Am I in Contact?

That is the question that has captured my attention. It is not a question that arrived through thinking, but one that distilled itself out of reflection. It arrived the way certain truths sometimes arrive, not gradually but all at once, with a felt sense of yes, full and palpable. You just know the real the way you know a plane has touched down on the tarmac.

The question Am I in contact? is not directed outward towards anything, not to a person or the circumstances of the day, but instead it is directed at something more interior and more primary than that. It is directed at contact with myself. The question invites me to return to the life I’m living from the inside. This feels important because contact with myself is the only place from which anything else becomes truly available.

I have been deepening my practice lately inside a course on the instincts offered by my teacher, Russ Hudson. In this course, Russ works with what he calls zones — areas of lived experience that the self-preservation instinct organizes around. Through this study we are learning to listen more honestly to what we are actually up to during our ordinary life. As part of the course we were given a worksheet, and as I sat down at my desk one morning, a candle burning as a simple reminder to stay present. I read the invitation on the worksheet to take a look at the zones.

Fifteen zones, wow, it seemed like a lot, but I took a breath and began to read through them slowly, not with the mind's usual readiness to fix or improve, but with something quieter, a willingness to simply feel which ones were alive for me. Three distinct areas rose to the surface; physical movement, energy management, and finance and resources. I wasn’t sure initially what any of them were truly asking of me. I only knew that they were calling.

Of the three zones, finances and resources seemed out of place, perhaps for the simple fact that I wasn't entirely sure why it was calling to me at all.

My husband is the primary breadwinner in our home, and the keeper of our finances. This is a conscious and willing arrangement we have made together. While I have full access, full understanding, and full trust in our financial life together, I don’t pay the bills or move money between the financial institutions. And yet, sitting with this zone, something quietly began to surface. It was a distorted mental picture of what it means to truly participate in finances. Now that I was in contact with myself I could see how I had confused not managing the finances into a belief that I was not participating. I had been telling myself something mostly true, I’m not that involved with the finances, and it stood in for a whole truth.

As I continued the inquiry something altogether different, and considerably more spacious appeared. I began to understand the ways I do participate in the finances, which is through a practical streak that touches everything; shopping within our means, feeling genuine delight at a good bargain, and through the quiet competencies I bring to our daily life without fanfare. I can fix most things. I trim my own hair. I carry a resourcefulness that sustains our household in ways that don't always announce themselves as financial, but are.

And then something opened further still. Not only do I resource our life, but I am resourced. By my husband. By the people around me. By a life that is honestly holding me from many directions all at once.

What the zone was showing me is that there was no deficiency, instead there was just an invitation to come into right relationship with what was already true. The finance and resource zone had always been operating, but what had been missing was simply my willingness to recognize myself inside it.

Sitting and reflecting on these three zones opened me up to more contact. There were no improvements to make, or deficiencies to address, but a single living question that had been quietly waiting underneath all of them. Now it was clear that moving the body or managing my energy is only genuinely related to once I am home within myself. The same with resources and support, they can only be received once there is a self present, and gathered enough to receive it. Everything flows from this one interior movement of contact.

Am I in contact?

And now I understand that question differently than I might have at first. It is not really asking whether I am paying attention to my body, or managing my energy wisely, or participating in our finances in the right way. It is asking something more primary and more intimate than any of that. It is asking whether I have come home to myself. Whether the one who is living this life is actually present inside it. Because from that interior place of genuine self-contact, everything else becomes available.

I also discovered something else that morning, something I might easily have passed over without recognizing its significance. When the inquiry began to feel heavy — when the mind moved toward fixing, toward goals, toward making something happen — I noticed a quality I have come to recognize. A particular kind of effort. A subtle pushing. And alongside it, a dimming of that interior contact, as though the self had quietly stepped back from the window.

This, I am finding, is one of the most honest compasses available to us along this path. The felt sense of heaviness, of complication, of things becoming larger than they need to be, this is the signature of the ego's involvement, the signal that we have wandered from ourselves. The opposite is also true, recognizable, and reliable, and that is when we are at home in ourselves there is a quality of lightness, of allowing, and an openness to what is actually unfolding in the moment that is present. Come to find out presence has its own felt sense, as distinct and unmistakable as the difference between a water and ice.

We do not arrive at this fluency all at once. It comes slowly, through the accumulated experience of noticing — again and again, without judgment — which quality is moving through us in any given moment. Until one day, without quite knowing when it happened, we find we have become conversant enough in our own interior life to simply notice with fondness:

Oh. There it is. The heaviness. The pushing.

Or just as quietly:

Oh. There it is. The lightness. The allowing.

And in that recognition, without any further effort at all, we already know the way.

So I offer you the same question that found me that morning:

Are you in contact from the inside out?

Not as a measurement. Not as another place where you might find yourself lacking. Simply as a gentle interior inquiry, a way of remembering to come home to yourself. And if you discover, as I often do, that attention has drifted, there is no need for urgency or self-correction. We can simply notice, breathe, and remember that the one we are returning to has been waiting, patiently and without complaint, all along.