What's Here Now?
Relational Voiced Embodied Meditation - This is a practice our times need!
Over the next week, we’ll be introducing two new ways to learn and practice with Earthbound in community. This is the first of two posts.
When most people think of meditation, a solitary cross-legged figure comes to mind—someone deeply anchored to the ebb and flow of the breath as it enters and leaves the nostrils, removed from the hubbub of life, a renunciate.
But our times are calling for us to remain engaged. To live fully within the centre of life. To notice spaciousness and quietude even within that hubbub. So we may try the householder path. We attempt to insert meditation into our busy lives by meditating with apps, attending evening classes or going on weekend retreats. These can be extremely helpful and I still make use of them all.
However, if you’re one of those who has been trying to fit meditation into life, successfully finding some peace, flow and connection while meditating, but feel like that evaporates as soon as you get up off the cushion, then perhaps “What’s Here Now?” is for you.
This is a wholly different approach to meditation. It’s not solitary, it’s not done in silence, and it’s designed to allow you to be in your life and be in presence at the same time. It’s relational, voiced, embodied meditation. Let me explain what that means.
Relational
What’s Here Now? is done in pairs or sometimes threes. It’s an invitation to share your inner experience with another human being for a few minutes. An opportunity to let yourself be as you are while being witnessed. How often do you get that invitation in regular life? How often do we present how we “should be” rather than simply allow ourselves to “be as we are”? This is an opportunity to relax and Be with another person.
And the flip side of this practice is that, because we take it in turns to share and the receive, you also get to hold space for another human to be as they are as they share. You get to give the gift of your presence. This is an act of service, and it is truly nourishing.
Another fascinating effect of this practice is the power of co-regulation. When two or three people come together, there is a field effect in which our nervous system states come into regulation and coherence with those around us. As we sit in presence, eyes closed as someone shares their inner experience, we witness them begin to relax, to release held tension in the body and to settle into their own being. As a natural consequence, we find that seemingly without us having done anything other than remain receptive, our nervous system also relaxes and opens.
Voiced
The practice of What’s Here Now? involves a short period of grounding and landing back into your body followed by a period - ten minutes each - taking it in turns to share what you notice internally - sensations, emotions, energy, space etc. - out loud.
There is something very powerful about naming our inner life verbally. Marrying the correct words with the actual, real inner experience we are having right now, creates a kind of coherence and wholeness between our inner and outer worlds that can be harder when we remain silent and solitary in our meditation practice. This helps bridge our presence back into our everyday life.
Voicing things out loud also helps us circumvent the mind’s tendency to dismiss our inner experience as “not real”. To say out loud that we feel subtle energy flowing through our legs, or that the edges of our body seem to be diffuse or porous, or that we are sensing an inner luminosity, allows us to own and embody these experiences as part of us. Sharing these experiences with another person helps us to normalise them. This normalisation of embodied presence is, I feel, one of the most important capacities we need to cultivate if we want to see true regeneration of our creaking industrial cultures of separation.
Embodied
This practice is all about coming into the sensate body and giving the strategic mind a break. If something has been on your mind or disturbing you during the week it can feel like it just goes round and round but is essentially trapped inside. As much as we’d like to imagine we can rationalise ourselves out of our agitated states, if you are honest with yourself, how often does that work? What’s more true is that the tension or nervous system activation eventually dissipates of its own accord.
But What’s Here Now? offers a very different approach to being with stuff that’s swirling around inside. It’s an opportunity to be really intimate with it without trying to avoid it, push it away or force it to change. The question is not “how would you like to be now?” or “what should you be feeling now?”, it’s “what’s here now?”. What’s here now might be physical aches and pains, or strong emotion, or feelings of nervous system contraction in your chest or gut or solar plexus. It might also be feelings of relaxation or energy pulsing, streaming or flowing, or quiet, peace or pleasure. The beauty of the question is that it’s not about your preferences, it’s about reality in this moment, right now. So there is an inbuilt permission to allow yourself to be, to notice areas in the body and to share what’s felt there.
And that’s where the magic happens. When we honour our own experience and do that in the presence of another, then very often, that energetic stuff which had been stuck in your system for days, softens, relaxes, releases and returns to the Whole to be used again by Life as needed. It’s an incredible process of embodied recycling or composting. The energy that felt like systemic indigestion gets digested.
Meditation
On the surface, this could feel like an active listening exercise where partners take it in turn to listen while the other speaks. After all, that’s what’s happening on one level. But this is happening not from the surface but from depth. This is deep contact for both the sharer and the receiver. This is a practice that welcomes us into embodied presence; a place where we can feel what’s going on in our own body, some of what’s going on in someone else’s body and what’s going on in the space between us. It’s a practice that allows us to feel that “I’m fully here and I’m available.”
Often people say they can’t get on with meditation because they can’t be still or because their mind wanders too much. But this practice has an easy level of availability because you are in relationship while you are doing it. It’s relatively simple to spend 10 minutes sensing yourself at depth and sharing that without even realising what you are doing is meditating. It’s much easier to do this with a partner than to do this on your own, possibly because relationship is hard-wired into our nature. So why not hardwire it into our meditation practice as well?
And what is meditation anyway? It’s being present, completely embedded and awake to the moment-to-moment aliveness of your body, the world and existence. And as both the sharer and receiver, that is what is happening throughout.
This practice is also an invitation to remain accountable and to stay present because it’s in service to someone else as well as to ourselves. That tendency to drift back to thoughts that can frustrate so many beginner meditators simply drops away. It’s easy to remain aware, sensing, and present for both ourselves and for our practice partner.
Getting real with reality
We need to stop living in the constructed stories in our heads as if that were our only reality. Most of those stories are often skewed at best and sometimes downright undermining and damaging at worst. Our prefrontal cortex has an incredibly limited grasp on reality. Our whole body, however, is immersed in reality all the time, so why not come back into relationship with it? There is a wisdom and intelligence in the body that we have been educated to ignore, and we do so at our own peril and that of the world. We need to come back to what’s real and allow ourselves to be more open and available to others while also holding space for those around us to do the same. That’s the gateway to true culture transformation. We need to normalise embodied presence everywhere. We need to foster what poet David Whyte calls “robust vulnerability”.
What’s Here Now? allows us to practice that robust vulnerability in a way that gives us the courage more and more to live from that deeper sense of self wherever, whenever and with whomever we find ourselves.
I am in my fourth year now of meeting weekly online (and yes, this works incredibly well on Zoom) with two other fellow coaches to practice What’s Here Now? and I can honestly say it’s one of the most potent spiritual and psychological practices I have ever done. I have also worked with many coaching clients to hold space for them to explore their own experience in this way. This practice allows me to discharge held tension and stress in the body, it invites in me an experience of really profound togetherness with my practice partners and it has supported me to get to know, and make friends with myself on ever-deepening levels.
What’s Here Now? is a practice for our times.
If you’d like to try it at home with someone else, here is a pdf with some instructions.
Join a community practicing What’s Here Now?
If you like the idea of coming together and practicing this in community then we are offering two ways to meet up and practice regularly.
Starting on Saturday 26th April 2025, we’ll be offering a monthly 60 minute What’s Here Now? Club session on the last Saturday of each month at 10 am UK time. This will include an introductory guided somatic grounding meditation followed by paired What’s Here Now? practice in breakout rooms and space at the end of the session for group reflection, sharing and questions. For just 5 euros per month, the price of a coffee, you can access this transformative experience of mutual presence.
Find out more and sign up to the What’s here Now? Club here.
(You can cancel membership at any time.)
Are you interested in a deeper dive into embodied presence?
And for those that are interested in an even deeper dive into dedicated embodied presence practice, we are also launching our new online twice-monthly Earthbound Practice Circle starting starting on Friday 9th May at 10@ UK time and continuing on the second Friday of every month.
Includes:
✔ Monthly Deep Dive 90-minute Circle sessions
✔ Includes access to What’s Here Now? Club
✔ Growing guided practice audio library
✔ Recordings of all Friday Circle sessions
✔ 10% off 1-1 coaching
👉 Read More About Joining the Earthbound Practice Circle here