Somatic therapist and healer Prentis Hemphill explores how curiosity and openness to emotions allows us to access their wisdom:
To feel an emotion is to allow it and let it run through, to learn from what it is telling you about you, about your relationships. Feeling is a self-acceptance of your own emotions and the wisdom of your body….
A significant part of feeling is not allowing ourselves to fall too quickly into naming or categorizing what we feel, but to allow and witness. Simply asking what an area of the body might say if it were held … most always elicits stories and more sensations. It can be tricky, though. Just as our avoidance of feeling can become our normal, we can try to live in emotions, or rather perpetually revisit them. Sometimes we can get stuck in a way of emoting, or focusing on emoting as evidence of feeling, and that can be its own means of hiding or avoiding another feeling buried even further underground. Authentic feeling is not performed nor is it summoned. Feeling is allowed. It is emergent. It is a listening that aligns us with our real indicators. Feeling grounds us. It is proof that we are alive…. Feeling itself needn’t turn into an obsession or another kind of supremacy. It is offered as a counterbalance to a worldview that denies its wisdom.
Hemphill explores how strong feelings are brought forward with support and in turn offer collective support and healing to others.
It takes resource to feel. But what we think of as resource can be expansive. Human and animal relationships often provide resource for us to face what was previously unfaceable. If we are open to it, trees can help us feel; their steady strength can be an ally, a way to ease our fear. Feeling needs resource and gives us resource in return….
Feeling and connection bring us into the world and into relationship with one another. Some things seem too big to be felt alone because they are. They require the collective to hold the space for big feeling, for it to move through, and to remind us that we’re not alone…. This is why we meet in the streets. As much as mass protests and direct action are about putting strategic pressure on opposition, they are often a gathering space for our grief and pain because they are too big to feel alone. Protests don’t get reported on this way, as an eruption of collective grief; on the news they are riots, and we begin the cycle of minimizing the feelings that bring people to the streets, and ultimately we miss the message. We need those spaces and others, too, where our grief can swell, where feeling for feeling’s sake can reconstitute us, where our empathy for one another can build. A community, a society, becomes one, remains one, I think, through sharing feeling.
The Wrong Story Entirely
a couple more thoughts on fear for my very good looking subscribers
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The Jesus Pillow
In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus and his disciples left with some other boats to go to the far side of the Galilean sea…there was a great storm and they were afraid and to top it all off Jesus was being sorta useless. I mean, in the middle of the storm he was napping . . .on a cushion. (For you Bible nerds: this story appears in varying forms in all 4 of the gospels, but God bless him, Mark is the only one of his fellow gospel writers who mentions that there was a pillow involved) Anyhow, the disciples are freaking out thinking they are going to die. They look at their situation and see that the cast isn’t acting how they are supposed to and the script isn’t unfolding the way they think it should if Jesus really loved them. So they wake him up and say, “don’t you care we are perishing?”.
The disciples had some feelings about their situation, which is totally understandable – If I were in a sketchy first-century boat, water up to my ankles, thunder cracking overhead, and Jesus was just snuggled up with his little boat-pillow? Yeah. I’d be like, Jesus why don’t you care that we are, you know…dying here?
The issue isn’t that they found a scary storm to be scary, the issue is that the disciples assume that since Jesus isn’t acting the way he “should” that Jesus therefore doesn’t care that they are in peril. Which is a little thing we call: projection.
Projection is how fear finds its business partner: resentment
I mean, Jesus never actually left them, he just didn’t act the way they thought he should in a crisis.
More often than not I am afraid because I think I am not going to get something I want or because I think that something I have will be taken away. Fear shrinks me down into the starring role in a tiny, self-centered story where I’m both the hero and the narrator. And in that story, every storm is about me.
Other Boats
Here’s why I mention that: I’m not sure how many times I’ve read this storm at sea story from Mark but it’s a lot. And I’ve read tons of commentaries on it and I can’t remember seeing anything about this one little detail in verse 26: And leaving the crowd behind, they took him with them in the boat, just as he was. Other boats were with him and a great storm arose and the waves beat the boat.
I get that they were afraid and all that, but what about the other boats?
I mean, the text says that there were other boats with them, which means that the people in those boats were experiencing the storm too. And yet I can’t remember ever noticing this part of the story. So maybe one cost of their fear was that the disciples forgot about anyone but themselves. I know that is usually my move. Fear can make me think only of myself and my needs. When the storms of life overtake me, my world becomes only about me.
What I mean is this: sometimes when we get so wrapped up in how we think the story of our lives should look: the cast and setting and plot, we forget about the other boats. Maybe we think God’s faithfulness to us has to look a certain way. But sometimes God’s faithfulness looks like the fact that there is actually a better story than the way we want things to be. And that better story is ALWAYS a bigger story. A story with a lot of boats other than ours.
And here’s the paradox: the very stuff I wish God had protected me from—my screwups, my addiction, my body falling apart, the griefs I would have given anything to skip—those are the exact things that allow us to show up for other people in their own shit storms.
Don’t mistake me, this is not the same as saying that your fear and crises and loss are not painful in a totally real way. I just think that maybe God’s love shows up in ways we don’t script.
And honestly, thank God for that. Because left to my own devices, I’d settle for a God who just fixes things on cue. But the God who commands the wind and the waves? That is the God of all the boats.
Which is inconvenient, honestly. Because sometimes I really want Jesus to be my own personal boat-buddy, smoothing my own personal waters, fixing my own personal life. But God’s story is bigger.
Bigger and better. I believe that, but it isn’t always easy.
In this storm with you,
Nadia
