14 - A textbook example of the power of "doing my emotions”

So... I know I said my next post was going to be about Martin Prechtel... and I have started writing that one already. BUT.

I just had an experience, these past two days, that perfectly demonstrates how "doing my emotions" works in real life, how powerful it is for making me feel better and my life flow better, and why I love it so much...SO, given that I just introduced the idea in my last post, I figure this is a good time to tell this story from my present day, 14 years after hearing about it from my friend Amy Sabrina.

First I want to tell a short version of part of Amy's story.

I still remember standing in her kitchen as we were making dinner together, and she was telling me how she responded when she got her cancer diagnosis... How she felt fear, but instead of letting it determine how she reacted, she let the fear play out in her body, and then she could make decisions from a place of greater clarity. In Amy's case, this led her to forego all the normal recommended treatments and procedures. I didn't know anything about cancer or it's stages at the time, other than that my mother had died from lung cancer four years earlier. 

I didn't know then, (I didn't ask,) that when she got diagnosed, the cancer had already spread to her lymph nodes and liver, which is considered "stage 4." I'm pretty sure she made a conscious decision to leave that information out, when she told the people in her life that she had breast cancer, because she didn't want people inserting their energetic fear about what she should do into her situation. She refused the mastectomies, the chemo, the radiation. (She did end up getting some radiation 4 years later.) The oncologist had told her that if she did all these interventions, she still only had a life expectancy of 6 months. She didn't tell me that, either, which I'm grateful for.

What she did do was follow the intuition of her body, when seeking out alternative treatments. If she felt a "yes" from her body, she would go with a particular mushroom or herb or energy healer or dietary focus. She did a lot of different things. At the same time, she was working on her beautiful barn to get it ready to hold dances, and she was frequently holding dances in her local township hall, and having gatherings and classes of various kinds at her home. She often slept outside in a "hut" she had built from gathered boughs.

To make a long story short, the cancer did eventually take her life. But up until the final month of her life, she was living a full, joyous and rich life of service to her animals, friends and community. Statistically, she had less than a 1 in 5 chance of living five years past her stage 4 diagnosis, and she lived five years and two months.

Amy is still my best friend, and I cherish the conversations and insights we shared. My "initiation" journey would have been much different, had I not had Amy to nudge and support me, and I miss the hell out of her to this day. I know she's really tickled that I am doing so well at the trick she told me about back when we talked in her kitchen in the fall of 2008!

       -----------------------

OK, so what is this trick that Amy taught me? What does it actually mean, to "do my emotions", and why is it so great?

Here's my most recent experience of it. I'm the head gardener for a group of restaurants in Duluth. I love my job. I "inherited" an awesome bunch of garden beds of various kinds and sizes from the previous head gardener, who built them along with the owners, over the previous several years before I took over five years ago. I haven't had to do much actual infrastructure designing or building. I just get to use the existing gardens as the canvas to do my own "painting" with plants every summer.

Last summer I was told that the company had bought another property with a building and were planning on turning it into another restaurant. They needed to have a plan for what to do with the grounds. I was busy taking care of what I already had going on, and didn't have the bandwidth for coming up with anything at all for the new property. In the meantime, they were consulting with the city for what the requirements were for parking and other concerns for the grounds. The city and the architects came up with a plan and design for the layout of parking and plantings. The city had some specific criteria they wanted satisfied, when it came to numbers of trees and shrubs, and other things.

There were some things about this design that I found annoying and impractical, but even by late fall I didn't have any mental space for trying to come up with something different. I was told that we needed to have specifics including tree species nailed down by this spring, in order for the city to approve the final plan. I have been dreading engaging with the whole thing ever since last fall. I ran up against a wall of resistance every time I thought about it.

As the winter has gone on, and some of the other things I needed to get done for planning for the upcoming season got done, I finally felt I had the space to engage with the new place. Two days ago, I got in touch and was sent the plans to look at, in preparation for a little meeting the following day, (that was just yesterday!)

Every time I'd looked at the city's plan, all I could feel was annoyance and frustration and my brain would be filled with angry static. It felt like it was drawn up by some person who came and took a few measurements and went back to their cubicle in a downtown office and put some cookie cutter trees into some slots that filled the city's regulatory requirements. The way the traffic was directed, and the placing of the trees just felt very "off" to me, and I could put my finger on some specific things about this feeling, but not on others. I really didn't want anything at all to do with this plan, either to help decide which tree species would be planted, or the installation or maintenance. But I was sort of resigned to dealing with it, in spite of great reluctance and a stressful feeling of resentment, since I hadn't been able to come up with anything different.

But as I looked at the plan on Monday, it finally hit me exactly what needed to change in order to make sense of it and feel like it had exciting potential. There was a "driveway" in the plan that seemed completely gratuitous and could be eliminated entirely, because the parking could be accessed directly from the street and then all the "driveway" space could be used for outdoor seating and garden space. Suddenly I was excited.

But I also immediately bumped up against a bunch of fears. What if there wasn't enough time now to change it all before it needed to get done this spring? What if the city wouldn't approve of the changes I was imagining? What if there were other considerations that I didn't know about? I spent a lot of time that evening and even waking up in the middle of the night, thinking about all the things that might stand in the way.

And my mind was expanding outward in concentric circles, stewing about how I hate this whole system we live in, of how we are forced to make decisions based on criteria that are invented by bureaucrats, no matter how well-intentioned, instead of letting our spaces be built organically over time based on how we live in them..how our entire economy is organized around principles that I don't believe in, how I feel like we're all rushing around deciding to do things out of some motivation to keep ourselves busy, or who-knows-what... there were so many thoughts running around in my head for hours, about how this situation sucked and I wouldn't be happy with the outcome and how maybe I should just tell the owners I wanted nothing to do with this new project...

It felt good for a while to imagine making this decision and sticking to it. "I didn't sign up for this, you can find someone else to take this thing on, leave me out of it." This is what we call "having boundaries." "I can say no to this," I told myself. I could feel a sort of satisfaction in this "boundary setting."

And then sometime in the middle of the night, after stewing about it for quite some time, lying awake in bed, I remembered...

"Do your emotions, Lorna." I've been at this point so many times. After my mind has run around in circles for a while, trying to avoid what's going on in my body, I finally remember to get out of my head... I finally set all the agonized "mentalizing" aside, and put my attention on my body.

Tension in my throat. Clenching in my gut. Feeling powerless. Feeling like no one understands me. Feeling like what I hold dear is under threat and has never been safe.. In my gut I feel the clenching turn into shaking. I lay there in bed in the fetal position, contracting, and pretty soon my whole body is contracting and shaking, as the energy of fear pulls my body in on itself.

I've done this so many times now, that I trust my body. It feels good to allow the energy to play itself out in my body, even when I don't know when it will end. It always ends eventually, though it may take some breaks and start up again. Sometimes it even turns into weeping. This time it didn't. It didn't actually last very long this time. Just a minute or so. It didn't even really feel done, but I finally drifted off into sleep.

I had my alarm set because I had an appointment to go to in the morning, and then I had the meeting about the landscape plan in the afternoon. I really didn't get much sleep, but when my alarm went off, I woke up feeling clear and looking forward to sharing my ideas about the design. All the fears and frustrations had evaporated, and I was just excited about the potential.

I know that if I had not spent that little bit of time letting that energy play out in my body, all the frustration and fear, which hadn't really been coming from this particular situation anyways, would have been churning right at the surface energetically when I went into the landscape discussion. The energy of fear and of expecting resistance has a way of being met with hesitation and a lack of enthusiasm... being free of that expectation of resistance meant that I could simply be enthused and inspired by my idea, and I presented it matter-of-factly and calmly. I got the green light! I was told to draw it up so it could be presented to the owners and the architect, and then to the city.

I could hardly wait to get home and start brainstorming and drawing out ideas. I stopped and took some measurements of the location, and when I got home, it was evening, but I felt energized and eagerly got to work making some first drafts of possible layouts of outdoor seating and trees and garden beds... It took me a couple iterations, and then I hit upon a design that felt good. I made a decent-looking draft of it and emailed it off.

I woke up this morning with another idea for adding some features for the public passers-by to enjoy. I drew that up and emailed it off. I got the response: "I really like where this is going, I will reach out to the city to see if we can get approval on this."

Who knows where this is going to end up. What is remarkable to me is how differently I feel about this whole thing today, compared to what I was feeling two days ago. Now I feel excitement, enthusiasm, inspiration, creativity. Two days ago I was feeling dread, frustration, anger, and no inspiration or creativity what-so-ever.

NOTHING CHANGED in the external situation between two days ago and today. And my attitude didn't change because I somehow managed to talk myself into feeling differently about it. I didn't have any expectations for how I would feel after letting my body do that contracted shaking. I just knew that there was some stuff in there wanting to be felt, so I let myself "do" it.

At this point, I feel like even if this doesn't go the way I envision, that I will be at peace about it. I have done what felt right, and now it's out of my hands, and everyone involved is just doing what they are able to do given the circumstances they find themselves in. I feel an energy of beauty and love and bubbly excitement flowing in my body and it has nothing to do with the external machinations of the universe, and yet.. the external machinations of the universe are malleable and each moment the universe is re-inventing itself based on the energy flowing, or not flowing, within it.

     ---------------------

Thomas Hübl, another one of my favorite teachers, often says that un-integrated past is destiny, meaning that the energies that have been frozen and not felt in our bodies become the template for what happens now, so that what happens from one moment to the next is not actually the "future," it is only a replay of the same old energy. He describes it as taking the road from the past and putting it in front of you. So when I integrate my past, by thawing and doing my old frozen emotions, this frees up the channels of my body for the actual inspired flow of the future to come through. I feel like this is what is happening in my body right now.

And this is what I meant when I said I have to let the Love virus run rampant in my body. The normal way that our society tells us to take care of ourselves these days is to have those boundaries that I mentioned. "I should just say no to this, because it stresses me out." Or in other situations, it's the equivalent of removing people from my life that make me uncomfortable. This is supposed to be what's good for me. All this does is dissociate that Love that I know myself to be from those energies I carry around with me that are wanting to be felt.

These situations are uncomfortable precisely because there are emotions that are frozen in my body that are wanting to flow and be felt, and it takes energy to keep them frozen, and they rumble around in my body trying to get my attention. When they get triggered, if I expend my energy to re-suppress them by mentalizing about how to change the situation, this is just a recipe for agitation, depression, anxiety and stress. Letting them come into my awareness and be lovingly accepted and allowed to flow is the most effective way I know of to actually feel better. This has taken years and years of practice, since first hearing about it from Amy. I've learned the hard way, by not doing it, and being miserable over and over again.

This is also why I say that emotions need spiritual channels to flow on. Maybe "spiritual channels" is not very precise, or even accurate. Maybe what's really necessary is to have a big enough sense of something greater than my current bodily state, in order to have an unfazed loving container that holds me while my body is doing the feeling. The notion of "doing my emotions" came along in my life after I'd had some potent seeds planted of awareness of my self as unconditional, infinite and indestructible Love.

Having said all that, I've also come to recognize that sometimes I'm not feeling "resourced" enough to face those rumbling frozen feelings in a good way, and I feel like I need a break from some situation or person. But I know that that is only a temporary solution, and that it's an invitation to upgrade my connection to the dimension of Love inside me, and then I will be able at some point to engage with the situation again and let that Love virus invade.