The Most Generous Gift I've Ever Received
One Conscious Breath: Issue 25
The depth of love we are able to feel is matched only by the accessibility of our connection to our own heart.
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.
Give yourself permission to simply be. In this silence. For just one conscious breath. And then gently meet whatever arises ~ whatever has been waiting underneath all the inner and outer noise ~ for a moment of stillness like this one.
And when you're ready ~ let's begin.
Last week, I shared with you that I felt angry. I didn't just think I was angry. I knew it because I felt it ~ in my body. And I know the core emotion of anger is a signal, telling me something unjust is happening or happened. And I trusted I could feel it because I know emotions are ephemeral. And when we learn how to feel them adaptively, the energy they carry releases.
The energy of anger feels different than that of other core emotions. In fact, they each carry their own unique sensation and message. We need to know what they feel like in our body so we can accurately interpret what they are trying to tell us. And live our life in coherence, mind and body, heart and soul. It's our very accessibility to feeling ~ all of our core emotions ~ that allows us to also safely feel the depth and intensity of love.
We're all born with a cry. And my daughter's early cries lit up emotion in me that I didn't even know existed. She ignited not only the deepest love I've ever felt, but also the deepest wounds. Funny how that works, right? We don't get one without experiencing the other. That's quite the juxtaposition to be with under the best of circumstances, but add all of the changes of new parenthood, internal as well as external, and it becomes a reckoning.
It took my daughter being born to see how devastatingly profound a simple cry actually is. It's the only way we know how to express ourselves when we are that little. It's beautiful and innate. We're born expressing our emotions ~ openly and immediately. And then, very early on, we begin learning just how safe it is to keep expressing so openly. Or not. It's based on the accessibility and capacity of our caregiver to stay attuned and help return us to a felt sense of safety within.
This isn't a letter meant to invoke shame. Or focus outwardly on someone to blame. It's an invitation to feel the signals of your emotions ~ then follow the pathway they illuminate ~ back to your own heart.
I grew up in a home where emotions expressed openly were often met with silence, anger and even violence. My body learned it could be dangerous to feel too deeply, feel too much. When we're little, we need someone to help us learn how to feel safe experiencing our emotions. And, for me, my early childhood home wasn't the place where I found safety.
So, in service of my surviving, my body began to disconnect me from feeling at all. It stopped me from listening to and honoring the very signals my body was sending. It stopped me from trusting myself ~ in service of attaching to my caregivers. It stopped me from feeling safe in connection ~ with myself. And others. This didn't mean there was something wrong with me. It was simply my body protecting me, in the only way it knew how. When I was too small to know or do anything different.
Brilliantly adaptive then. Disastrous now.
I proceeded to spend decades of my life not feeling too much at all. So, imagine my surprise to be greeted with a baby who openly felt and expressed everything so unabashedly. She was born into being and feeling exactly as she should. And yet, her open expression was unsettling to my nervous system that learned, very early on, that feeling too much could be dangerous.
A simple form of communication so powerful it cracked me open.
The depth of love I felt for my daughter created an opening that allowed me to feel the disconnection from my own self more acutely. The feeling of love that was activated within me led directly to my deepest wounds. And the only way to fully access that love, was by feeling the very emotions that my nervous system had been protecting me from feeling for all those years. This wasn't a sign of unworthiness or failure. It wasn't even a signal that something was wrong with me or my connection with my daughter. This was actually love in action. The immense power love has to reconnect us to ourselves. And then each other. We can only heal what we feel. And the deepest love will activate our deepest wounds. Not to punish us. But to help us heal them.
It's the most generous gift I've ever received. And she didn't even know she was offering it.
Your child ~ or anyone you feel close to ~ will trigger you to feel. Not because something is wrong with you, with them or with your connection. Simply because they make you feel something. Desire or aversion. Both activate feeling within our bodies. The question becomes: is it safe for me to feel? Because at some point in time, it may not have been. And if that's the case for you, as it was for me, the answer now is, yes. It is safe to feel. Even if it wasn't then. It is now. And the work is updating our nervous system to no longer sense feeling as a threat ~ something to run away from or shut down around. But instead, something to open to and express.
I used my daughter as an example here to show that the person who activates feeling within us is not an enemy to retaliate against. Or avoid. They simply offer us a pathway ~ pointing with precision ~ to the place within us that is carrying unprocessed emotion. And it's precisely this place within that needs and deserves our awareness and compassion. The work is to turn inward and follow the pathway to the emotion. And then feel it, giving it the space needed to finally, adaptively, release.
This simple process allows us to feel more fully. Because underneath the release, is greater access to our core Self, to our heart. And feeling ~ ecstasy to sadness and everything in between ~ is what makes us human. Knowing full well that emotions are ephemeral ~ and nothing lasts forever. We're just much more familiar experiencing pain. And learning how to avoid it at all costs. But if we're avoiding pain, we will also ~ unconsciously ~ be avoiding the ecstasy, too. And that's a shame. Because we are human. And we deserve to feel it all.
The birth of my daughter made me feel again. The emotion itself wasn't about her, necessarily. She sparked it, but it was already there ~ within me ~ patiently waiting to be remembered, revealed and released. Her simple existence, her complete openness and light shined so bright, upon her birth, that it illuminated unhealed parts in me that I didn't even know existed, waking me to emotions so deeply buried and hidden, too overwhelming to feel when I was little. But that's the gift. We can feel now what was too unbearable to feel then. We have more resources as adults to learn a new way of being ~ with ourselves, and with our emotions. Because underneath all of our unprocessed emotion, ever so patiently waiting, is our fully intact heart. We can't possibly know how deeply we can love, if we don't ever access the unprocessed emotion disconnecting us from our own hearts. We don't get to feel one without experiencing the other.
And so, in a breath between the trigger and our reaction ~ we can create a space. Enough space that allows us to make a choice ~ to turn inward and meet the activation of emotion within our body. Whatever is being activated within us is ready to be healed. Or else we wouldn't feel it. You have the capacity now to meet it.
One conscious breath at a time.
A Practice for This Week
The next time someone you love triggers you, pause before you react.
Take one conscious breath. Notice what's happening in your body ~ any tightness, heat, desire to run away, retaliate or shut down. Whatever it is, gently bring your awareness to it. Ask if this reaction is necessary and helpful in this moment in time. Or is it safe now to soften? To open to meeting whatever emotion is arising in this moment in time.
Take one more conscious breath and welcome whatever you feel arising in your body. I bet it's been waiting a long time to be seen, felt and released.
Elongate your exhale. And allow yourself to soften.
One conscious breath at a time.
The most generous gift I've ever received was an offering that the giver didn't even know they were giving. That somehow makes it even more meaningful. My daughter, so generously, led me back to myself.
Every emotion that had been buried, in service of my survival when I didn't know how to feel them, surfaced in the intensity of her love and light. The anger, the grief, the fear, and a love that felt too intense to experience, came rising to the surface.
It was a reckoning. And I had a choice. I could turn away from all of my emotions that were rising. But then I'd have to also turn away from the love.
And that's when I realized ~ we don't get one without the other.
With love and One Conscious Breath,
Jody
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