To Be

We exist everyday in our lives, going through the motions and responding to the demands of the world around us. We take up space, we take up presence, and we try our best to make the best choices we can each day. In all of this, are we allowing ourselves to be? 

I’m sure some of us do, at least we have some time or space, or pockets in our life where we get to just let everything go from us, release our defenses and just be in the moment. For the rest of us it may be hard to understand what it means to just be. Aren’t we all being right now? So then what do we mean by being?

When we are being we are allowing the whole of ourselves to be in the moment with us. All of our thoughts, our emotions, our needs, our desires. They all get to be with us in the moment. How often do we get to do this, and does our inner critic have something to say about each one of these things we are experiencing?

This last week I had an experience with allowing my needs and emotions to just be. It was such a powerful moment and such a powerful release, I had no idea how much I wasn’t allowing myself to take up residency in my life emotionally. What a huge act of self abandonment. 

So for a little background here, I personally have struggled with PTSD and Panic attacks since 2005. Through making adjustments to my behavior, my life and the way I think I have been able to live asymptomatically for the last 4 years. In the last few months these symptoms have been resurfacing. Being afraid to go back to how I was before, I reached out to a very good student, friend and colleague to help curb what I felt to be an impending disaster. 

We practiced some mind-body techniques that she had recently learned that allowed me to get into what was coming up for me in a matter of minutes. The level of emotional release I experienced I could never imagine coming to on my own. I sobbed, I got into some old narratives of my life, I relived some hard experiences and I made room for all of it. We weren’t looking to qualify any of these experiences or to place blame for anyone who was in the narratives. We were just creating space for the emotional memories to just be. I was coached to sit with the emotions. 

I generally advertise and think of myself as being a really open person, like really, I’ll say pretty much anything, but in this exercise I realized I wasn’t being open to myself. I wasn’t making room or allowing myself to have emotional residence in my own life or my own experience. Through this exercise I learned that if I can just sit with my emotions, and just let them be, without trying to intellectualize them away or “make excuses” or “explain them”, and that was allowing me to release the held emotions I was experiencing. 

It felt so good to just release, let go, cry unabashedly, in the absence of my own or anyone else’s criticisms. I kept trying to escape experiencing the feelings and intellectualize what I was experiencing, the person I was working with kept bringing me back to just sitting with the emotions and jut letting myself feel them. As I’m living in them and feeling them, I’m feeling them change. They started transforming from these feelings of tightness, or agony, or pain into feelings of joy and delight. Each of the emotions that were showing up for me were healing, and I could experience this in real time. I have sat with these pains for so long, it’s incredible how simple it was to let them just be, and process through on their own. 

That can be so hard for us. It always seems easier to set it aside for just one more day, so we can get through this moment, and this moment, and this one… and then it’s been 20 years and you no longer know why you had the issue in the first place. When the memory fades we think, “hey we must be over it!” and we just move forward with our lives. Our emotions are still there though, and our bodies remember even if we don’t. 

The idea of us letting our emotions be a part of our experience is so terrifying to us. It seems better for us to sit in our discomfort than to bear the idea of allowing ourselves to be vulnerable, even with those we care most about. We are so afraid that if we let others know when we are hurt that we will incur more hurt. To a certain degree this is understandable. Think about how we have been received in the past when we have tried to be open with our feelings. Some can criticize us, some can ridicule us, some can make it seem like our feelings are invalid. We all have had moments where we have done this to others, each for our own reasons. Maybe we could get better at actively receiving one another when we are not feeling our best. Hold space for each other that is safe, and reassuring. 

Then there’s our inner critic. Which tends to be the combined voice of everyone who has ever judged us unfairly. Instead of finding fault with those judgements, we have agreed with them and integrated them into our psyche. Now we hold ourselves to those judgements when those who would judge us are no longer around. Does that seem fair, that we should be denied the right to our own safety and comfort? All because of a fear someone else instilled upon us with their words or actions? 

If you are finding yourself stuffing your feelings or hiding them from the rest of the world, why not sit with yourself in silence and let yourself experience your feelings. Our bodies have developed these responses to our experiences for a reason, and we should trust our bodies to know how to handle them in a way that allows us to live our best, most healthy lives. I think through all of our sudden advancements as a species we have forgotten these things. Living our lives and carrying the burden of our emotions all the time is a fairly new trait that we have developed. 

When you consider the frequency of depression, anxiety, and other mood disorders it makes you wonder why we are living this way. There are so many pills an potions available to us but they only manage to soothe the aches without curing the problems. Maybe if we all gave ourselves time to release and process our feelings and our experiences we could free ourselves of these burdens and live a life with more peace and well being. All we need to do is remember to be, and let things be. Exactly as they are, and they will unfold for us into beautiful stories, giving hope to those who need it most.