The Great Disruption

by | Apr 22, 2020 | Newsletter

The Great Disruption

Like an earthquake it is heaving our social and emotional rift zones, revealing fault lines within. The demands of life shifted without warning: we must become highly adaptable while facing an invisible, unknowable threat. We feel this disruption internally. It can push us into avoidant behaviors: whatever helps us check out.

This is a good time to learn how to ‘settle in’ instead of avoid. To learn how to meet—with kind curiosity—whatever we are experiencing internally instead of turning away from our feelings and sensations. Knowing why we avoid is helpful: it could be that it wasn’t safe to feel pain, grief, anger or confusion when we were children. We may remain afraid of those feelings even now. Yet all of those feelings are normal in this abnormal time, and most of humanity is feeling some of those emotions in various degrees during this Great Disruption. Most of us have emotional skills and strategies that we did not have when we were young. Yet we remain internally fearful and vigilant—hyper-vigilant—of our feeling states, and the avoidance we engage in keeps those deep fears activated but suppressed.

Here are a few facts about emotion that may help:

  • We don’t need to know why we are feeling something in order to feel it
  • Feelings are not up for approval. They are either accepted as is, or not.
  • If you feel it, it is yours. No one “makes” you feel anything… your feelings belong soley to you, they are part of ‘your lane’.
  • Feelings don’t go away because we shut them down. They go away because we have listened/acknowledged them. Or they go into the body and begin their mischief in the autonomic nervous system, ultimately leading to complex chronic illness.
  • Feelings do not require much action from us… apart from acknowledgment.

When we attempt to settle in–to sit with ourselves, in a quiet space, to focus on our breathing, and observe the sensations that emanate from our bodymind as they pass through our consciousness (AKA mindfulness meditation) — there are 3 kinds of experiences most of us have:

  1. An overwhelming experience
  2. A contained experience
  3. A numb experience

What you can do:

  1. Breathe slowly and deeply when feeling emotionally overwhelmed. Those emotional flashbacks or ‘amygdala hijacking” (Walker, 2013) usually indicate that trauma memory circuits have been activated. Look outside of you, look around you, to confirm that there is no actual danger happening. Feelings are not facts: the feeling inside is called a ‘paper tiger”—a feeling of danger that feels like a fact (of danger). Use the EFT tapping strategy every time you experience emotional overwhelm. It helps to name the overwhelming feeling: “This is fear” “This is anger” “This is confusion” After tapping, when you are feeling calmer inside, place your hands over your heart, breath into that spot, and hold yourself : take a breath or two just for you. Feel safe in your own arms before you jump back into your life. If emotional flashbacks happen more than once when you try to settle in, try an expressive meditation like this one 1 or 2x/day instead: https://cmbm.org/thetransformation/resources/
  2. The private experience of contained emotion is the ebb and flow of feeling that runs through our consciousness, responding moment to moment to the life both outside and inside of us. These emotions are private experiences, and we may not even know we are having them until something calls our attention to our own felt sense and we pay attention. If we are having a feeling about something, take a moment and acknowledge the feeling, i.e., “a part of me really doesn’t want that”…The more we pay attention to how we are feeling throughout the day, the more we can show up for those feelings, noticing how they change as we meet them with acceptance and ‘kind curiosity’.
  3. Numbness may be a chronic state, or it may be a response to the current crisis. You might need more ‘waking up’ in the bodymind: try a moving/expressive meditation like this one 1 or 2x/day (https://cmbm.org/thetransformation/resources/) to wake up your emotional/limbic circuits. As much as possible throughout the day, pay attention to your physician sensations and name them, i.e., “I am hungry” “I am worried” “I need a break, I’m tired”. “I need to stop watching the news”

The Great Disruption is a fertile time for inner growth and deep reflection: much will be changed when we fully emerge. Learning how to ‘settle in’ helps to access intuition. Intuition is the Wisdom of the BodyMind.

Right now the healing opportunities being offered online—for free– are unprecedented, as is the healing energy encircling our precious blue planet. As human beings we all have the right to tune into that spiritual healing energy and use it for our own healing and growth.

 

Great Disruptions precede Great Awakenings.

Resources