Claiming a New Inheritance

If you’ve been practicing yoga or mindfulness for a while, you’ve probably come to discover that trying to be more conscious doesn’t necessarily make your life any less intense. In fact, embodied consciousness practices increase your capacity to be present to what you’re experiencing, and thus you feel more. And since life throws you all kinds of experiences, feeling more doesn’t necessarily lend itself to the vision of peacefulness and balance you may have imagined yoga or mindfulness would create in your life.

But giving yourself permission to feel more does give you the ability to be more connected to the life that you are living, and to the people with whom you share your life—a prospect that is perhaps equally desirable as it is unsettling.  

If you’re anything like me, there are people with whom you learned, perhaps many years ago, that it’s not safe to feel what you feel around them—they’ll make fun of you, they’ll ignore you, they’ll lash out at you or in some way hurt you when you’re most vulnerable.

My grandma was one of these people for me. When I was a young girl we were quite close, as she would baby sit me while my mom slept during the day because she worked nights as a nurse. But as I got older, my grandma’s patterns of being emotionally closed, hurtful and manipulative, especially to the women in my family, started to appear. I closed my heart to her. I became polite around her, and guarded. 

When she fell and broke her femur at nearly 90 years old, I knew immediately that I needed to fly back east and try to break my defensive pattern with her before she died. After all my years of practicing yoga and doing therapy I felt like I might be able to do this—to stay open and undefended and allow myself to feel what I felt without anything about her, the situation or the past needing to be different.

The first week I visited her daily in the nursing home, however, I was back to being polite and guarded around her. It wasn’t until the last few hours before I had to leave for the airport, that I moved past my emotional shut down. I was alone with my grandma during a rare moment when she was calm, conscious and recognized who I was. Aware that this was the last time I would see her, I finally just let go and wept. I didn’t care if she ignored me or snapped at me to stop as I had experienced any time I showed emotion around her in the past, I just couldn’t not feel any longer.

To my amazement, she took my hands and pulled me onto her chest.  Without saying a word she stroked my hair and patted my back as I cried. I stayed crying on her chest long after she had fallen to sleep.

Never in a million years would I have imagined that my grandma and I would have shared a moment like that, vulnerably meeting each other in the reality of the present moment and the fullness of our emotions without trying to change or control anything. It felt like a gift—to get to change the story the lineage of women in my family carried around emotions being off limits.

I’m struck at how hardly any of us know how to do this: how to simply feel what we feel without trying to manage, contain or control the external situation or our internal response. Most of us did not come from families that modeled this, and we certainly don’t live in a culture that fosters it.  Like my grandma, we’re doing the best we can, and that involves seeing emotions as a liability. 

I completely understood, then, when two of my clients said this week, “I feel like I can’t breathe!” as they shared what it was like trying to resist their powerful emotional responses to difficult external circumstances in their lives. They felt panicky, as if they were flailing in an ocean of their own emotion, not able to make it to the surface, and quickly running out of air.

But here’s the thing: the point of conscious living isn’t to stay on the surface. The point is to be able to not freak out under the surface of our experience.

The other evening a friend showed me video that he took while snorkeling in Hawaii. I could hear the waves pushing up against the rocks above, but underneath the water…aaaaahhhh…that sense of timelessness, effortlessness and pure presence. Even watching it on a computer my body softened and I took deeper breaths.

With that, it’s as if embodied practices like yoga that increase our capacity to feel our physical and emotional body are metaphorically about learning how to snorkel: we learn how to exist on that thin plane between the surface and the depths. Having spent so much time trying to keep our heads above water, we now find that we have the resources to breathe and to open ourselves to experiencing the marvels and mysteries of what’s below the surface. And not merely as a spectator, but immersed, engaged and fully a part of the experience.

And so I encourage you: practice giving what you’re feeling more space. Start with feeling your physical body in the shape it’s in—whether that’s a yoga pose or how you’re sitting in your chair right now. From there, see if you can tell what the physical sensations you feel tell you about what emotion it is you feel. Then see if you can give yourself permission to feel what you feel. 

That doesn’t mean that you have to break out in sobs or scream in a fit of rage, but that you simply allow the tide of the emotion to move in you, to be fluid. Given space, sometimes the feeling recedes naturally. Sometimes, however, it requires a good cry in your pillow when you can get some private time, or some solid punches on a punching bag at the gym. The important piece is that you’re making space for what you feel—and thus for you to be just as you are in that moment.

And not just that, you create a new emotional inheritance for your family—one that says that you care about the depths of the people in your life, not just the surface, and it’s an invitation for them to do the same. And whether or not anyone else agrees with you, you giving yourself your own full experience is what matters in terms of becoming more yourself.

Sound good but you’re not sure how to do it? That’s what Yours Truly is all about.