You Heal What It Is Safe For You to Feel

🔥🔥🔥THIS POST IS LONG(ER)—AND NECESSARY—TO CLEAR A MAJOR DISTORTION IN THE COLLECTIVE FIELD🔥🔥🔥

We’ve all heard it, what you feel you heal. To heal, you need to feel.

Because apparently the complex and highly nuanced multidimensional hero/heroine's healing journey can be deduced to a single sentence.

As if feeling is nothing more than a choice, a thing you choose to do.

I love me a good generalization, but in this case I’d like to shine some light on the exception.

What happens when it’s not safe for you to feel?

Are you—without choice—sentenced to a living hell of suffering? Banished from healing?

What if what you’re not feeling, you’re not feeling, because not feeling is an adaptation and/or mechanism that is in service to your biological and/or psychological survival?

Is your biology wrong then? Or are you wrong, for wanting something other than what your body wants—and clearly needs.

What if an individual simply doesn’t have the capacity to feel the feeling(s)?

What if ‘feeling’ could only be experienced by overriding the system, potentially resulting in an overwhelming experience leading to a re-traumatization of the system? Would you want to feel then? Or desire for someone you love to feel, like your child, in such a case?

Why would our biology even allow this to happen?

It wouldn’t..unless you forced yourself to feel the feeling, through some means of willful intervention, as so many do, and then call that growth.

Or, better yet, biohacking.
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When what you really did was violate your biology.
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Yeah, I said that.
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Do we shame, guilt, or worse, blame, an individual for not feeling? Why?

I’ve observed my fair share of direct and passive shaming of both men, women, and children (in person and online) for their inability to feel or for their ‘lack of heart’, lack of compassion, empathy, etc.

Would you—and do you—blame, shame, or guilt a child for not feeling?

Who are we to presume that we have any fucking idea why a child or adult isn’t feeling, especially what we think they should be feeling?

On the surface it may appear like denial, repression, suppression, or some variant of spiritual bypassing, but little is as it ever seems.

Remember, every adult has a tender and sensitive child inside, with a profoundly unique signature of traumatic inspired adaptions.

I’m all for feeling and healing, as a lived experience.

And yet it’s feels important to acknowledge the triteness of the ‘feel to heal’ adage.

There have been many times on my journey when I simply did not have the capacity to feel.

Nor did feeling the feeling, feel safe to me. But I didn’t know this at the time, I just assumed something was wrong with me, that I was broken or fucked up. Most of the time I was too numb, disconnected, and lost to even notice the self-reproach.

Little did I know that I didn’t feel safe (even if I was)—and because I felt unsafe, I remained incapable of accessing and feeling the feeling, regardless of intentions.

That was the actual issue, but I didn’t know that. I didn’t know about safety, or container, or support.

Because during that time in my life, I was trying to do it all on my own. I was isolated, spinning in circles in the well fortified prison of my mind.

Yet, things have changed, with the gradual journey into receiving support, in all it's beautiful forms. From myself and from others.

When someone put their hand on my heart (or I did), or gazed into my eyes (or I gazed into a mirror), or held such a potent presence that something began to happen inside of me, or they simply let me feel what I was feeling (even if that was nothing) without judgement, opinion, agenda or dialogue. Or during meditation.

…and then I felt the feeling. I just felt. Something happens, happened, is happening...

Almost miraculously, on it’s own.

Looking back on these times, judgement of any kind, simply did not apply and was irrelevant to the fact that I did not have the required internal and external resources required, to allow me to feel the feelings. To feel what was bottled up.

But that doesn't change the fact that there was judgement and shame. It's only in hindsight that I can forgive myself and others.

It wasn’t that I was broken—it’s not that you’re broken.

It’s simply that the container isn’t such for the feeling to be felt.

I’ve experienced this countless times in my life and I experience it regularly in my interactions with others.

Feeling to heal isn’t so much about feeling the feelings as it is about creating the container, which allows for the natural emergence and associated somatic experience of the feeling.

I’m constantly reminded to be as gentle and tender with another, as I would want one to be with me.

Half the time I don’t know what the fuck is happening inside of myself.

Until I do, which is usually after the fact, when I’ve had ample time to transition from the nonverbal experience of the feeling (and the sensations) and back into the restructured narrative.

There's energy, there's feeling, there's thought, there's simply presence to an experience.

I consciously choose to extend this courtesy to another when holding space. They don’t need to know, nor do I, anything.

My job isn’t to analyze or dissect why they’re not feeling, though often I have a felt sense of what’s happening.

Instead, I create a container founded on safety, trust, and connection, in which one’s own lack of safety can be explored (when needed), paving the way to feeling—but only what is ready to be felt, when it’s ready to be felt.

I serve the agenda of the body—and nervous system—that is in front of me, as "it" presents itself.

How do you know what is ready to be felt?

You don’t need to know, you just need to be with what is, as it is arising, as it is emerging. That’s what’s ready. For that’s what’s present, in the eternal now.

Most people are doing their best, have compassion.

Cut them some slack—and when appropriate, check your holier-than-thou, self-righteous, "I've got it figured out and they don't” self-aggrandizing narrative.

You and them are exactly where you are. Feeling what your feeling. Not feeling what you’re not feeling. Aware of what you’re aware of, not aware of what you’re not aware of.

What you're thinking, feeling, seeing and experiencing is but an emanation of a vast, dark, and unseen territory within.

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The fruit (and the feeling) will ripen in due time.

Create the right conditions and life itself will harvest that fruit.

Patience.

And if you’re not feeling what you think you should be, well, it’s ok.

You’re not broken or fucked up. You’re not banished to suffering, even that’s all you know. You're doing the best you can.

Remember, there is a way.
Let that wash over you.

You can read the original Facebook post here.