Is "I'm fine" really fine?

I recently read a great guide by one of my favourite Yoga teachers, David Procyshyn, about the practice of the body scan (Original article here). He explained in detail how simple and effective a body scan can be to combat anxiety. It can take as little as three minutes—just lying in bed before sleep or right after waking up. All it requires, fundamentally, is to pay undivided attention to your body, part by part.

As simple as it sounds, I know it is a difficult thing to do for many of us. Difficult, because you actually have to pause, command your attention, and do it.

Our attention is a paradox. We give it to our work, studies, family, and friends—all vital parts of life. But we also waste it on trivia, like a celebrity’s lavish wedding. Do we ever pay attention to ourselves? Yes, but usually through a judgmental lens: How do I look? How did I do in that presentation? Am I a good parent, partner, or worker? We obsess over our social identities. Yet among all those identities, we forget the one simply called “I."

Life is busy, and demands are endless. The mortal "I" gets stretched so thin that we are forced to ration our focus. Unfortunately, attention to the self falls to the bottom of the stack. It is dangerously easy to push ourselves aside—so easy that we don't even notice we are doing it constantly.

In today’s age of pop-psychology, we all talk about how traumatic it is to be neglected by others. But we fail to see the truth: the person constantly neglecting you is you.

I go to a yearly Yoga retreat - “Mind into Matters”. At this retreat, we have a constant practice called the "check-in." Every morning and afternoon, after our yoga practice, we gather in a circle, and each person shares two things: a number from 1 to 10 representing their energy level, and a single word describing how they feel.

It was incredibly hard, at the very beginning, to come up with these two simple pieces of information. It felt like agonising soul-searching. It made me nervous. Looking around the circle, I could see the same tension mirrored on the faces of my companions. “How do I feel”, what an absurd question! After decades of saying “I’m fine”, was I really supposed to dig deep and answer that question with real words that actually represent my heart at that point of time?

Yet it was amazing to see how quickly things shifted. By the the second or third day of the retreat, the practice became easy, so easy that the words just float up on their own. The expression on everyone’s faces turned from laboured to contemplative. I even noticed that I was doing mental “check-ins” without being asked. I became genuinely interested in myself.

When was the last time you asked yourself, “How are you?” And when was the last time you used a word other than “fine,” “tired,” or “busy” to answer it?

It is never too late to start. It can be a three-minute body scan tonight, or a caring little conversation with yourself tomorrow morning, starting with some simple words like: “How do we feel today?”