Feel More, Not Less
What I write is not to teach you anything. There is no guidance or advice. I write about my experiences or I write about my thoughts or I write about what I feel, think, believe deep down inside. I do this so that if you relate to whatever I’m writing, then maybe you’ll realise that you too have everything you need within.
One of the biggest gifts that I have had in my life, it the one of someone bearing witness to my feelings. Happiness and great joy, the giggles that remind me of my innocence. People bearing witness and joining me is so much fun. Yet, when it comes to the other feelings like shame, sadness, anger, when we feel those, authentically, and that inner child inside of us needs someone to bear witness to the pain, silence takes over. Many of my most profound sessions have been when I’ve felt my feelings, gone into a somatic experience and released what has been inside of me for so long.
Like those before me and now society at large, it has become the norm to keep our feelings to ourselves. Yet, doing such things can create a whole lot of consequences. Many I have endured.
I’m not saying that you have to have someone or a group of people bear witness to your feelings. Of course you can do it on your own. It starts with stillness. Being still and allowing whatever needs to arise to come forth with compassion and love for self.
My new habit is that when I’m triggered. I feel it and listen to the voices inside. I don’t coach myself, shove it down (my patterning), nor do I distract. It is in the feeling of it all that leads to the releasing of whatever it is. Only sometime down the track do the revelations or whatever lessons that are needed come to me and sometimes they don’t. That’s perfectly ok too. Sometimes, I cry when I want to cry. Other times being triggered is telling me something about my patterning that no longer serves me. Mostly, everything stems around the beliefs that I have when I kept what was going on to myself.
Below is a recent example of a trigger and how I navigated myself through it.
The Lie of Belonging
I just recently came home from a 7 night visit at a health retreat. The delicious meals were cooked for everyone, no need to make the bed or clean the room. All I needed to do was rest, relax and rejuvenate. There were activities on offer that supported the pillars of health - physical, mental, spiritual and emotional. It’s interesting when the daily chores of adulthood are lessened or taken away all together, how a group of people can regress to their teenage years. For many years I have been apart of this pack mentality digression. Now looking at it from a different light, I feel for the people in the health, retreat, healing industry, I truly do. To be in the ‘retreat’ industry is to be undeniably an automatic trigger for your guests. It’s the hidden part of the job that no one tells you. The most triggering for me in both the past and present are the session leaders who are shut down and give nothing of themselves. Like teachers who have been in the education system for too long and hate the children that they once (hopefully) loved. There are always the exception to everything. Those people who went towards a job that didn’t suit them and, yet, felt trapped and stayed.
This time, my trigger happened to be at the basket weaving class. That’s right, I said basket weaving. Gosh, the trigger could have been about everyone eating the bananas and I was excited to eat one, the content doesn’t really matter. So, I LOVE basket weaving as I did it as a kid in Canada as well as beading, weaving string, knitting, crochet… you get the gist. Now, to put things into context, the staff leader, at the beginning of the stay talked about coming and going from activities as you pleased. Well, everything except for some things like basket weaving. I showed up late and was told ‘no’ that I couldn’t join in. What I wanted to be asked was if I had basket weaved before, in which I would have said, ‘yes’ and would have been set up to continue later on with the materials in my room. I could do anything in 15 minutes because I catch on quickly and have the perseverance to continue until complete. I froze when I heard the ‘no’ which has said with the drop of this man’s tone too which was perfect to ignite a trigger within me. There were several people in the circle who I didn’t get to know yet… strangers.
I held it together, in hopes that something could be rectified and it did. One of the women who had finished 3/4 of her basket handed me hers. She stated that she didn’t care for the basket and would hand it in a tree for the birds anyways. I was handed the basket and said, ‘thank you’.
“I’ve got to go anyways,” she commented.
“No,” said the teacher, again, a dropped tone.
He proceeded to tell her that he was about to show everyone in the circle (10 people maybe) how to finish the basket.
I handed the basket to the woman who continued to state that she had to leave.
I had to leave too.
“The little girl cried inside and the tears came out of the woman that I am today. ”
I got up and made it in time to the toilets to have a good cry. I balled my freaking eyes out and surrendered to the tears and the pain of the teacher not asking more questions about my capability. I prided myself in being capable (especially in the craft world as a young person). Far out, I had made myself capable in as many things that I could so that I could feel safe and belong to something.
The little girl cried inside and the tears came out of the woman that I am today. The embarrassment of leaving the room just in time and the circle of people looking at me (probably not) and I cried some more. The sense of not belonging. I cried until I could cry no more. To really feel into it, I cried for about 10 minute maximum. Maybe less time was taken. It’s hard to tell when you’re present to the moment where there is no time which means it can slow down or speed up.
Whist walking back to my cabin, I was asked if I was ‘ok’. I talked about my feelings of disappointment, sadness and the wanting for it to have been different and it wasn’t. I wanted the teacher to ask more questions before he dropped his voice and said ‘no’.
Unknowingly, a couple of days later the same class was offered which I didn’t realise. I went other class and was super early. The teacher would have been the same way if I was more than 15 minutes late to the class and wouldn’t have been flexible. During the class, I sat there and listened. The basket was completed and I walked away without any blame towards the teacher. I had moved on hence why I could even show up the the class again in the first place. I did wear my hair down instead of up and had different coloured clothes in the hopes that he wouldn’t remember me. So many people pass through the retreat that I know as a former teacher myself, when you meet 20 new faces each week, it’s hard to place a face. All the same, I made sure I didn’t look like I did during our first encounter.
What I learnt from that trigger is that I will always be triggered by something. The best way for me is to feel the feelings and to let them out. It helped me to move on so quickly and to not make it about the teacher. If it were something that needed closure, of course I would have spoken up in a compassionate way, maybe 2 or 3 days down the track.
As I didn’t hold onto the story in the present nor did I link in to a story from my past, it made it so easy for me not to talk about it. The woman who I had debriefed with couldn’t seem to let it go. I realised that this said more about her than it did me. I chose to connect with her about other things that brought to the table both joy and happiness instead of the remembrance of when the teacher said, ‘no’ and all the justification as to why that was not ok within the setting we were in.
I learnt a lot about myself during this time and thank the teacher for being the catalyst. I also have the self empowerment to speak up or put in a boundary when required and also the discernment to know what requires whatever level of attention needed. In this particular moment, I needed, my inner child, my four year old, needed a good cry to release a cry that she chose not to have a long time ago.
For the record, I got home and one of the dogs ate the basket anyways because it wasn’t about the basket in the first place, was it?