erase difficulty. Grief, tension, frustration… they still arise. But now, we are learning that life’s weight can be carried with openness, that the body knows what to do when we stop trying to outthink it.

That’s how the internal work of felt sense meets the world. That’s how what we notice inside begins to shape everything outside.

As we accumulate the inner capacity to meet our lives with openness, we begin to radiate that same capacity outward, and what we give comes back to us.


Of course some might say that’s a bunch of superstitious hoo-ha, but others agree that it’s simply physics at work.

A seed with wings, carried by chance on the generosity of the wind, landing where it may. Life moves through us like that......small, quiet, unstoppable, even on concrete.