The Wisdom of Our Emotions
I've been reflecting a lot lately on what it looks like to hold space for myself and others from a place of compassion, curiosity, and staying in my body.
While each of these takes practice to cultivate, that last piece of staying in and with your body seems like it should be much easier than it actually is. After all, we are our bodies. So, why is it so challenging?
When I say staying with your body what I mean is staying with the feelings and sensations that stir up in your physical body—a.k.a. your emotions—when they arise and not trying to escape them.
I know this asking a lot.
We each experience exhaustion, heartache, loneliness, longing, and an overabundance of other hard feelings. And every human, at least in some way, has experienced a sense of feeling unsafe in their body. We exist in a culture that upholds painful stories of oppression and domination that get passed down through generations, and we’re then fed them as truth. The seed of self-doubt and distrust is often planted deep into our psyche so early in life that we don’t even notice it’s there. We unknowingly live out this pain, letting it spill out onto everyone around us—and the cycle continues.
As a way of coping with these difficult and extremely uncomfortable sensations, we learn to adapt to the fact that they exist at all. For most of us this adaptation comes in the form of escape. We avoid, ignore, deny, refuse, fight, shrink, defend, or conceal aspects of ourselves. We are so masterful at seeking solutions to protect us from the pain.
The only catch here is that these attempts at safety are unknowingly shutting us off from ourselves, from the wealth of wisdom we hold inside. In eluding these more challenging feelings, we miss out on the possibility for healing, growth, true intimacy, and a full expression of our authentic self.
I know for me, when I become “compromised” emotionally my instinct is often to make the feeling go away. I just want it to stop. This may result in denial and fooling myself into believing I can push through and ignore its existence—even though I know that never works out. Or, it may look like becoming so fixated on finding a solution to remedy the feeling that I end up swirling in my own anxiety-provoking thoughts. In my experience, that flood of possible remedies has only proved to exacerbate the overwhelm.
In such an effort to escape the signals and intelligence of our body, we turn this part of ourself into something to overcome or outsmart. We make ourself the enemy.
In all my repeated attempts at emotional domination, I've discovered that this is where compassion and curiosity come in. We offer ourselves such a gift when we can find the courage to accept our imperfect humanity, question the stories that have shaped us, and seek wisdom in the sophistication of our emotions.
We are guided into a deeper understanding of why we learned to adapt the way we did. We reclaim those parts of ourself we felt were lost, or believed we were never capable of. We are faced with beautiful truths about how we are innately designed for expansion. We realize how to hold ourselves with tenderness and grace, and it becomes easier to offer that same generosity to others. We gradually find a sense of internal peace. We learn what it means to love.
A few reflections:
What would happen if I stay with my body? What might I learn? How might I heal?
Where are my edges when it comes to offering myself grace and understanding?
Is self-compassion the true key to understanding how to love another in their full humanity?
