“I don’t believe people are looking for the meaning of life, as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive”

-Joseph Campbell

As a child, you had to swallow your feelings and show up as a ‘good’ child, ‘well behaved’. Learning that this was how you received love and kept yourself safe and cared for, you stayed silent. Others can’t hear it but your silence has become a scream inside.

Someone asks you how you feel and you can’t even name one emotion, you simply don’t know.

You are tired of always being what you think others want you to be. Yet you still don’t share how you feel. You hide your ‘disagreeable’ side, your big emotions, your objections, your ‘no’s’, your-self. It hurts.

There has been this niggling feeling of frustration, resentment, and sometimes anger growing inside you for a while now. You can’t ignore it any longer.

You play it small. But you have outgrown your cage, and it is feeling too small, too tight. It is becoming difficult to breathe. Now what?

Imagine a world where you can hear your heart more than your head. Where it is about the feelings and not the stories. Imagine you have access to your emotions, maybe even in real time. Where you can feel the sensations in your body that let you know how you feel, what you need right now and the courage to meet that need.

Imagine a world where your body could feel the simple pleasure of tasting the sweetness of an apple on your tongue, feeling the fresh awakening chill of the dew on the grass as you walk over it, hearing the sound of the music and how it touches you, how it lands in your body. Imagine having a mind slow enough to sense this and all that the body has to offer.

Why stepping into your full self has been a struggle

The inability to show your whole self is a conditioned, long standing pattern. The answer lies in the deep wisdom of the body and finding the pathway to that innate intelligence is possible and full of pleasure.

You have life training that tells you that if you stand tall, show yourself, be visible, share your whole self, then you will be isolated and rejected from society.

This pattern to stay silent is a deep, protective (and intelligent) pattern established in early childhood. You had to put aside your feelings and bodily responses and signals since very young. You avoided feeling the feelings by disconnecting from your body.

The connections and signals are still there but hard to tap into because the pathways are unfamiliar.

You hold in your emotions and needs. Hiding your feelings and yourself, feels tight and restrictive. You feel compressed, as if you can’t breathe.  

This may have been necessary when you were young. It is not necessary now.

You long to belong as you are, not as who is deemed acceptable.

Disappointing or angering those close to you, your partner, your children, your parents, feels not just scary but existential. Your nervous system can throw you into a triggered response and it can feel deeply uncomfortable as a result, you often avoid it at the cost of your authentic expression.

As a result of not showing yourself you feel unseen, unmet.

But how can your partner and loved ones, meet you when you have not met yourself?

If the mist clears

“When patterns are broken, new worlds emerge.”

-Tuli Kupferberg

This excites me so much, it is like there is a whole world hiding underneath ‘the grind’ that seems to be what we have been sold as ‘Life’.

This ripple effect that begins with curiosity is a journey of self-discovery. Yes, there is plenty that we are afraid to look at but there are at least as many gems down in the shadows as there are rocks. It leads to self-love and self-respect. There is much power behind that. It becomes easier to be authentic, to be ourselves, to show ourselves.

There are some people that won’t like the full, honest version of you but those who love you will really love you, for who you are and even more than that, your innate gifts, your intrinsic value will be a gift to the world, with little effort from you. All the energy that has been trapped in holding yourself in, in staying constricted, becomes available to you, however you want to use it. 

Resentment, for example, then just becomes a signal to you, that you need something, or perhaps need to change something in that moment or situation. Choice suddenly becomes realised.

There is pleasure, in the simplest of things, beauty, ease and softness. There is owning our power (which I think many of us, men and women, are afraid of). There is joy and glory and of course none of that comes without feeling the pain. But at least there is not contraction without expansion. There is not fear without the freedom of courage. There is not pain without love.

If we keep doing what we have always done.

Without conscious effort patterns tend to continue, embed and strengthen, physically, mentally and emotionally. 

If we continue the way we are going things stay the same or worsen. The body gets tighter where it is already tight, our posture becomes an exaggerated version of today's, both physically and in how we present in life. Our habits of staying quiet continue, our fear of something different exacerbates and it feels like our choices become less and less.

In this case of living a life where we don’t express ourselves, where we play it small and turn up for others when we neither have the will nor the capacity, it is most likely that resentment, frustration and anger will grow. Or perhaps it shows itself as defeat and collapse. In cases like these, the energies, which need to go somewhere, if they do not express outwardly they will express inwardly. So often, in the body as dis-ease of some kind.

Unfortunately the world we live in supports the ‘keeping quiet, staying inline’ way of living. This makes it even harder to find, never mind to express, our whole self.

There are plenty of practices, even yoga or meditation, that label themselves as embodied practices. If these do not teach people to feel into and respond to their bodies they can exacerbate the disconnect from the body or override it in the name of being a ‘good’ practitioner or student, compromising the ability to listen to the body and reinforcing the ‘good child’ pattern, keeping you stuck.

Talk therapy, if only intellectual, can continue the disconnect from the feelings held inside the body, the language of the body. We need to be strengthening the pathways between the body and brain, to understand what the body is telling us. It is talking all the time and understanding this language opens doors to wild worlds!