Probable Cause for Pause
That sense of urgency may just be a plea for pause in disguise.
Hello again, friends. I hope the first days of April are delivering delights to your doorstep. For me, April arrived with a surprise visit from an old friend. There I was, merrily minding my own biz, when I heard its knobby knuckles rapping at my door.
After decades of such unexpected encounters, I knew better than to pull the shades down and pretend I wasn’t home. Clarity is many things, but easily deterred isn’t one of them. And when I’ve ignored its rapping in the past, it has faithfully circled back with a battering ram, and….well, that becomes unwieldy. I just don’t have a dustpan big enough to hold all that fallout. So, when Clarity showed up on April Fool’s Day, I fetched up my courage and let it enter. And after it said its piece, I begrudgingly conceded that it was no joke. It was making a solid point:
Oh, clarity, you old so and so. The way in which you so often dawn with no apparent rhyme nor reason. Like the way you’re choosing April 1st, of all days, to reveal that after countless hours spent thinking about feelings, thinking about feeling feelings, talking, reading, listening, workshopping, and generally nerding out in every possible way about feelings, I’ve likely spent relatively little time actually feeling them.
Sigh. It’s so true. Just because I’ve ruminated about how I don’t want to feel certain feelings and how I should or shouldn’t feel certain feelings doesn’t mean I’ve felt them. Taste-testing every stick of feeling in the emotional chewing gum pack, then sticking the whole wad of it under the desk just really isn’t a digestive process. Sigh, again. The truth of the matter, it seems, is that I’ve mostly hovered above my feelings. Just closely enough to convince myself I was actually feeling them.
Yet I know I’m not alone in struggling to move from pseudo-feeling into feeling feeling. It’s not just me who’s been confused about what it even means to feel one’s feelings. I think what I’ve encountered, more often than not, is folks on a spectrum of bafflement that ranges from mildly bemused (How does one “feel” a feeling? <shrug>) to fully frustrated (I don’t know HOW to feel my feelings!!! <stompety-stomp-stomp>).
So, how is it that we came to be so confused around this seemingly simple matter? Not haphazardly and not by happenstance, friends. Chances are good that, like me, you may have come from a long family legacy of emotional illiteracy and received your education from a system that forgot to include the cultivation of emotional intelligence in its curriculum (and no, getting detention for losing your cool during a kickball altercation in gym class doesn’t count).
And as always, there’s the cultural backdrop, shot through as it is with so many threads of productivity and industriousness. Culture generally doesn’t encourage us to take time out of hustling and bustling for the messy business of feeling. Unless it reaches the level of crisis, in which case we’re corralled behind closed doors to handle it as unobtrusively as possible under the care of medical professionals.
And one more thing. I have my suspicions that the brain’s logical, analytical, linear — and often fear-based — left hemisphere (aka “your royal cerebral highness”) pretty immediately puts the kibosh on feeling both our emotions and our somatic sensations. In its way of thinking, so long as one has a good intellectual grasp on the concept of feelings, there should be no need to actually feel them.
Why subject oneself to the mess of it, the unwieldy, anti-social nuisance of it? Isn’t it a waste of time when there’s so much thinking and hustling to be gotten to, and so many fires to fight? This seems especially true of this chaotic moment in time, when things are shifting so fast, so furiously, so dramatically. Pumping the brakes seems a little like fiddling while Rome burns, doesn’t it? If anything, shouldn’t we be devoting everything we’ve got to constantly contesting Fascist fuckery?
Actually, I think it may mean that it’s more important than ever to slow down, climb back into our bodies and feel things, because…well, THAT is resistance.
Fortunately, we’ve got a force of nature in our favor here, friends. The endlessly creative cosmos loves us all to bits. Every last one of us. And so it cleverly and continually choreographs circumstances to help us feel a full range of feelings, especially the hardest ones. Those are especially crafted with (tough) love.
This is precisely what happened for me the other day, when the cosmos dropped into my lap (aka my phone) a jumbo tough love opportunity to take a stand against my bossy left hemisphere and really sit with some feelings.
A short, misattuned text message, converging with a long lineage of similar texts received over time, struck swift and electric directly into the squish of my heart space. Then it then swept like a wall of fire through my gut, my limbs and out my extremities. My pulse and respiration, spooked by the lightning strike, took toff at a gallop. And each and every one of my cells threatened to follow.
Instead of hurtling headlong into reactivity, though (what I have historically done the vast majority of the time), I just…stayed. I put my hand over my scorched heart space, closed my eyes, lassoed my breath, and waited.
After just a little over a minute of waiting, the internal bonfire sputtered to a smolder, and my galloping physiology slowed to a cantor, then a trot. The smoke cleared and things came back into focus. I remembered that I could choose how to respond to the text, which I could now see was just…a text…not an existential threat. It was almost unbelievable that just a couple of minutes earlier, I felt like I was getting a personal summons from Pele for sacrifice duty.
There’s more to it, of course. It didn’t just end there, because sorrow and grief came trickling in when clarity told me in no uncertain terms that I must set a solid boundary with a seminal figure from my early life (perhaps another story for another time). But the really good news is that I was reminded of a tool I wrote about here a little over a year ago. A tool that seems like a good one to keep handy in our roadside kit during these days when the emotional quality index is so often in the danger zone.
The tool, friends, is the 90 Second Rule coined by neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor, who survived and recovered from a massive stroke in her left hemisphere. Her “stroke of insight” both incapacitated her for years and positioned her to become a purveyor of insights about — among other things — the way emotion plays out in the nervous system.
Here’s a broad approximation of how this thing works:
We have a thought that triggers a highly distressing emotion;
thought + emotion activate the emotional circuitry of fight-or-flight;
fight/flight triggers a release of biochemicals into the bloodstream, which creates all manner of interesting somatic sensations; and
less than 90 seconds later, the biochemicals flush out and we return to stasis.
Now, when something distressing occurs, narrative thoughts around that “something” have a tendency to keep cropping up like weeds. So this 90-second process might need to happen repeatedly until, what may seem at long last, we truly drop the thinking and curiously and calmly stick with the pure physicality of it.
For me, the ability to do this has taken its sweet time to arrive. Perhaps because I deeply believed that naming my feelings meant that I was feeling them. Naming that I was angry, scared, or sad was a first step, yes. But from there, I went straight to rehashing the narratives around why I was feeling those things, rather than staying with experience of them. That left me in an arrested state of replaying the narratives and stoking the feelings in the furnace of my body. And that kind of high-octane suffering takes a lot of time (WAY more than 90 seconds-worth) and energy.
So, here’s this week’s invitation, friends: the next time you’re feeling jolted by some circumstance, memory or future-based anxiety, don’t just do something. Try sitting there instead. Rather than fleeing into distraction, deflection, defense, or knee-jerking any which way, try radically (but gently) accompanying yourself through the rough terrain of your emotional and physical sensations.
My hope for you, for me, and all of us is that as the biochemicals flush out, perspective and a sturdy sense of self-agency will rush into the void. And in that way, we might just build a better future, 90 perseverant seconds at a time.
Loved this Keith, and yes when clarity comes a calling it's a good thing to answer. I too learned the hard way, and apparently I needed many times to learn this. Still do. But I will say the response time is much less.
Ahhh emotions. Gotta love em, yet I still try to push them down. Even when I know they have deep and powerful wisdom. So much they can show me, and teach me. Yet the conditioning, so powerfully and covertly done. The messages of stay in the head, forget the emotions, don't listen to the intuition and instinct. Stay in the mind. Yet, this is where true resistance lies, as you brought up. The conditioning loses its grip, the truth comes to the light, this form is embodied, and connection to everything becomes apparent. True resistance! 💜
This is a fantastic reminder. Being with unpleasant feelings is a way to integrate them—the same way we often need a hug (or some kind of unconditional acceptance) when we're in an unpleasant mood. As within, so without.