I promised to share with you the first and, I believe, most powerful of the Wayfinding compasses: something I call the Body Compass. 

From early childhood, you’ve been taught to override signals from your body in order to cooperate with other people: sit quietly and listen when you want to squirm, pretend you’re fine when you have a headache, get up when the alarm rings even if you’re still exhausted.

None of this is universally bad—it all helps us work together in groups—but it has one outcome that’s not only problematic, but catastrophic. It makes most people turn off the signals that are constantly flowing through our bodies to direct us toward our comfort, our joy, and our destiny. 

We tend to think of thought and decision-making as occurring in the brain. Then we imagine that the brain is somehow not part of the body. In fact, our nervous systems extend everywhere inside the body, and work with the brain to help guide our actions.

Your nervous system is incredibly good at steering your life—if you let it. It works through several complementary systems:

• Cognition. This is conscious, usually verbal thought. Most of us have been trained to see it as the one and only device for navigating life. But alone, it is clumsy and inaccurate. Trying to think your way to your destiny using only cognition is like trying to knit with two clubs.
• Perception. This is the awareness of the world that comes through our five senses. It picks up far more than we ever consciously recognize. It works best when we are in a state of open awareness, not deep thought.
• Interoception. This word refers to our awareness of internal signals: tension, trembling, pulse rate, nausea, restlessness. This is the system we are taught to ignore and override in order to be socially appropriate. And it’s one of the wisest advisers we have.
• Neuroception. This term, coined by Dr. Stephen Porges, scans the environment for minute signals or patterns, deciding in every moment whether the people, places, and things around us are safe or dangerous. You can think of it as your “spidey senses,” but this is no comic-book fantasy (though again, that’s how we’ve been taught to think about it). Neuroception is very real and very sophisticated.

Even though you may have shoved most of these systems out of your conscious awareness, you haven’t lost them. They are the basis of your physical life—the most empirical and reliable devices you’ll ever possess. Under the surface of the life you’ve been taught to live, they’re always working. They combine to move like a compass, one that always guides you toward your right life. 

Here’s how it works: Every time you encounter a decision point, large or small, your body evaluates the situation at a level far more nuanced than conscious thought. Your entire nervous system creates a physical experience that’s meant to warn you away from bad decisions and toward good ones.

“Reading your body compass” is simply noticing how your body signals “yes” or “no” to a decision, and following its guidance. This is not rocket science. However, I’ve coached actual rocket scientists who had forgotten (or been trained) not to do it. Here’s what I taught these folks, and thousands of others, who needed to access their own deepest wisdom to navigate the world.

A Practice to Tap into Your Body Compass

Take five minutes and try this simple practice wherever you happen to be:

1. Close your eyes, breathe deeply, and then let your attention travel slowly through your body, head to toe, noticing sensations, areas of comfort or discomfort, patches that feel numb or quiet. Don’t try to change anything. Just notice.​
2. Now, remember a time when you made a decision that later turned out to be problematic: the used car you bought on impulse, the educational opportunity you passed up, your first marriage, whatever. Remember being in this experience. Now, scan your body again. What did that negative experience feel like in your body? Don’t use emotional words like, “heartbreak” or “fear.” Use physical signals. Things like “Tight gut,” “Armor in my shoulders,” or “Whole-body collapse.” This is your body compass saying, “WRONG WAY! MAKE ANOTHER CHOICE!”
3. Whatever you do, don’t stop now. Shake out your arms and legs, take a few deep breaths, and let that bad memory go. Replace it with one of the best times in your life: adopting the shelter cat who became your trusted companion; choosing the doctor who stuck with it and diagnosed a tricky illness; quitting the job that was slowly but actively murdering you. Go to the moment you made this good decision. Scan your body. Name the sensations. Again, use physical terms, not emotional ones. “The flying feeling,” “The warm glow in my chest,” “The spontaneous smile.” 
4. Almost always, a wrong decision causes tightening and constriction, while a good choice feels like loosening, freedom, or weightlessness. Once you’ve learned to recognize your own body’s “compass readings” (which you’ve just done), you’ll feel more and more subtle versions of these two sensations. 

When I began noticing and using my own body compass, I was deeply entrenched in the wrong life. I didn’t know that I wanted to be a writer, or that I needed to leave my community’s very intense religion, or that I wasn’t cut out for the career I’d chosen. 

Pushing all this out of consciousness had cranked up my body compass to full volume. I’d been in chronic pain for more than a decade. My immune system barely worked. Weakness and lack of energy had slowed or stopped anything I had thought of as “forward progress.”

Then I noticed the physical clenching that accompanied many of my daily choices, and the slight relaxation when I let myself do things I thought were “unproductive.” Things like sitting down by a tree for ten minutes, or petting my dog, or reading a novel.  

I began doing more of these things, just for physical relief. As I turned toward the choices my body compass enjoyed, I began to discover who I was and what my life wanted to be. Not just a tree-hugger, but someone who spent time in the wilderness helping people who healed ecosystems. Not just a dog lover, but someone who loved the well-intentioned animal inside myself and other humans. Not just a reader, but a writer.

Since then, I’ve taught thousands of people to read their body compasses. I’ve seen that once we start doing this, life becomes a version of the game, “You’re getting warmer, you’re getting colder.” At first, choosing what your body compass loves may feel almost ridiculously small and subtle. Hang in there. Fasten your seatbelt. Within weeks or months, this simple practice might well take you and your life from cold, to cool, to warm, to bright, blazing, hot.

And this is just the beginning. In coming articles, we’ll take a deep dive into the second of your inner compasses—the Emotional Compass. I’ll share how learning to observe experiences like grief, delight, anger, confusion, and even numbness can accelerate the construction of your right life. 

Until then, keep noticing what your body is telling you. Keep choosing what makes your body compass feel “colder” and “warmer.” By the time we meet again, you may be in a much better place. See you then!