Healing Begins When The Story Ends
- Jody Allen, LCSW
- Jul 20
- 7 min read
Updated: Jul 27
One Conscious Breath: Issue 14
One Conscious Breath: Issue 14
What 10 days of silence taught me ~ fire doesn't destroy us, it sets us free.
Before we begin, I invite you to take one conscious breath.
Feel the cool air as it enters your nostrils. Follow it as deeply as it goes into your body.
And then exhale. Out of your mouth. Slowly. Elongate the release as much as you can. And as you exhale, feel your shoulders drop. Feel your jaw soften. Feel your feet firmly on the floor.
Now pause.
And notice, without judgment or needing to change anything, what is happening inside right now.
Whatever you find, just notice. And let it be.
And when you're ready ~ let's begin.
I almost didn't go.
The first time I registered for a ten-day silent Vipassana retreat, I cancelled before I got there. The fear was real. The mere thought of ten days of silence felt deafening. Don’t get me wrong, I’m an introvert. I love silence. And yet, that kind of silence felt like something I wasn't quite sure I could survive.
But something deep called me back. And this time, I summoned the courage needed to step into the silence, toward myself.
I reasoned I’d done enough work on myself to handle anything. I read countless books. Sat in years of therapy. Gone to graduate school. I was a therapist, after all. I knew how this all worked. Or so I thought….
In hindsight, maybe my courage was coated with a touch of arrogance.
I stepped out of my life in Brooklyn and boarded the train to New England. I joined a carshare to the retreat center. There were 4 of us. Different backgrounds and levels of awareness and meditation practice. We were all giddy. At first. Attempting to get all of our talking out before the silence began. When we arrived, we surrendered our bags, our journals and our Blackberries at the door. Little did I know, surrendering personal belongings was just the beginning. The real surrender, for me, happened on day 4.
The rain began falling almost immediately after we arrived. Every morning the bell rang at 4:30 AM, summoning us all to the meditation hall. I awoke and walked out of my shared cabin into the darkness toward the light of the pagoda. Traipsing through the soaked earth where we would all sit in silence for hours. It was a cold, muddy, disorienting walk through the dark toward something I couldn't quite yet see.
A perfect metaphor, as it turned out, for the inner terrain I was about to traverse.
Even under ideal conditions, silent meditation retreats are meant to break you open. Sometimes slowly. Sometimes all at once. Our mind is accustomed to constant thinking, solving, managing, producing. It fills every available moment with doing and doesn’t quiet easily. It narrates. It plans and replays and worries and strategizes and reaches, again and again, for something familiar to hold onto. Usually a story.
And yet, in reality, there is nothing to hold onto. Nothing is fixed. Nothing is permanent.
Everything is in motion.
And that is the teaching. That is the point.
The first three days were loud. Not outwardly loud, this was a silent retreat after all. All of the loudness came from within. When we quiet our thinking and slow down long enough, everything that never had space to be heard gets loud. We finally hear what all of our doing, running, producing and achieving had been keeping from us. The noise doesn’t just keep us from feeling pain, emotionally and physically. It also keeps us from hearing our own true knowing. Our inner wisdom.
We don’t get one without facing the other.
At the end of day 3, the extraordinarily loud silence, the restlessness, and the fear I was experiencing remained, but underneath all of that, something was starting to shift. The rain kept falling, the bells kept ringing, and I kept courageously walking, one foot in front of the other, through the mud in the darkness, toward my cushion.
Nothing on the outside changed. What was actually changing was happening within me.
The most startling and profound change happened on day 4. There was nowhere for me to run. No distractions to pull me from myself. The recalibration had begun. And my body felt like it was engulfed in flames.
The fire began in my chest. A flame rose from my torso. Up through my throat, into my jaw, my temples, my hands. Every cell felt like it was vibrating at a frequency just beyond what my body could contain. There was no teacher who pulled me aside and explained what was happening. I was alone in my experience. Surrounded by others having their own experiences, although it looked like everyone else was reaching nirvana. My stories got louder: I must be doing it wrong. Something must be wrong with me. But the instruction in Vipassana is simply to observe. To feel what's happening. To not run from it and not grasp at it. And definitely not let the stories that our brain wants to create around it take us away from what is happening within our body.
To simply stay focused on our breath. And surrender.
And so I continued to sit. Burning. For what felt like hours.
Part of me was certain something was wrong with me. But a deeper, wiser part of myself that had been sitting in silence long enough to begin to hear past the noise of my mind's constant chatter, felt into something much more profound, underneath the terror.
Something that felt like the truth. Like liberation. Like my heart.
I didn't have language for it then. It would take me many more years of meditation to really know what happened that day on my cushion. Many more years of my own therapy and healing work. And many more years of sitting with clients in and through their own breakthroughs before I really understood the transformative power of emotions.
Emotions as energy. Not to destroy us or others. But to teach us and guide us. To return us to our own hearts.
For me, what I experienced that day on my cushion was the rage of a child who had been taught, before she had words, that her emotions were too much. That if felt, if let loose, they would cause great harm, destruction perhaps. Sitting in silence began to remove the dam created by a nervous system that had spent decades protecting me from this false truth. My nervous system learned to suppress and over-regulate to keep my emotions from rising and releasing. It was attempting to protect me the way it learned how to protect me when I was small. But it was no longer protecting me. It was keeping me stuck. And all of that energy was building up in my body with nowhere to go. No release.
Until day 4.
By day 4, the dam began to break. And the emotions, the energy in motion, began to release.
And what was waiting there, underneath the fire ~ patient and faithful ~ was my fully resourced, core self. My heart. The whole of me that my nervous system protected when I was too little to protect myself. Or know any different. My authenticity that was abandoned in service of my attachment and survival when I was little, was right there.
Waiting.
For my return.
And here is what I hope you understand about what happened on that cushion.
The fire was not a breakdown. It was not evidence that something was wrong with me. Or what I was experiencing was wrong. It was my body finally doing what bodies do when they are given the conditions they have always needed.
It began to release all that it stored over a lifetime. And it is beautiful. And cathartic. And necessary.
Emotions are meant to be in motion. They are energy moving. They rise with intensity and then crest and break. The energy then releases, like a wave reaching shore. The physiological arc of an emotion, when met with presence rather than resistance, lasts approximately ninety seconds.
Ninety seconds.
The reason we feel stuck inside the experience of an emotion longer is not the emotion itself.
It is the story our mind pours onto it.
I can't handle this. Something is wrong with me. This always happens. I am too much. I have always been too much.
We pour the kerosene of a story onto the fire of an emotion.
But the moment we stop feeding it, the moment we drop out of the narrative and return to the raw sensation in the body, the emotion can finally do what it was always designed to do: Rise. Crest. Break.
And release.
This is not a technique. It's not another thing to manage or master or get just right.
It is simply a returning. To the sensations of your body. To yourself. To trusting, not only what you know, but what you feel. And when those two things are in sync: alignment.
To your own truth. To your own heart. To what is actually happening in your body, beneath the story, beneath the interpretation, beneath the constant narration that has kept us all one step removed from our own direct experience.
The story is not where healing happens. The story is over. You survived.
Healing begins the moment we stop trying to make sense of it. And feel.
A Practice for This Week
The next time you notice an emotion rising, you might experience tightness in your chest or throat. Maybe you'll feel a sensation in your belly. Pause and just notice before your mind tells you a story about what you are feeling.
Don't ask why. Don't explain it. Don't narrate it.
Just feel what is happening in your body. Where might there be bracing or resistance to experiencing the feeling. Because whatever feeling got triggered is ready to be released.
Remember: we can only heal what we feel.
Bring your awareness and one conscious breath to it. And then elongate your exhale.
Feel what happens when your mind stops pouring kerosene onto the emotion. And you simply create the space necessary for it to release.
The wave of emotion will rise. And when you surrender to feeling it, it will crest.
And within 90 seconds, it will break. And you will feel one breath closer to your own inherent being. Your wisdom. Your heart.
It’s been there all along. Simply awaiting your return.
With love and One Conscious Breath,
Jody
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