Yesterday was a big pause.

I’m back from NYC and it seems airline travel wipes me out much more these days than a few years ago.

My system is a heck of a lot more sensitive to being pressurized. Perhaps it is ‘age’, but I’m quite sure it is simply my heightened sensitivity to myself, my emotions, my body sensations and my environment .

Here is a wonder, something that has never occurred to me in my many flights

If you have a plastic water bottle on a flight, and you don’t open it during the flight, it shrinks and gets scrunched. Then, when you arrive back on land, you open it up and….phew!!…..the pressure is released. It makes an audible sound. Air is released. The plastic bottle says “Thanks for de-pressurizing me”.

I’m sure a physicist would correct my description of pressurized systems about now, but, nevertheless, here I am sitting on our Air Canada flight waiting to taxi into the Vancouver terminal and I look at my FIJI water bottle, and I think to myself as I let the pressure out of my bottle,

“Shit, this is why we feel so shitty after air travel. It’s not the security, bad food (or lack thereof these days on flight), re-circulated AC air, or being squeezed into a confined space like sardines with no ability to get away…..it’s the pressure.”

A plastic water bottle has it easy. All it needs is a swift twist of the cap and ‘ahh’, pressure no more. We on the other hand must navigate the pressure put onto and into our cells organically. No one is sitting at the top of our head twisting our caps. Taking a momentary pause, or even a whole day pause if you can plan it, to really bring yourself and your cells back to normal pressure would be ideal post-flight care.

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Last weekend in New York City, one of the presentations was delivered by actor Josh Pais. It wasn’t so much a presentation per se, but an evening of movement, awareness, high energy, and essentially getting comfortable in our own skin and in comfort with the 300 other sets of skin in the room. He calls his craft “Committed Impulse“.

Josh did a great job bringing our cells and bodies back to the present moment. Back to ourselves. He de-pressurized us in a sane and very fun way by allowing us to let our instinctive impulses fly as they wished, while bringing us to a place of committed presence.

This idea of being in the present moment, or the ‘here and now’ as I like to sometimes call it, is critical for our nervous system to feel safe and in its comfort slippers. Being oriented to our environment is another way to say it.

Josh has a great way of teaching this ‘here and now’ piece.  Two words he gets people to say  – when they’ve left their body and have floated into their personal din of critical thought and needless worry – is, “I’M BACK”.

I’m back. And very glad to be back.

Happy (almost) Halloween. Irene.