“It is no surprise that you feel tired,
heavy, and short tempered once you start
deeply engaging with your emotional history
Healing will make you feel what you avoided,
and this may impact your mood
Letting old burdens move through you is hard,
but it will help you feel renewed”
-Yung Pueblo, The Way Forward
These words are kind of a cliche in therapy, but with any cliche, they are true and real and profound. Many who are not yet ready for therapy brush these kinds of words off, but they hold a deep truth. The way out is always through, there is no luxury in life that allows us to escape the feelings, because we are feeling based beings. We cannot escape the material journey that our souls are on in this life. When my dad was about to pass, I had two choices. 1. I could maybe prevent it a little long, or 2. I could lean into it. I came up with this metaphor of a moving train that is coming towards you. It’s coming along for a while, and each moment spent you are aware of this. Until it hits you, it hurts like hell, and then it’s suddenly receding off in the distance. Metaphorically, the pain happened, but you are still here. “No feeling is final” as they say in seeking safety.
A recent book that came out on plastic, titled Plastic Inc, by Beth Gardiner, talks a bit about the corporate culture of profit making without consideration for the entire life span, and thus the planet and the beings that live on the planet. This consumerist culture, primed by many unethical corporations, is horrible. In a way, this mirrors our consumerist relationships with ourselves. So much waste is produced and allowed by not thinking of the whole picture. By not thinking of the complete cycle. Psychologically speaking, how much of our lives do we waste by not considering the entire cycle? If we stop at the bad feelings, and never go on to think about how we can do reclamation work, we stay stuck in unfinished, unending patterns that stall and leave waste of the emotional, physical, and spiritual nature.
Coming back to starting to feel feelings when coming out of the numbness. This is going against our mammalian nature. But it is not wrong, it’s simply paradoxical. Because once reclamation work is done – If you stick with it – you will also feel more good feelings down the road, and hopefully sooner rather than later.
