Insides Out
For those of you just tuning in to my journey with Touch Practice, let me give a short recap of previous episodes.
- Years ago, I created a structure for myself, from purely selfish motives, to get held. For reasons I didn’t understand at the time, I felt like I wanted to be held, a lot, by a lot of different guys. I didn’t really know why or what I was doing, but intuitively, I created a space where a certain part of me that was broken could come out, be seen, be “held” in both a literal and figurative sense, heal, and integrate. In retrospect, that phase of the work seemed to take roughly 60 to 80 hours of being held, one hour at a time, one man at a time.
- Somewhat by accident and to my surprise, I found that the structure I created was not only great for me, it was also a very positive experience for lots of other people, who encouraged me to “write a book,” “tell other people about this,” or in one way or another, encouraged me to move from forest monk to evangelical in terms of how I carry the work.
- Doing the work has helped me practice sitting with other men and myself in an intensely observant way, grounded and attentive, noticing whatever happens to unfold. It has also taught me how to notice attraction (the desire to move closer) and aversion (the desire to push away) without acting on either one, but to simply keep sitting with the object of my attraction or aversion.
- This has resulted in my becoming less judgmental and opinionated about how men should be, what they should look like, how they should act, what they should feel, and so forth. A man is the way he is, and I sit with him, and myself, as we are, trying to let all of our pieces be in the room, observed but not judged.
All of this has had an impact on the way I experience myself and my life. By developing my skill to sit calmly with whatever is unfolding, I have become much more aware of the inner world of my own thoughts and feelings. I no longer “push away” things about myself that I’d rather not look at (greed, for example, or pettiness.) Partly because I’m not so judgmental and opinionated, and because I have less of a tendency to punish or berate myself for what I feel, I can look at it more calmly and clearly.
Part of that is the benefit of a kindness practice. If you’re kind to yourself, you can look at your whole self more easily. You’re not constantly pushing pieces of yourself out of your consciousness because you fear the ensuing beating. When you become kind to yourself, those pieces no longer need to hide in the corners.
My experience with this is that as I am able to simply witness, to observe with non-judgment, what I’m actually feeling, what I’m actually thinking, I grow bigger, like a container, to get around that feeling so I can contain it, observe it, and examine it. Feelings that used to overwhelm me no longer do. Feelings that would spill over the container (producing a behavior psychologists refer to as “acting out,”) no longer spill over; my container is bigger.
My most vivid experience with the sense of “growing my container,” increasing the capacity to comfortably carry emotions, came during a key point of my recovery from childhood sexual abuse, after about a year of therapy work.
Have you ever been at work, and felt an illness coming on, like a flu, or a stomach bug, and you just know that in an hour or two you’re going to be very, very sick? You can feel it coming. You know that in two hours you’re going to want to be lying down or near a bathroom. Well, I had this very same experience with a set of feelings.
I was at work, about 1:00 in the afternoon, and felt, from a distance, emotions coming at me where I knew in a couple hours I was going to need not to be at work. And I told my assistant I wasn’t feeling well and went home, and laid down on the bed and I waited for them to hit.
Like a really bad flu, when these emotions hit, my first thought was, “I feel so bad, I might die from this.” And I remember telling myself, “emotions can’t kill you, and they don’t last forever, so all you have to do is wait it out.”
And I felt that way for 4 or 5 days, I felt so bad that I felt like I might die. And what I felt was what it was to be abused; what it felt like to have that experience, and the impact of that experience for me.
And after 4 or 5 days, I had felt this particular round of feelings, absorbed them, and I felt better. Not perfectly better; I felt the way you do after a serious flu. I felt a little wobbly, a little weak, but definitely better. I think, after many, many sessions of talk therapy and telling the story of what happened to me, those 4 or 5 days of feeling my feelings, that was the real work. That was the actual recovery. The point of all of that talking was to become strong enough to open up to feel what actually happened.
The way I experience this in my body is that I have the sense of becoming just a little bit bigger than my emotions, wrapping myself around my emotions rather than the emotions wrapping themselves around me; holding my emotions like a container rather than having them hold me like a clamp or a vise. Because if I can’t do that, I can’t really experience them (this is my view, at least.)
If my emotions have me like a bear in a trap, I’m not really having my emotions; they’re having me. When I can grow just a little bit bigger, keep breathing, keep noticing, keep leaning into whatever I’m experiencing, no matter how painful, no matter how horrifying, then I am having my emotions. I’m experiencing my life, fully.
Now, what are all the things I do to avoid having to really feel my feelings, notice my emotions and pay attention to my experience? It’s an amazing list, the behaviors I do to distract myself from paying attention, the way I ‘get busy’ instead of allowing myself to feel.
To take but one example: to protect against the horrible feeling of “I might not be enough; I might not be accomplished, smart, or valuable enough,” I:
Overwork, overeat, overdrink, check e-mail obsessively, try to be “supercolleague,” care more than anyone else in the world possibly could (or should,) run to the rescue, get involved in hopeless projects so I can be the superhero, accept bad behavior from my boss, numb out by staring at the internet or checking Facebook compulsively, never ask for help, care too much about how everyone else is doing, skip my gym workout so I can get to work earlier, and take care of everyone in the office except for me.
And that’s just one feeling! I have a half-dozen feelings like that, things that I’d rather not feel, and that I wouldn’t even notice, and didn’t notice, before I really learned to start paying attention to every moment. And while feeling my feelings can be hard work, re-read the previous paragraph: not feeling my feelings can be completely exhausting!
So ironically, the more I pay attention, the more I notice bad feelings, but then I grow bigger, which allows me to carry those feelings comfortably and I feel better. And then, bad news: because I’m bigger, I can pay even more careful attention, and go deeper, and I notice another layer of feelings that I never paid attention to, and then I feel really, really bad. And then, again: I grow bigger. And I feel better. And it goes on.
This week is pretty intense; I’m feeling a feeling that I suspect has been with me my entire life, a feeling that is almost “background noise” playing constantly, very softly, in the background. It’s a feeling that says, “what if I’m not worthy of existing? what if I have absolutely no value whatsoever, what if I am not lovable, not valuable, not worthwhile?” This week I feel something probably best described as despair, which comes in 4 to 6 hour blocks, and then lifts. In my physical body, it feels like being kicked in the stomach. It’s quite unpleasant.
All of that tells me that a bigger container is in the making as we speak. I will eventually get myself around this feeling, too, just like I have all the others. The more I pay attention, the worse I feel–but only momentarily; and then I get bigger.
Part of me misses the good old days, when I felt good most of the time because I was asleep on many levels. Waking up can be hard work, painful work, but so worth the effort. I’m going to keep on the path I’m on. I’d rather be uncomfortable for short periods of time than go through my entire life asleep.
Have thoughts you’d like to share?
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Kevin: There were many parts of your post that rang for me. The one that feels the most relevant is the notion of sitting with unpleasant feelings. There’s a difference between sitting with feelings, say, of grief – with onesself vs. someone else. In touch practice, you are allowed (giver and receiver) to be witnessed in the place of feeling, no matter what comes up. It’s harder to run, even in your head, when you are being held physcially. When alone, sitting with onesself in unpleasant feelings is a diferent animal, isn’t it? And just as necessary. These days, I’m having to be a good companion to myself, a kind witness to my pain. Holding onesself at these times is certainly a practice that requires practice. As always, I cherish your guidance.
Tony, yes, I definitely notice a difference in how I’m able to sit with other people and how I sit with myself. Although the two are related (I won’t be able to do something for someone else that I can’t do for myself, and vice versa) they’re not exactly the same. My insides told me a funny story just now: if I were feeling bad, and Tony showed up to really be present with me, my insides would say, “oh, yay! Tony’s here!” When I show up for myself? It’s not quite the same reaction. It’s like: “oh, you. Um….is anyone else available right now? Oh, ok….well, sure, yeah, why don’t you come sit with me for a while.” I’m not always as thrilled to have me show up for me, and the flip side of me, the part that shows up to stay present, often has an easier time doing that when it’s someone other than me who needs me to show up. Interesting stuff. I’ll have to sit with that, I guess!
It’s a conundrum (love the opportunity to use that word) when you we feel bad about ourselves, or shame, or icky, or unloveable – and then – who’s there??? Oh, you again. What a challenge.
Like I’m stalking me. Ick. 🙂