Presence isn't retreating from life. It's engaging it fully — the light and the shadow — adapting with what's actually there, and leaving your print on it.
That's the idea I wanted to sit with in the first episode of Sense. Not because it's new to me. Because the world around me has finally started using a word for something we've been teaching, quietly, for more than a decade.
What the West just discovered
A little while ago, one of the largest trend-intelligence platforms in the world — Nextatlas — published a report. And buried inside it was a phrase that stopped me cold. They said somatic intelligence — the knowing that comes through the body — has become a new form of literacy for 2026. Not a wellness trend. Not a self-help fad. Literacy. Something a person has to learn, the way they once had to learn to read, in order to understand themselves, their world, and the people around them.
I read the report and I wasn't surprised. I've been teaching this exact idea — under the name Somatic Thinking — for more than ten years. The report wasn't uncovering something new. It was catching up to something that had been happening quietly for a long time. Every one of the five hundred coaches I've trained, across four continents, was working on this before it had a headline.
So what changed? Why now?
The question I was waiting for
Pamela asked me about a phenomenon spreading on TikTok — short videos, sixty seconds or less, that promise to "reset" your nervous system in one minute. Some somatic therapists pushed back hard: that isn't possible, they said. Other people tried it and reported back: wait — something is actually happening. She asked me which side I was on.
Both of them are partly right, and both of them are missing the point. The video doesn't reset your nervous system. That much is true. But it might be doing something smaller, and much more important: it reminds you that you have a body. It reminds you that the body is sending signals, and that you've been away from them for a long time, and that the road back doesn't start with a book. It starts with a breath.
People are hungry for this reminder. Not because the video is medicine. Because the absence has been long.
The theory I built out of ten thousand hours
I've logged more than ten thousand hours of coaching. And from inside those hours, I've watched a pattern repeat itself in almost every person who uses AI seriously and persistently. A road with three stations:
A honeymoon — faster output, the rush of being a hero, "I can do in a day what used to take a week." This part is beautiful. It's intoxicating.
A bottom — the moment you realize you got a lot done, but you weren't really present in any of it. The house is quietly falling apart. The body is tired. Meaning is leaking out of things without announcing that it's left.
A return — and this is where the work begins. A return to the body. To the breath. To the moment you can feel, not the moment you can plan.
This is what explains the paradox the report was pointing to. The closer machines get to the mind — the more fluent they become in language and logic and emotion — the more humans need to come home to their bodies. Not in flight from the machine. Because the machine takes from the mind everything that can be transferred to it, and what's left for the human is what can't be transferred: presence in the body.
And I want to be precise here. The "return to the body" I'm talking about isn't withdrawal. It isn't retreating to the mountain. It's the opposite. It's how you come back to your life as it is — noise, tools, relationships, all of it — and this time you have a body that reads what's happening, so you know when to move forward, when to hold still, and when to answer. If presence doesn't make you more open and more adaptable without losing yourself, you're not practicing presence. You're practicing something else.
What Al-Ghazali said a thousand years ago
The idea I'm describing isn't new. Al-Ghazali named it almost a thousand years ago, in a single word: dhawq. Direct tasting.
And in his autobiography, The Deliverance from Error, he wrote a line that has been quoted for centuries. Knowing about a thing is one thing, and tasting the thing is another entirely. You can read a thousand books about swimming and still not know what water feels like against your skin. Knowing about something is not enough. You have to taste it.
What I try to add to this long lineage — from Al-Ghazali to now — is something small, but it matters. Dhawq is not a gift. It's a craft, and a way of life for cultivating ourselves, and it has no limits. If you allow yourself to live one minute of your day in presence — just one minute — something in your life will begin to change. Not gradually. Through accumulation.
Al-Ghazali walked ten years in the desert to taste. And we, in the twenty-first century, are trying to build a staircase up to it. We discipline the mind, we activate presence through awareness of what the body is telling us, and we climb one step a day. A road toward dhawq. This is what Somatic Thinking does when it's done.
One minute a day
If I had to compress ten years of teaching into a single sentence for someone listening to this episode who doesn't know where to begin, I would say this:
One minute a day. No more, at the beginning. Sit down. Put your palm on your belly. Listen to the breath going in and out. And notice what your shoulders are telling you, what your jaw is telling you, what the area around your heart is telling you. Don't interpret, don't analyze, don't try to fix. Just listen.
That minute is the place where somatic intelligence starts. And when you repeat it every day, you discover that you didn't actually know your body before. You were using it. And the difference between knowing and using is the difference between living your life and being run by it.
A small thing at the end of the episode
At the very end of this episode, something happens I wasn't expecting when I sat down to record. If you listen all the way through, you'll know the moment I mean. I won't ruin it here.
I'll just say this: if something in your body wanted to speak to you while you were listening — even as a small whisper — listen to it. Don't interpret. Don't push it aside. Take a breath. And hear it through.
