Life Is Not a Concept: Finding the Courage to Experience
by Katie Simons, PharmD, BCPS
We just spent a week in the jungle of Costa Rica. I love being in the jungle—it is immersive and wild, but never truly still. The air is thick with life; everything breathes, everything moves. The frogs sing through the night. The howler monkeys begin their guttural calls around 4:30 a.m., just before the sky begins to shift. The ocean crashes steadily in the near distance. Even in darkness, the land pulses with energy. There’s a rhythm in the jungle—a primal intelligence—that everything seems to follow. Including us.
The week began with a sweat lodge—a purification of body, mind, spirit, and story. From there, everything deepened. We held three medicine ceremonies throughout the retreat, each one a portal requiring a level of presence that can't be accessed through thought. These ceremonies call something ancient from within—the parts of us that speak only in sensation. The parts that know how to shake, sob, purge, sing, and soften. The parts that modern life rarely makes space for, and that ask to be met with full presence.
We shared fresh food that made the body hum with energy. We breathed deeply. We moved our bodies in walks to the ocean and in yoga practice. The women gathered in ritual, steaming and toning, moving and humming—tuning into the language of the wild feminine—while the men drummed in the distance. There is a knowing in these spaces that transcends language or theory. A primal recognition of what it means to be human. Inside the moment. Inside ourselves. Inside the collective.
Each experience throughout the week was a transmission of reality—not the kind we read about or see on screens, but one that lives in the flesh, in the immediacy of the moment. It was real. So real that my soul whispered urgently, Please, don’t forget. Don’t forget this connection to the hum of life.
Returning home felt harder than usual. Even though I live a quiet life and have intentionally stripped away much of the noise that once surrounded me, reintegrating into the pace and structure of modern life felt disorienting. Heavy. Disconnected. Overcomplicated. Even seeing my clients, whom I love, felt oddly flattened by the digital interface between us. My body ached for the rhythm I had just come from.
This experience left me reflecting on how we live now—and what it would take to stay connected to that primal, present part of being human. When did real life become something we only access on retreat? Why does it take leaving our lives to remember what it feels like to truly live? And perhaps more importantly: what are we missing, here and now, when we mistake stimulation for connection? When our days are full, but our souls are starved?
I’ve been sitting with these questions since returning, feeling the contrast between a life that moves through the body—through sensuality and felt experience—and one that plays out mostly in the mind. A life spent trying to understand rather than inhabit. And the more I notice that difference, the more I believe: Life is not a concept to grasp, but a presence to return to.
Life is not a Compilation of Information
One of the clearest things I felt after returning home was this: Life isn’t something we’re meant to strive to understand. It isn’t a concept to master or a process to perfect. Life is not something we study or figure out or get right. It isn’t something we access only after reading the right books, listening to enough podcasts, or implementing the perfect morning routine. There is no school of life with a curriculum to study. Life just is and it’s here. Life is an experience.
And more than that, it’s not about arriving anywhere. It’s not about finally having enough insight, or building the perfect yoga flow, or getting to a place where we never feel fear again. Life isn’t a destination. There is no "end point" of healing. No gold star for perfect behavior. Life just asks, again and again, Can you be here now? Can you experience what’s in front of you with breath and presence?
But that’s not how we’ve been trained. Our culture rewards outcomes. We’re taught to seek clarity, mastery, efficiency. To believe that if we just learn enough, plan well enough, and improve ourselves thoroughly enough, we’ll finally feel safe enough to live. And that belief of proving ourselves and striving for an endpoint doesn’t stop at the perceived edge of “real” life and healing work. It follows us into all the spaces.
Even in healing and spiritual spaces, it’s easy to drift into abstraction. We often end up collecting more concepts than we embody. We speak the language of presence, embodiment, intuition — but how often are we truly in it? We know the steps of nervous system regulation, but do we pause to feel what our nervous systems are actually saying? Even this article — helpful, maybe — is still another layer of understanding. But understanding isn’t the same as lived experience. This article is simply my thoughts jotted down through the symbols of language — it’s simply concept.
Now, I’m not saying stop reading. But invitation to tap into your experience as you read these words. How do they make you feel? What happens in your body as you intake these perspectives?
It’s so tempting to stay in the realm of ideas. The language of healing can become its own refuge — meditation, intuition, shadow work, forgiveness — all concepts that describe a process meant to be experienced. But sometimes, we stay in the study of these things as a way to delay the actual living. We keep gathering information while quietly avoiding the discomfort of changing anything about how we move through the world.
The New Age movement adds another layer of complexity. Conversations about ascension, spirit guides, starseeds, and other dimensions can be fascinating. But without grounding in the body and in daily, human experience, those narratives can quickly become distractions. They offer an illusion of expansion while bypassing the discomfort, the nuance, and the beauty of life here on Earth.
I’m not against insight or knowledge, and I hold no prejudice against any forms of spirituality. I love a good mystical rabbit hole. But healing — real healing — doesn’t live in the mind. It lives in the decision to be here now, in all the mess and beauty. Embodiment isn’t a buzzword. It’s how your body feels when you stop trying to manage everything and actually arrive.
When we’re disconnected from the body, the world of information becomes a kind of drug. It makes us feel like we’re doing something. Like we’re making progress and in control. But it’s simply an illusion. It’s just another way to bypass the discomfort of being with what is.
Because here’s the thing: we can spend years "working on ourselves" and still not be in our lives. We can collect tools but never use them. We can understand everything and still avoid the one decision that would set us free. And that’s not a failure. It’s a very human pattern. But it’s also a place we don’t have to stay.
The real work doesn’t always look impressive. It’s not always graceful. It’s raw. It’s vulnerable. It’s awkward sometimes. But it’s alive. And once you’ve tasted that kind of presence — whether through ceremony, nature, intimacy, or silence — it becomes harder and harder to pretend that anything else is enough.
The Loop of Fear: What Keeps Us Captive
If life is meant to be lived — not studied or strategized — then why do so many of us struggle to step into it fully?
Fear.
Not the loud, obvious kind that shouts “danger,” but the quieter kind that whispers, “maybe later.” The kind that hides behind logic and responsibility. The kind that dresses up as overthinking, analysis paralysis, hesitation, endless preparation. It wraps itself in the language of self-awareness, good judgment, and “being realistic,” but what it really does is keep us from moving.
We wait. For clarity. For confidence. For a sign. For the timing to be right. We tell ourselves we’re just being intentional, when in reality, we’re scared shitless.
And fear makes sense. The nervous system is designed to protect us, and the unknown registers as unsafe in our psyche. Presence requires vulnerability. Living fully means opening to the possibility of rejection, failure, discomfort, change. It asks us to let go of control — and that’s terrifying when control is the thing we’ve built our identity or safety around.
So we stay put. We collect more information. We chase a sense of "readiness" that never quite comes. We numb out with social media, with self-improvement, with productivity. We orbit around the thing we want without ever stepping into it. As stated in “The Man in the Arena” by Teddy Roosevelt, we stay safe in the stands, occasionally pointing out “where the doer of deeds could have done them better.”
And from the outside, it can all look very responsible — like healing, even. But many of us aren’t stuck because we don’t know enough. We’re stuck because we’re afraid to move. Afraid to get it wrong. Afraid that the version of ourselves we meet on the other side of that leap might disrupt the life we’ve carefully built.
Comfort becomes the hiding place. But comfort without aliveness isn’t peace — it’s stagnation. It’s a slow drift away from the pulse of our own vitality. It’s the illusion of safety wrapped around the quiet ache of not living.
And sure, the fear asks valid questions: What if it doesn’t work? What if I feel something I can’t handle? What if everything falls apart? But it rarely asks the one question that matters most: What if I don’t try? What if I never find out what’s possible?
Fear doesn’t go away when we’ve gathered enough knowledge. It softens when we act in spite of it and exercise courage. When we speak the truth. When we show up shaking but show up anyway. That’s where life begins to shift. Not in the knowing — in the doing.
This isn’t a call to recklessness. It’s a call to honesty. To discern when fear is holding us captive. And to remember that the loop only breaks when we act. When we speak the truth. When we step forward unsure but willing. That moment of movement is the beginning of everything real.
The Trap of Comfort and the Illusion of Safety
Something I just mentioned briefly, but I feel is worth circling back to is comfort. Comfort is one of the most seductive forces in modern life. It’s presented to us as the reward — the goal. A comfortable home, a stable job, a predictable routine, enough money to avoid worry, enough perceived control to avoid chaos. It’s what we’re taught to chase, and it’s what we’re praised for having.
But comfort is tricky. Because when we don’t feel safe in our bodies or anchored in our truth, comfort becomes a stand-in for peace — and it’s not the same thing. Real peace nourishes. Comfort, on the other hand, often just numbs.
It lulls us into complacency. Into dullness. It silences the inner voice that’s been whispering, There’s more for you than this. It convinces us to stay in the job, the relationship, the identity that doesn’t feel alive anymore — not because it’s aligned, but because it’s easier than stepping into the unknown.
Comfort becomes the hiding place. But comfort without vitality isn’t peace — it’s stagnation. It’s the soft, subtle seduction of a life that looks good on paper but feels disconnected inside. It’s an illusion of safety that keeps us circling the same patterns, believing we’re doing the work while quietly avoiding the uncomfortable edge where growth actually lives.
And the real trap? Comfort masquerades as safety. It gives us predictability, low risk, familiar terrain. But actual safety — the kind our nervous systems long for — comes from deeper places. It comes from regulation, connection, self-trust, and being in integrity with ourselves, all of which requires the experience of living. When we chase comfort as a proxy for safety, we end up shrinking our lives to fit inside what feels manageable. We stop growing. We stop listening. We lose touch with our intuition and our passions.
This illusion of safety shows up everywhere: in jobs that drain us but pay the bills, in relationships where we can’t fully be ourselves but don’t want to be alone, in the refusal to try something new because “what if it doesn’t work?” And what gets lost in that calculation is the question we’re often too afraid to ask: What if staying safe means giving up on living fully?
In this way, comfort starts to cost us something. It costs our vitality. Our creativity. Our hunger for something real. It keeps us in maintenance mode, moving through the motions of a life that looks fine on the outside but feels lifeless inside. And maybe that’s why so many people hit a wall in midlife. That moment when we wake up and realize we haven’t really been living — we’ve just been maintaining comfort. It’s the reckoning point where the soul speaks louder than the fear, and the old ways of numbing or performing just don’t work anymore.
It’s not that comfort is inherently wrong. It has its place. The body needs rest. The nervous system needs moments of ease. But when comfort becomes the goal instead of the support, it slowly begins to shrink our lives.
Real living is risky. It invites discomfort, unpredictability, and change. But it also holds the beauty, connection, creativity, and joy we’re starving for. Eventually, we have to ask ourselves: Is the life I’ve built around being safe worth the parts of myself I’ve silenced to keep it intact?
Because staying small might feel easier in the short term, but over time, it erodes something essential. And that erosion is often subtle — until it’s not. Until the body starts to protest, or the soul begins to grieve, or life throws us the rupture that forces everything into question. Sometimes we get to choose that turning point consciously. And sometimes life chooses it for us. But either way, the invitation is the same: to loosen our grip on the illusion of safety, and reach for something that feels alive — even if it asks more of us than we’ve ever given before.
The Screens, Nervous System, and the Weight of Overwhelm
Coming home from the jungle, the most jarring part wasn’t just the return to screens. It was what they did to my nervous system. The jungle had its own rhythm — a constant one, yes, but a natural one. There was no silence, but there was also no static. Every sound was organic, every movement part of a larger pulse that was full of life. Back home, I noticed how quickly I felt scattered, fatigued, disoriented — even though I wasn’t doing much. I wasn’t overloaded with tasks. I was overloaded with input.
That’s the paradox of modern life: so many of us feel completely overwhelmed, not because we’re too engaged with life, but because we’re barely in it. We’re overstimulated but undernourished. We spend hours with our minds spinning, scrolling, consuming, absorbing content that was never meant to be digested at this pace — all while our bodies remain stagnant, our breath shallow, our gaze fixed on glowing rectangles. We take in more content in a day than our ancestors did in over a month, and somehow we wonder why we can’t sleep, focus, or feel joy.
Our nervous systems evolved to regulate in response to the real world — eye contact, co-regulation, nature, rhythm, movement, the subtle cues of voice and facial expression. These are the signals that tell the body, you’re safe here. But through a screen, those signals are incomplete. It can mimic connection, but it doesn’t feed us the way presence does. When our systems are flooded with half-signals and surface noise, we start to fray.
And because the digital world is so noisy, we begin to believe we’re “behind.” We think something’s wrong with us. So we double down on productivity, click into another tab, consume more information, try to optimize. But the real issue isn’t that we’re falling behind. It’s that we’re disconnected. What we’re craving isn’t efficiency — it’s presence.
What’s worse is that the more overwhelmed we feel, the more likely we are to reach for the very tools that perpetuate the cycle. A few scrolls to escape. A few more tabs to open. Another video, another voice in our heads, another opinion to consider, another digital hit of stimulation. But the soul knows the difference between connection and distraction. The body knows the difference between nourishment and noise.
Eventually, this digital overwhelm begins to feel like our baseline. We forget what it feels like to be in our bodies. To take in only what’s meant for us. To exhale fully, without distraction. To listen to our own inner voice without ten others chiming in. That’s why reentry after an immersive experience in nature, ceremony, or deep presence can feel so sharp. The contrast becomes undeniable. It reminds us how alive we’re capable of feeling. And once we remember, even the “normal” ways of living can start to feel intolerable.
This isn’t to say that technology is inherently bad. It isn’t. It’s a tool — a powerful one. It’s an issue when we feel like we have to stay plugged into it. When it replaces life rather than supports it, it fractures our connection to ourselves, to each other, and to the pulse of what’s real.
So if you’ve been feeling overwhelmed, consider this: maybe it’s not that you’re doing too much. Maybe it’s that you’re not doing enough of what brings you home — to your body, your breath, your heartbeat. To connection. To meaning. To the experience of life.
Reclaiming Aliveness: A Different Way Forward
At some point, a deeper question begins to surface beneath all the busyness, the seeking, the planning: What am I actually doing here?
Not in theory — but truly. What am I waiting for before I say yes to the life that’s right in front of me?
We tell ourselves we’re waiting for clarity, for confidence, for the right timing. But often, we’re just out of rhythm. Moving fast, but not deep. Filling our calendars and our screens, but starving for depth. We’ve confused stimulation with engagement. And in that hum of doing, we’ve forgotten what it means to actually live.
It’s a strange contradiction — we’re overwhelmed, but under-experienced. Exhausted, but undernourished. There’s too much in our heads, and not enough in our bodies. So we reach for distraction, for digital escape, for the next thing to fix or optimize. But what we really need is to return.
Aliveness doesn’t mean more motion. It doesn’t mean fixing something inside ourselves. Sometimes, aliveness is the pause. The breath. The willingness to feel. It’s not about productivity — it’s about presence. It’s not a rush of adrenaline — it’s the steady pulse of truth underneath everything else.
Aliveness is sensual. Not sexualized, but sensory. Sensuality is presence made tangible. It’s the sacred act of paying attention to the present moment through your body — through taste, touch, sound, light, breath. Through noticing the wind on your face, the lump in your throat, the temperature of the air, or the taste of your tea. It’s feeling your way through the moment instead of performing your way out of it.
And it doesn’t require a massive overhaul. Sometimes aliveness looks like moving your body in a new way. Speaking the truth you’ve been holding in. Taking one quiet step toward what you know in your bones you’re meant for. Sometimes it’s canceling the thing. Sometimes it’s saying yes. The form doesn’t matter as much as the presence behind it.
This isn’t a call to force yourself into presence or pressure yourself to be more aligned. It’s a gentle invitation — to feel again. To return to the places in you that still hold vitality. To stop running from discomfort long enough to hear what it’s trying to say.
Because life isn’t waiting at the end of a plan. It’s happening now — in the sensuality of breath, in the rawness of emotion, in the quiet spaces that still remember what’s real. And when we say yes to those places, something begins to wake up. Something sacred. Something unmistakably alive.
A Return to What’s Real - Life is an Experience
The truth is, most of us aren’t starving for more knowledge or information. We’re starving for connection to ourselves, nature, and others. For presence. For the feeling of being in our lives instead of managing them from the outside. We crave depth, not data. Sensation, not strategy. We want to feel something real.
The bottom line is life has no inherent meaning outside the experiencing of it. There is no finish line or endpoint or prize waiting that is going to suddenly settle our minds and grant us peace or three wishes. The old adage "It's not about the endpoint, but the journey" is so cliche and also so very true.
Living isn’t about getting it right — it’s about being in the experience of it.
Being in the joy, the ache, the stillness, the stretch. Being in your body, even when it’s trembling. Being in your life, even when it’s messy. And from this place of presence, trying new things. Even small shifts can have a large impact.
Yes, you will make mis-takes. Congratulations! When you do, you then have a the opportunity to take-2 and try again. This is how we learn.
The path to this kind of living isn’t forceful or grand. It’s tender. Subtle. It begins in small, often silent choices: to feel what you’re feeling. To breathe into the moment. To move a little slower. To let something matter again.
And the more we do that, the more we start to hear the quiet pulse beneath the noise — the rhythm of something alive. The sensuality of being with what’s here. The voice of intuition rising up when the distractions die down. Life doesn’t always speak in epiphanies. Often, it whispers. And we learn to listen by being still enough to notice.
You don’t need to know the whole plan. You don’t need to feel ready. You don’t need to fix yourself first. You don’t need to anticipate all the things that could go wrong and try to avoid them. You just need to begin — to say “yes” to the present moment. To letting the moment touch you. To letting yourself feel — even if it’s imperfect, even if it’s vulnerable, even if you don’t know what happens next.
Because this is it. This moment, this breath, this heartbeat — this is life. Not what happens after the healing. Not what begins when you finally arrive. But what’s unfolding now, in the rawness, in the rhythm, in the simplicity of being willing to live it. Life is a ceremony if we are present with the experience of it.
And maybe — just maybe — that’s all life has ever been asking of us.
To be here. To feel it. To experience. To live.
