Perhaps the most intimate question we can ask one another: How are you?

When we ask someone this question, we are inviting the other to allow us into their reality, their innermost world: how they are. In the asking of this question, we invite a permission for the other to allow us into their real-time state of their real-time experience.

How are you?

“The world is not as the world is. The world is as you are.” ~Talmud

So. How are you?

To really receive the full answer to this question, there is an exceptional value in knowing for one’s self, how you are. For if you truly know how you are, you have the capacity to be authentic and relay with full honesty your state to another.

This then opens the invitation to inquiring Shakespeare’s famous statement “know thyself.” In knowing one’s self, there has to be awareness. This awareness is rooted within the intimacy of self-awareness. 

Intimacy. Into me, you see. Intimacy. 

Intimacy can be defined as closeness, a private atmosphere. In being intimate with oneself, there is a turning inward to see, which is really to say receive, the awareness of you. There is a retraction from the external world to becoming focused on the one constant in each person’s life, their Self. A true checking in. 

So, how are you?

Again, to do this, one must turn inward. Retracting the outward sensations and expressions and turn within. In drawing the awareness towards one’s self, in paying attention to the subtleties of how the body is softly in response with its environment, with its own thoughts animating sensations throughout the template of the body, the mind-body can retract from outer attention and actually expand into an inner receptive state of heightened awareness of “how am I?”

“The world is not as the world is, the world is how you are.” ~Talmud.

In knowing the honest fullness of how you are, you can start to see the way your inner state (the way you are) is predetermining your experience of your reality. 

“How we think of the world, precedes the world.” ~Anonymous 

For these reasons, engaging in practices that create the space to quiet the mind, receive one’s inner state, process past experiences (that have left impressions within, aka samskaras, aka subluxation), and thereby allow us to simply receive the totality of the experience from a clear slate, with no bias, is incredibly beneficial with investigating and offering an honest response to “How are you?”

So. How are you?

Personal practices that have assisted me with my discovery of how I am have been meditations out of the yogic tradition, chiropractic, mindful movement practice and time in Nature. Perhaps it’s no surprise then that I am a chiropractor, as it’s the natural, self attuning engagements within life that have connected me so deeply to myself.

May the sensitivity of your sensations ever inform you of your state and serve as a guide for clarity in the experiences you create.