When We Stop Holding Life At Arm’s Length | Blog

“Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body.”
— James Joyce, Dubliners

That line names something I’ve seen in myself, and in so many others.

Life appears fine on the outside, work flowing, relationships steady, yet something inside feels muted. A sense of being alive but somehow uninhabited. Like moving through life, but not really touched by it.

A quiet hum of blah.
Not sad, not anxious… just flat.

I know that feeling well. Last year, I started to notice it more often.

During a webinar I co-led recently with Aila Coats, I shared my experience. I had a realization that “blah” wasn’t about what was happening in my life but about where I was living from.

It wasn’t telling me it was time to change outside circumstances, my work, or my living situation. It was revealing my inner world. I was in my mind all the time: interpreting, narrating, observing, managing.

After sharing that story, Trevor Timbeck shared the James Joyce line from the book, Dubliners: “Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body.”

It landed powerfully, for many of us, because we’ve all felt it – that truth of living one step removed from our own lives.

Since that initial realization, I’ve seen more clearly how my mind does this as a form of protection. It wants to keep me safe, to make sense of things, to control outcomes.

At times, that’s been useful. But what begins as protection can quietly become a way of life.

What once kept me safe had started keeping me separate – from my aliveness, from intimacy, from the felt experience of being human.

My friend Kaye recently told me about an orchard on a piece of her property that she and her husband, Iain, are bringing back to life. The trees had these plastic guards on them, and they had clearly been in place for many years. The guards and protectors are important when trees are young. It helps them survive the early years, but they were no longer needed and hadn’t been for a long time.

When she finally removed them, she saw deep marks where the trees had pressed against the sleeves. They looked like raw wounds, filled with bugs and scars.

The trees had continued to grow, even with the tree guards. They were twisted, gnarly, and had some bumps and scars, but were still alive and strong.

And, once the protectors were removed, it didn’t take long for those “wounds” to heal. All they needed was air and light.

That image stayed with me.

The trees kept growing. It’s their nature – just as it’s ours.

The guards did shape the way they grew. Our mental protectors do the same. They don’t stop our evolution, but they do affect how we experience it.

The other realization that came in my conversation with Kaye is that we often say growth feels uncomfortable. But maybe what’s uncomfortable isn’t the expansion, maybe it’s the resistance.

What’s creating constriction isn’t the fear of the unknown, fear of what others will think, fear of getting it wrong, or fear that we’ll look like fools.

It’s holding onto protections that no longer fit.

The constriction, tightness, and discomfort are a normal part of letting old, conditioned needs and protectors fall away. But we misunderstand.

Rather than meeting it, being with it, and feeling the feelings and sensations, we resist and jump to our minds to problem-solve, understand, or control.

We’re resisting the felt experience. We misunderstand and try to protect ourselves.

Not realizing that it’s not the feeling that creates our suffering, it’s the story we tell ourselves about it, it’s the conditioned protectors gripping us a little tighter.

For me, that resistance felt like blah. A subtle binding in the body. When I tried to analyze it or fix it, the feeling only tightened. But when I allowed myself to feel it – without interpretation – movement returned.

Aliveness returned.

The flatness wasn’t something to solve. It was showing me that I’d stepped out of direct contact with life (with the air and light).

I had old “tree guards” on that were no longer needed. Those old habits of running to mind to sort things out, keep myself safe, were no longer needed.

By ‘being with’ blah, flat, uninspired, rather than trying to fix, solve, or interpret it, I saw something meaningful for me. I allowed myself just to give that feeling air and light, without all the added thinking about what it means.

Through that, I had the realization that I’d been living in a removed state, living more in my head than in my life, and yet what I desired was more joy, connection, intimacy, and aliveness.

The shift that was calling to me via flat, numb, and blah was a shift from within. A deep desire to be IN my life, fully.  It had nothing to do with my work or home.

That realization has been a beautiful pointer for me.

What if we didn’t have all these conditioned protectors? The ones that say don’t be too vulnerable, don’t want too much, don’t get it wrong. What might life show us?

We say we want intimacy, but then protect ourselves from feeling exposed.

We want to follow what feels alive and interesting in our work, but then hold back from the sensations of uncertainty or being seen.

And yet what my soul craves isn’t safety. It’s aliveness. The full-bodied participation with life, even when it stirs me, even when it’s messy.

Letting life in isn’t another practice or project. It’s not something to perfect.

It’s a remembering. A noticing when we’ve drifted into the mind, and a gentle return to the body, to breath, to sensation, to now.

Because when we stop holding life at arm’s length, it naturally rushes in.

So maybe the question isn’t How do I live more fully? Maybe it’s how much life am I willing to let in?

Like those trees, we grow either way. But when the old protectors loosen, even for a moment, light – life – touches more of us, and we can touch more of life.

And maybe that’s what aliveness really is: not something we create, but something we finally let in.