September 25, 2020
Feeling Together In Embodied Community
Community. This word is so important to me at the moment, as new layers of its magic are revealed.
I removed myself from the realm of social media in May for myriad reasons, a big one being that it’s so easy for me to fall into in the social media vortex throughout my day, surrounded by stuff that mesmerizes me and keeps me feeling a dull sense of “good” within a false sense of community. When it comes to real community, it’s so easy to only invest time with my people in person to share good times, be pleasant, and have fun. It can be challenging to stick around when the harder, uglier, more vulnerable feelings come up. It’s easier to slip away from my people and return to my social media bubble to be soothed by that one dimensional space that always serves me exactly what I ordered: shallow relief. But it’s just a blip, an isolated hit of dopamine that soothes and then leaves me feeling empty.
Why do I feel empty in those moments? What’s going on? A pattern has ignited. Something has triggered discomfort in me—I know that because I find myself on Insta again, without a clear reason, not even remembering having picked up the phone. My body knows I need relief before I even know I need it. But then, the emptiness. I have come to learn that feeling of emptiness is a brilliant indicator from my body that, when I felt a disturbance in the force and chose to turn to social media or Netflix, I didn’t do what my body was really needing. Imagine if you were hungry and, instead of heeding the call of the hunger pangs and eating something, you hopped on a screen instead. There’s a good chance you’d continue to literally feel empty.
In those blink-of-an-eye moments that reflexively send me to take solace on screens, I’ve learned that I’m simply being invited to complete a natural cycle. Just like the natural processes of feeling hungry when my body needs food which then gets me to eat, or equally importantly, feeling the urge to vomit when my body needs to expel something leading me to do so (usually a much harder bodily urge to deny, which is why I call upon its power here, to highlight body talk we cannot easily override), when I feel emotion, I am simply being called to feel my feelings. Feeling our feelings helps the body to do something it actively does (and NEEDS to do) every single moment: self-regulate. Adjust temperature and heart rate and hormone levels and breath. These are some of the ingredients, constantly adjusting to every piece of input we encounter, that create the sensations we experience in the body as “feelings.” If we allow these feelings to rise, crest, and recede, we are allowing our body to do exactly what it needs to do to stay healthy and feel safe.
Think of feelings like a toddler. Imagine her crying nonstop about something that upset her. Hot face, huge tears, shallow breathing, loud vocalizing. But then, her attention is caught by something fascinating. Her tears stop instantly. Her facial expression changes to awe with a hint of a smile. The flush in her cheeks begins to lessen. She takes a deep breath. This ability to leave the last experience behind and instantly change gears, something cars and babies do easily, is something most adult nervous systems struggle with.
Why?
You may have an idea, story or even diagnosis that explains why to you. But of all the varieties of explanation we have around strongly charged, usually-seen-as-“negative” feelings, the story most of us hold is this: I’m broken. There is something wrong with me. I don’t know how to do this right.
Most of us have been raised to fear and/or not feel our feelings. We’re often afraid of feeling them in front of each other, adding the feeling of vulnerability and fear of ridicule, rejection, or worse to the initial emotional cocktail, causing it to intensify. Our fear of feelings is fuel to their fire. If we try to feel our feelings by ourselves, we often sense that we will be absolutely consumed by them. So, more often than not, we just…don’t feel them. We’ve been socialized to do this as we grow up hearing things like “don’t get angry; remain calm; get yourself together” etc. When we put a lid on this incredibly natural process, that lid causes a build up of emotion, like a geyser, which then often manifests as an explosion or implosion of feeling at inopportune times. Imagine being a kid and, instead of being patiently potty trained (“this is where and how we go when we gotta go), being told harshly time and time again “don’t pee, get yourself together.” After a not-so-long-while, you’d just end up peeing all over the place and pissing off (pun intended) your parents. The same thing happens with feelings. If we don’t feel them, they let loose all over the place. And if emotion is not accessible through emotive expression because we’ve been programmed to not even go there (“boys don’t cry”), the charge can explode in violence or implode as aches, pains, and disease in the body. This age-old wisdom is historically unknown or ignored by modern medicine. Luckily, the physiological and psychological importance of feeling our feelings is starting to be recognized again (See Dr. John Sarno’s work for more on this phenomenon.)
For many of us, this “putting a lid on it” has been the best we could do with the information we’ve been given and the fast life pace we’ve fallen into, which doesn’t encourage us to stop and feel. While there is a kind of wisdom in not feeling (it’s intelligent for the body to not make us vulnerable if we feel like we’re going to be hurt), it is maladaptive. There is another, intrinsically human and ancient way to approach this stalemate around feeling our feelings. So let’s put a fat pause on the “it’s unsafe to feel my feelings” narrative for a moment, as our bodies, minds, and hearts are exhausted from trying to keep up with this misinformation.
We’ve already touched on the physiological truth of how and why feelings. But a greater truth: Feelings are magic. They are proof that we are alive and that everything is in solid working order—the body, mind, and spirit are communicating with each other as we move through the world, moment by moment, guiding us toward exactly what we need to do—eat, sleep, pee, get closer to someone, move further away from something—all with the body language of feelings.
How do we relearn how to do this? How do we take back our birthright to feel our feelings, keep our bodies healthy and safe, be responsible about how we express them and encourage others to do the same?
We learn from each other.
As creatures with mirror neurons that constantly feel and echo back and forth between bodies showing that we are meant to exist and learn in packs, humans have felt feelings together for ages. Since the dawn of time, communities have gathered to grieve loudly, dance, sing, yell, pound drums, all embodied forms of coexisting that encourage feelings to be alive and move with healthy expression from, not stagnant in, the body. Yes, we have massively fallen away from this tradition as a whole to our detriment. Yet cultures and communities remain who actively cultivate strength, resiliency, and a sense of unity by maintaining practices like the ones listed above, such as embodied worship or mourning rituals. By gathering in this way, we learn by emoting in front of each other that it will not destroy us to feel our feelings. On the contrary, it connects us. We empathize with one another. It leaves us with a sense of real (not empty) relief and clears energetic space for new potential in the body and mind to flow in. It’s like gathering as a group to clean house, something that takes a lot less time to do together, and something we must do regularly to not literally get trapped in the house or sick from the buildup that has accumulated. And we don’t have to do this as a group activity (although doing it this way is so normalizing and powerful). We can find a friend or two or a great therapist to be a witnessing presence for us as we tap into this well of emotions and sensations. And as we directly experience the refreshing, life-giving feeling of this phenomenon together, we start to be able to hold that kind of emotional space for ourselves, by ourselves, when needed. But, for most of us, as paradoxical as it may feel at times, we must develop this ability to feel our feelings among others first.
This is the world I want to live in, one that acknowledges this simple cycle: A call of nature to feel (and heal), and supportive response by me and my community (no matter how small) to allow that flow. That’s why I have returned to social media, as I endeavor to do what so many others are using that space for, as a tool to cultivate in-person healing and connection. We need each other. Just as we are hurt among one another and feel pain in the body, so do we heal and celebrate in community, through the body. It is an active, never-ending process. Now is the time to re-member who we are, to remember that our feelings are not here to destroy us, but to instruct and guide us, so that we can unite and face the unprecedented challenges of our time, challenges that I believe cannot be solved without coming to terms with our feelings.