LIVED EXPERIENCE
Not every revelation occurs in a lab. Sometimes it takes exactly one conversation, on an unremarkable commute, to change your perspective on things…
Earlier this month on our way to work, one minute Martin and I were talking about mitochondria and biophysics of energy, and the next—I truly cannot explain how—we were discussing a topic completely foreign to me: bathroom reading.
Apparently, it’s a thing! That even in the one place designed for pause, we fill the silence. Scroll. Flip. Consume. We let the mind keep running.
At one point in the conversation, he shared a French expression that made me laugh and wince at the same time: “Il ne se sent plus pisser.”
English translation: “He is so absorbed with himself that he can’t feel himself peeing anymore.”
It’s crude. And precise.
So lost in thoughts, that we can’t feel.
It captures something about the moment we’re all living in. Our society moves at a pace where “doing” and “being on” dominates everything. We are so occupied with planning, analyzing, and reacting, that we barely inhabit and feel the most ordinary, mundane moments of being alive.
We move from meeting to meeting, from headline to headline, and from notification to notification, rarely noticing the energetic state we carry into any given moment or space.
Awareness is sadly something that gets put in the backseat.
But science shows that practices that help us focus on our breath, and simply being attentive to the present moment, changes the brain, improves inflammation, and enhances well being. That’s the science of mindfulness and contemplative practices.
Every breath is an opportunity to be.
What if every shit, too, was an opportunity to be?
Putting the “Rest” Back in Restroom
When we are perpetually in our heads and identify with our thoughts, we disconnect from the subtle cues of our own physiology. The breath shortens. Our shoulders lift. Our energy becomes diffuse.
Take a moment to feel your body, now. To take a breath.
We might driving towards efficiency, but we’re not present. We’re productive, but unaware of what’s stirring up within.
What if the smallest, most mundane pauses in our day became valuable moments of silence, serving as portals back to ourselves?
Not to scroll. Not to consume. But to notice. To breathe. To feel the body as it is.
To sense and bring awareness to the quality of our energy before we bring it to our colleagues, our children, and to our work.
With Martin and his lab, we have been developing the concept and platform for mitoception—turning inward to sense and interpret the signals our mitochondria send us, as a window into our body’s energy state. We’ll share more on that in a dedicated post coming soon.
But the short version is this: The body is always broadcasting its energy state, through hormones like GDF15, which travel from our cells to the brainstem to tell the brain exactly how much energetic strain we are under.
The question is whether we are ever still enough to notice. To get a bit cheeky, is the“rest”room the one place quiet enough to tune in? Getting in the habit of regularly stopping and tuning into these and other signals could help us better monitor and maintain our health.
In an age where most of us people bring their smartphones into the bathroom (no judgment!), even our last quiet room has stopped being quiet.
And while there is a perfectly practical reason to leave your phone outside (smartphones harbour far more bacteria than a toilet seat, with warm crevices that carry germs from the bathroom straight to your kitchen) the more interesting argument isn’t microbial. It’s this: every time we reach for a screen, we choose distraction over the one thing the body is quietly asking for… a moment to feel.
Perhaps a more human-centered society does not begin with policy or technology, but with this: remembering to fully inhabit the moment we are already in. Perhaps even—and especially—the most unglamorous ones in the bathroom.
Sometimes transformation begins in the quietest place, with a pause.
Will you take the quiet cue to tune in the next time you sit, bare bum, on the porcelain throne?
We’re excited to be building a community around the Science and Experience of Energy with this Substack. We hope to bring people together to reflect on how we experience energy in our everyday lives.
If this post made you take a pause or if it resonated with you,
please share with someone you love.
In the still and quiet moments we can hear the Universe speak to us
We stop, we live, be…ing!