In a writing group I attended a year or two in the past, I made up an exercise for myself one day because I didn’t like the prompt they’d given. I wrote lists:
Things I won’t write about.
Things I will write about for money.
Things I will write about for free.
I read the lists aloud to the group at the end of our quiet co-writing time. “Dang!” they said. “You know which of those sounds the most intriguing, right?” It was, of course, the things I wouldn’t write about. I already knew that — just reading the lists aloud, I could sense how the last group was sweet but lacked tension, the middle group was intelligent but lacked feeling, whereas the first grouping was a whole memoir in itself. It was layered and fraught and compelling and conflicting. In a way, it told a whole story, regardless of elucidation.
Even sharing that list feels like too much. Maybe one day.
*
I keep hearing this message about being with your pain. And being with your body. Being with the pain to transmute it, to see it, to bear witness, to love it. Me? I like to fight my pain. I like to take the discomfort and the panic and the tension and just pummel it. Two-fisted, like I think I’m an actor in a Rocky movie. I’m so determined to strongarm my feelings, to wrestle them into a defeated and mangled pulp, at which point I, sweaty and depleted, can lift a fist into the air while the bells ding and the crowd goes wild. Afterward, I’m interviewed about the fight, talking strategy and training and the sheer endurance I brought to out-match the hurt, as if I’m a mastermind, as if there isn’t still something bloody and pulsing and panting on the floor of the ring. “It’s a mind game,” I say to the reporter, tired and cocky. “You can’t let the mind win,” or, “once you convince the mind, the body just follows.”
*
Trust your body. Your body knows. Listen to your body, the only thing with answers. And I get all of that, I do. I’ve found quite a bit of wisdom there myself.
Lately, though, I’m concerned. What if the body is stuck in a moment and can’t tell the difference between past and present? What if the mind (also just a part of the body, I always think, as a smart-ass response) betrays? What if what’s real, true, and present cannot be seen or felt in the current moment? How to sort through the sea of all the body contains in order to hear what’s “true” when the body is quite busy slamming one’s shorelines with fear, memory, grasping, flailing? What happens when the fight isn’t even conscious, it’s actually the thing pummeling the conscious self to the floor?
*
Step 1: Devotion to nervous system regulation. What this looks like, in a practical sense: going outside in the morning time and breathing in the cool air while the world is quiet enough, watching the sun settle on the apartment building rooftops, phone off and left behind. Erykah Badu’s “today (earth song)” playing. Massage. Writing notes to myself. Walking. Running. Hiking. Movement. The ocean — feet in water. Reiki, tapping, guided meditation, journaling. Talking to myself with love. Laying on a blanket on grass or sand and feeling the earth under bare feet, against my skin.
Step 2: The work begins. IFS, EMDR, sitting in all the pain/muck/fear/discomfort and just sensing it just being with it. Asking what it wants to tell me, and getting out of my own way (ie mental soundtracks) to hear the answer. The mind goes wild here and starts to kickstart the high alert feelings again. Return to Step 1.
*
I think of all the things my mind tried to reject that were entirely and purely choices my heart has made, and how those don’t-make-sense-to-consciousness, heart-centered things are easily the very best gifts of my life: my wife, and my sweet cat. How they both came as complete surprises, threw me for a loop, scrambled my pre-conceived plans and visions, and yet have given me more than I could ever, ever have asked for or dreamed up. More love, more growth, more adventure, more intimacy and enjoyment and evolution and maturing than my previous hopes and aspirations ever contained.
I remind myself how setting fear aside and letting the decision that follows be the thing I choose has always been the place of the deepest abundance, joy, and receiving I have ever known, and I don’t say that hyperbolically in the slightest. The last-minute Italy invitation was like that this summer, the return on the heart and trust investment continuing manyfold, not only in the experience itself but ongoing through love, friendship, some of the most beautiful connections I’ve ever been on the receiving end of. The reconciliations I’ve chosen to pursue and hold and experience with family members and previously abandoned kindred spirits this year tells me again: yes, it’s the heart. Yes, it’s love. Every time.
(In Glennon Doyle’s book she talks about this knowing as what’s warm vs what’s cold, and that makes sense to me, too. It’s always what’s warm. Not what is comforting or even what feels safe, but where the life is. The vitality. I can always sense into what is a shutting down for me as opposed to what is the aliveness, the juice, where the energy lies. And it’s often not where my head — so strategic, so cautious, so deeply concerned with data, so dear — says it is.)
*
I don’t want to play games with my mind to get it to rest, and I don’t want to fight it, either. I don’t want to talk it out of itself, or to try so hard to make sense of things that, for now, simply don’t. I do want to honor the body and its urgent alarm bell needs (through nervous system regulation, not its impulse — in these moments — of fight-or-flight!), and at the same time I also want to acknowledge that sometimes the body doesn’t know yet. I want to recognize the places in me that need more chill and the places where I can build muscle and strength train (metaphorically and also literally). Not so I’ll be a better fighter, but because I am committed to my own experience. I am showing up for the life in me.
As much as I want to collapse, fall to the floor of the ring myself, a tiny piece of me knows the ring is outdated. Giving myself bloody noses is old news; I’ve been doing it since I was a child. The body remembers the ring, and the body reacts, and in a way this is what the body wants, because it knows where it leads: to lying on a floor. We’re safe there, it says. There is rest in defeat. But this time I don’t let it fall, so the body squirms and cries and trauma-responds to the heightened level of discomfort. And I’m trying to be accountable for managing navigating care-taking all that without either shutting off or wreaking havoc. Forget “growth edge,” I’m all the way outside my zone of tolerance. So: Step 1. Then: Step 2. Rinse, repeat.
Look: I feel like an incapacitated idiot when I think it’s only about what’s happening right now.
See: I feel compassion when I recognize the decades of pain contributing to this response.
It’s okay, I tell myself.
Maybe one day I’ll write about this, too.