When emotions crack you open

I’d rather be surrounded by life. Any day, I would rather be surrounded by life. Here I am, a couple days before Thanksgiving. Something different is in the air, because people are back home or off work. Maybe they are like me, here to grab a cup of peace and spend a couple of hours in the liminal space.

Nestled at a table there are plants on either side of me. A money tree to my right, glossy green leaves, succulent. To my left, a textured juniper with micro repetitions of spikes and points. Aloes and snake plants. And plants I don’t know by name. I’m in a coffee shop - plants + coffee is its name. I like it.

I decided to write differently. Sometimes I write like an artist and sometimes I write like an educator. And today my artist wants to take up space.

I’m tickled by the way life is different than what could have been. I am tickled because there are a million ways to live and the way I’ve chosen is a discovery process where I’m surprised again and again to come into what is more natural and made for me than what I knew before.

Like I said, I like being surrounded by life. This isn’t a sterile coffee shop. Plants are guardians here all along the walls and on shelves dividing the space into little nooks. A big bright window is letting in light. There are lives in motion here. There’s a table of old friends gathering. A friend holding another’s newborn baby, standing and rocking her back and forth. A new dad with tired rings around his eyes, heart opened to a wrenching, melted layer of love previously unknown. I see it written across his chest as he catches up with folks he hasn’t seen in a while. All bringing their lives back home to gather around a table.

I’ll sneak glances up from time to time - right across from me is a cute queer couple. My heart got warm when they walked in the room. Something in me wants to jump up and embrace them, join them in a collective celebration of our queer hearts and bodies. I never knew that feeling before. But over the last few years, as I came into my own queerness and held hands in public for the first time with a woman, and started a life with her, I got to start getting the warm and tinglies when I see and meet other queer folks.

The glances I snuck at this couple showed me intimacy, closeness, and tender touch. A magnetism for each other. Sensuality, comfort, and beingness in their own bodies. Something about queerness - something about it tells me that we have had to go inside our skin enough, to explore ourselves enough to actually be ourselves even if it’s different than what we grew up seeing and having modeled for us.

Being surrounded by life feels good to me. In this moment, with my headphones on listening to instrumental beats, feeling the buzz from a sweet London fog, I feel gratitude, softness, and love beat through my insides in waves. Tears in my throat, gentle ones that express appreciation for seeing others slow down and be with each other. Sitting in a coffee shop to just be for a few hours.

The queer couple clinked their bagel sandwich halves together before lifting the halves to their mouths.

It made me smile.

My heart is cracking open, and that is why I can experience beauty. Love for people I don’t even know. Grief for what I have and don’t have, of where I’ve been and where I don’t know if I’m going. Grief so often comes coupled with gratitude. Expansiveness, in my hips, in my legs, it gives me the breathing room to let my tighter chest settle and be held. This is how I have the space to feel what it means to be a human.

I wrote a poem. I wrote this poem in one of the many, many wrestling matches I’ve been through around my relationship with emotions. It hurts to feel sometimes. It hurts so bad sometimes that we do anything we can to avoid it. We may not have been taught how to feel. We may not have had a loving caregiver who said - it’s okay. I’m here. You’re okay - and held us gently while we cried and raged. We may have had harsh words that said - stop crying. We may have had distractions, numbing our hurt with toys and cartoons. Whatever happened, we often lack a nuanced, embodied way to experience and move through emotions.

Here’s the poem:

Elder

One day I will be an elder
Old, crinkly, and cracked
cracked open and sprouted out
cracked open and filled with love and grief
so many times cracked open
that I breathe with the rhythm of cracking open

One day I will be an elder
smooth in my concept of life
after years of hemming and hawing
this is Experience and it is my gift

One day I will be an elder
And my body will be so close to ashes
That the universe finds all the space in me
To intermingle me with dust and pollen, honey and rain

I will be smiling, learned in laughter,
Steeped in time, restful in letting go

One day I will be an elder.

***

What do emotions mean to you?

Are they welcome?

Do you embrace them?

Push them away?

Do you know how to feel them and let them move through you?

Are some good and some bad?

Which ones are pleasant and unpleasant?

What’s the most challenging emotion for you to feel?

Are emotions an inconvenience?

How do emotions help you?

Participants in my offerings often arrive with emotional regulation challenges. They may not always have the language or experience to site emotions at the center of it. Instead, the language may be “stress” or “burn out” or “exhaustion” or “dysregulation” or “stuckness.”

But emotions are at the heart of all these things. When we don’t feel our emotions, feel them in our bodies not think them in our minds, these are the kinds of symptoms & experiences that arise.

Maybe we’ve never been shown that it’s safe to feel.

Or maybe it literally wasn’t safe to feel before. Could it become safe to feel now?

The wrestling matches I’ve been through with my own emotions tell me again and again that dysregulation often can be shifted into regulation by feeling. Feeling releases the charge of avoiding the feeling, fearing the feeling, being overwhelmed by the unfelt feeling. As long as we can do this without flooding ourselves (which is prevented with titration, going bit by bit, being gentle with ourselves, simultaneously feeling into being supported and ok), feeling is part of regulating. That’s where the safety of someone (whether a parent, partner, practitioner, or ourselves) telling us it’s ok comes in. That’s what makes it ok to feel. And ok to be human.

And there’s a deeper layer here. It’s about more than just dealing with the physiology of feeling. The deeper layer for me is the richness of a felt life. The richness of the love, the grief, and the joy. The sparkle of the gratitude, the expansiveness of the sadness that even in this moment here at this coffee shop make me feel alive.

I would rather feel my way through and have gained the riches of love, humility, and depth than hold some magic bullet through life that lets you get through without feeling hurt. I want a rich life.

Here’s another story.

Yesterday I drove 3 hours to see my mom. Here’s what happened: three hours of driving, 1.5 hours of a sluggish physical drag in my chest, of tired eyes and unfocused vision, of constricted hips and a restless heart. I arrived dysregulated (disconnected, constricted, tired, restless) and frustrated at my dysregulation. Frustrated because I wanted to feel easeful and bright and engaged. I stretched on the living room floor, breathed, felt my body. Got comfy, de-bra-ed myself (took my bra off - is that a word bc I want it to be). Still, the sticky icky dysregulation lingered and I hated that it was there.

Meanwhile I know it will be ok because I’m a somatic practitioner right, and I’ve been through this for years. Sensing and meeting the dysregulation. Doesn’t mean it isn’t still annoying sometimes.

So I pull out my journal and start writing because that’s what I feel called to do. Getting into my body with the stretching and breathing may not have fully moved the charge of the dysregulation, but it connected me with myself enough to feel the pull toward the journal and writing. I write and finally the emotions rise up. The swell in my heart, the tears. And with it clearing, settling. The unconscious avoiding/not noticing of the emotions underneath is the source of the dysregulation this time (and many times for me as I was once a chronic bottler of emotions as a stress management strategy).

The drive reminded me of a similar drive I took about 6 years ago. My first long drive by myself after getting chronically ill. I couldn’t drive at all at first, then only had the focus and stamina to drive short distances. Eventually I braved the 3 hour trip to my mom’s and the dysregulation was similar enough to this drive (though that time was much worse) that it brought the body memory up for me. And there it was - an unfelt grief from 6 years ago wanting to be felt now. Wanting to be seen and experienced now. Maybe I didn’t have the capacity/experience/insight/support to feel the amount of grief that was there 6 years ago. But I can now.

I think that visit was for my sister’s baby shower. During that visit I was wrought with dysregulation. I was back and forth between hyperaroused (anxious, panicky, fearful), and hypoaroused (down, numb, zoned out, shut down). Both were dysregulation. The quantity of sorrow in me at that time in my life, grief over what I had experienced with my health crisis and how long it was taking to change, fear that I may never be healthy enough to lead a “normal” life again or to have a family of my own, I don’t think I knew how to feel it then. Perhaps my system said - this is too much - and it masked it and contained it and managed it with the numbness, with the physiological panic and seemingly disordered ways of being. Thank you to my system which protected me from what may have been too much. Thank you to my system for healing and allowing me to feel more since then.

Emotional regulation. The safety to feel. The capacity to choose that you can wait to feel something because perhaps now is not the right time or would feel like too much for you. To be able to sense that, and to wait. But choosing to make the time later to feel it. Sensing when you’re in a safe environment to feel, or with a person who feels safe to witness and hold you in your feeling. To let go yet stay grounded through the strange moving and gripping bodily sensations of grief, pain, sorrow, fear. To dance through, hold, and cherish gratitude and joy without grasping onto them or fearing they will never return when they slip away. To be able to zoom out and see the cycles of life, the ups and downs, the build ups and breakthroughs that define our existence. Without getting lost. Without drowning or fearing we will drown. Finding a steadiness through it all. To have walked the path of feeling in our bodies enough that we trust it and perhaps even learn to favor, choose, and treasure it.

Nestled by life. New people have come and gone from the coffee shop. The baby in pink pajamas went home. The friends parted ways. The queer couple put on their coats and walked out together.

I’m blessed because I chose to create this space for myself. To organically feel my way through writing this blog post for you (and for me). I’m blessed because the life I was nestled in - the plants, and the families, and the couples - were here to support me in my creative process. Were here to remind me and reflect to me aspects of myself who have existed in the past. A younger me who ached to know she would still be able to conceive and raise a baby even if she had chronic lyme disease. An older me who got to experience for the first time being publicly queer. Who has had the ongoing surprising gifts of discovering what feels good to me (to her, or them). And it does feel like a pleasant surprise every time when a more true me steps into the light. And the me here and now, with futures still unknown but who contemplates and senses many possible futures, including an adopted baby with my partner who will one day be my wife.

I started writing this post because I wanted to talk about emotions. Then, I chose to surrender to the artist in me who wanted to weave together stories. Who wanted to dance along the creative path to connect what needed to be connected. And I got here. With an open, so open heart, feeling tender and grateful. Sensing tears as they gather in the air like angels around me. Held in the soft, quiet light of the cloudy day and the trees shedding their leaves into the street outside the window. I am illuminated and wistful. This is all so much of what it means to me to feel, to be alive. It is continuously surprising. I feel my emotions so I can be changed, touched, moved. So I can discover and become. So I can experience the fullness life has to offer in every ordinary moment.

***

What did this piece of writing bring up for you? What was your experience while reading? I’d love to hear. Email me nicole@themind-bodyway.com.

Warmly,
Nicole