How do we REALLY know emotions, feelings, and sensations if we never have before?
If repression is a ritual, then we must create pleasure as a practice.
I’m in a family group text often feels like Twitter (aka X) to me. Lots of one way conversations with very few likes or engagements. My parents tag team sharing a combination of bible verses with a religiously-spiritually inspired motivational quote at the start of every day. Sometimes one of us replies, most of the time we don’t. A few times a month there’s something shared that feels a little more connective - a photo, a meme, an opinion on what’s happening in society, an update on an individual’s world. This is a space that I feel a limbo with and within, a deep sense of torn.
The closer I become to my most authentic self, the harder it becomes for me to ignore all the things that invite me feel numb. No one wants to admit that their family of origin gives them grief. But this is a commonality that we all experience in our own unique ways. It’s part of the journey of life and of living. To not only realize, but to find the ways to admit and confront everything that has caused us pain. Some of us have experienced great harms in the places we were supposed to know as home. Others the damages were more subtle - challenging our ability to give them a name.
Regardless of the intention - through my own reflections, studies, conversations, and interactions in the world - I am learning that this is part of the ways in which we evolve throughout a lifetime and how we learn to release, heal, transform, and reclaim. By finding admittance in what felt true to us in our youths and naming what feels true to us in our present day. And through this finding our own footing, voice, power, courage, and agency to exist in our own unique way.
I am coming to believe that we cannot do this if we do not confront what lead us to repress any parts of ourselves. And by proximity, this often means, confronting the ways we learned to love by how we were loved. By facing the fears we run from of admitting all the ways we have felt wronged by the ones who were supposed to protect, love, care for, and uplift us. And by learning to embody ownership of our own needs, desires, pleasures, validation, courage, peace, and love.
This morning in our family text a message was dropped that activated a fight response in me. Which is happening frequently these days. And true to the pattern I learned in the earliest of my days, I met that fight with repression and shame for feeling that way. The message was innocent from it’s origin. A familiarity and bonding point that we’ve come to normalize in our family. It is something that we have all learned to laugh at. But it’s become less of a humor, and more of a nostalgia entangled in a depth of sadness and pain for me. This message reminded me how I was not allowed to feel as a child. That feeling felt, and was unsafe and unwelcomed. That emotions were a burden. That if I emoted too much or in the wrong ways or the wrong place, I would be rewarded with pain. That if I were not perfectly put together at all times - and by that I mean not taking up too much space - that I would be ridiculed and shamed.
Right now my mind’s processing runs so fast it feels like a time lapse scene from a movie. The ways in which I can be greeted with a new experience that triggers a memory of something from the past to play back as if it were in real time. I do this with my therapist, teachers, and mentors intentionally and through this work, it has given me the tools to hold these flashes in real time with greater ease so that they don’t derail me. It also has given me strength and resilience to hold others around me as they navigate through their own explorations of their own mind-body-heart-soul.
In a matter of minutes I had a clarity on why I default to disassociation when anything feels in a way that I haven’t had before. When an emotion arises. When life gets out of control or feels hard. I found a pinpoint into why I bully myself into perfection. And why being imperfect makes me feel weak. Why I manipulate myself out of emoting and why when I am asked to be vulnerable, I minimize and lie. I don’t think I’m special in this story. Unfortunately, too many of us can relate. I don’t hold hate for my family for this way of being. Because it’s what they have always known to be love, even through the confronting and repression of their own pain.
I have a visibility of how healing happens across generations. And a voice that holds a gentleness created from compassion, empathy, resilience, and dedication to change. I am witnessing the slowness that it takes for change to settle in and how commitment to my desires allows them to unfold in the time that they are meant to exist. And I am holding myself in my own healing as a proclamation that it is possible for everyone who comes anywhere close to my proximity. Perhaps my life’s journey is simply a series of moments where I transform memories into poetry. Perhaps that is enough.
photo story created with Mike Saavedra
Lately, I’ve been slowing down to allow my mind to surface emotions and creating space for my nervous system to turn on, run wild, and give my body space to find safety in all the ways it can feel. I’ve been reading to find new vocabulary and writing, moving, creating, and breathing from any point of activation to find comfort in lack of control, presence, transformation, change, and what it is to take up space. I’ll be sharing more about this in future letters to you. But upon entry, this is what I mean when I say somatic practices. This is what I mean when I say doing body-centered work. This is what I mean when I say healing + pleasure. This is what I mean when I say doing the work.
This morning, I met my trigger with action and wrote a little series of notes giving permission to myself and to anyone else who needed to hear it to let it feel. The emotions. The sensations. The explorations. The heart’s languages and expressions of love. If you missed it in the Substack Notes or on Threads if you’re an Instagram fan, here’s the reflections I wrote - take what relates, leave the rest:
Emotions are not a burden. We can take time and space to allow them to surface. They can exist in the open and have a place in our lives. When we repress emotions we train our body to repress feeling. This is how we become numb, depressed, disassociated, and disconnected from everything that makes us feel alive. When we deny our emotions their truths, we also limit our ability to feel pleasure, to fantasize, to love, to experience play, and to express courageously in all the parts of who we are.
Repression, just like mindfulness is a ritual that becomes a habit. When we learn how to dim, numb, hide, and contain our emotions we train ourselves to disconnect from feeling. Emotions activate sensations, and the feeling of these sensations is a communication between the brain and the body that helps us understand more of the language of our heart.
Many of us were forced in our childhood to make repression a habit. To not take up too much space. To not be too expressive. To contain, deny, or not feel our emotions. To change our attitude, fix our faces, be quiet, not cry, or settle down. This is all acts of repression - designed to teach us to control in order to conform to whatever is normal around us and in the environment we spend our time in (home, church, school, sports, work).
Most of us are taught to learn to repress to control our “negative” emotions (anger, fear, disappointment, jealousy, grief, pain, shame). But there are also lots of us who were taught to repress to control our “positive” emotions (joy, pleasure, excitement, love, desire, gratitude). The challenge that arises with repression is that when we deny our emotions room to exist, we teach our body that it is normal to not feel.
So over time, sensations, whether they be hard or desired, become overwhelming and depending on how numb one has become, they can be unbearable. This is why we have challenges with not only feeling grief + pain, but also experiencing pleasure, play + creativity.
Dedicated time to being with our bodies, emotions, and expressions can help us explore feeling in spaces that allow us to find safety in the sensations and normalize what can feel overwhelming or dangerous when it comes up in environments that are uncontrolled. Somatic practices help us dedicate time to not only learning how to become more embodied, but they teach us how to experience emotions through feeling, expressing, transforming, and rewriting the stories our bodies hold.
This is what is that we are desiring at the roots when we seek out healing and intimacy work. To feel the full spectrum of our existence - not only in our peace, but also in the depths of our pleasure. To become more liberated and autonomous in our body, heart, and mind. To be able to explore our edges without the repression that took us away from our pleasure + play. And to be able to hold our grief, pain, and rage without feeling shame or like we’ve lost control.
We learn this through the body. By learning how to be within the body, reconnect our emotions to sensations, and grow our capacity with the discomfort that exists in our edges that surface when we stimulate and allow stimulation to exist inside of our body, mind, heart + soul. Somatic work can sound so clinical - but ultimately, it’s simply a practice of exploration, curiosity + play around creating one’s own formula to become comfortable with feeling.
Leave a line in the comments, share, or send me a DM if you’d like to continue the conversation. I’ll be opening up containers for deeper explorations this fall after the BODIES Exhibition has come to a close both online and in person. In the meantime, if I can support you in finding your way into feeling, healing, pleasure + play in any ways - book a session (online or in person) and let’s drop into this work.
I hope today gifts you moments that you need + connections to things that bring you closer to what you desire to experience in your own journey towards healing, intimacy, pleasure + play.