Casual Abuse of Emotions

Programming and conditioning starts young

Full disclosure, we have seen the enemy, and the enemy is us. The WE of us living in the U.S. has been revealed by the fair election of we, the people who voted this week. The split is now obvious by the numbers of people and the electoral congress. The pent-up energy has been released.

The full spectrum of emotion is in full view. Anger, rage, grief, joy and every degree along the continuum has brought us to a convergence point. No longer stuck in a holding pattern, the combustive burst of energy turned into a form of release.

My hope and intent is that we as a nation can now begin to process the movement of energies into a mode of healing.

The side-stepping, ignoring, stuffing, exploding of how we were conditioned or programmed to experience our emotions starts early in life.  When we practice ‘false’ feelings to make others happy or accept us, we deprive ourselves of moving energy through the body. It gets stuck or lodged within the organs or structure of our physical being.

As a female I learned early that I was supposed to ‘smile’ no matter what happened. Frowns were not what pretty does. The coping pattern I learned was to ‘stuff’ the feelings that were literally trying to communicate with me. The consequence was three abdominal surgeries and feeling sadness in my heart.

It played out differently for the men in my life including father, brothers and bosses. They must’ve also been wearing their masks to hide their confused emotions about what it means to be male. In my experience they were much more direct and allowed what I perceived as negative emotion to be expressed.

Betrayals in life and work led me to feel anger and eventually name it, claim and release it before it moved into rage.  The violence that has been voiced and displayed over the past few years is evidence of other kinds of betrayals that are different and equal to mine.

My emotions were raw after the election on the 5^th of November. I tried to pick myself up, dust myself off and attempted to immediately start all over again. Day two, I gave myself time to be introspective. During a class about embodying the voice, I wept calling and toning the sound of ‘pa’ representing father. Immediately I began to weep for my father who was drafted into WWII at 17 years of age, and for the lineage of men who fought in sequential warfare. The feeling of grief for duty to fight and kill others was against all the teachings of what it is to be human. The sounds of pain for the masculine bubbled out of my body until the energy subsided. My voice changed into a nourishing, soft tone as I released energy that had been contracted inside my body. It was as if the ‘ma’ and the ‘pa’ had rebalanced.

Now, I am at a more neutral acceptance of a new reality. A place of ‘in-between’. A space where I can deepen my understanding of the other, opposite, different, and common, alike, same, equal sense of what it takes to be a human being.