Presence, Nervousness, and a Rogue Rosemary Leaf

Every year, I begrudgingly schedule all of my annual doctor's appointments. And because I am a firm believer in making the unbearable more bearable, I purposefully book them in a little nearby city I love, so I can reward myself with a visit to one of my favorite restaurants afterward. Annual exams? Not fun. A whole day carved out for self-care and respite? Much more doable. That's how a medical obligation quietly becomes something I almost look forward to.

I sat down, looked at the menu, and saw exactly what I expected to see: the most delicious things. Among them, a rosemary vanilla latte. Obviously, I ordered it. When it arrived and I brought it to my nose, I was met with a rush of rosemary. And something about that stopped me. Because the fact that I could actually smell those herbs, that they landed on me and registered, told me something important: I was present. I was here.

This is something I tell clients often, and sitting there with my latte, I was reminded of it myself.

We are only experiencing life through the nervous system state we are currently in. If you're in fight-or-flight mode, or deep in that low, shut-down dorsal vagal state, it becomes genuinely difficult to smell the rosemary. Your system isn't oriented toward savoring. It's oriented toward surviving. The fact that I could pick up those scents told me my nervous system was, at least in that moment, somewhere safer.

Learn more about the states of the nervous system here.

So I decided to lean into it.

I pushed myself to be even more present, just to explore what that felt like. I put my phone face down. I didn't open my book. I took a little bit of my own advice, which is that discomfort is often where growth lives, and I decided to just... be there. In the corner of my favorite comfortable restaurant. Alone. No one is watching. No performance required.

Ironically, I recently started yoga teacher training, and one thing I've been learning about meditation is that eating can itself be meditative. You can bring your full awareness to food - smell, texture, taste, temperature, all of it. So that's what I tried to do. Not perfectly. Not even close.

I had a strong urge to open some app approximately every ten seconds. I checked my phone three times, mostly because my sister needed some support, which, fair. But for the most part, I stayed with it. I stared out the window. I noticed my food. I had what I would genuinely describe as a lovely interaction with my server, who turned out to be wonderfully chill and kind. The meal was, in large part, just me sitting in stillness with my herb-topped latte and a window view.

And then something interesting happened. I noticed that whenever I started thinking about writing this post, I began eating faster. Same thing when I thought about what I needed to do after I left. My pace picked up. My body was responding to thoughts about the future by rushing through the present. At one point, I thought, what if my food gets cold? And sure enough, I sped up.

If I hadn't been paying attention, I would never have noticed how much my worry was shaping what I was actually doing.

So I intentionally slowed back down. I talked myself through it: the food is not cold. You are eating it right now. I tried to release the mental to-do list that was quietly unraveling my presence from the inside. It worked, imperfectly, and that was enough.

Did I achieve perfect stillness? Absolutely not. And I am genuinely, enthusiastically okay with that. Anyone who knows me knows I'm more than happy to admit my faults and stumbles because I believe naming them out loud is how we take the shame out of them. It keeps us humble. It lets life remain a growing, learning process, which is exactly what it is.

I enjoyed my meal. I learned something about myself. And I'll probably do it a little better the next time around.

P.S. As absolutely delicious as that rosemary vanilla latte was, I should mention that at the very bottom of my last sip, a rogue rosemary leaf was waiting. And not in a gentle way. It was quite pokey, and I was met with a little jab to the back of the throat as a parting gift. I chose to take it as an opportunity to laugh. Presence and all that.

Learn more about mapping the nervous system here.