Get Woke: Ownership as an Observer
“Suffering occurs when we wish for something to be different than it is in the present moment.
Only this moment is real. ”
As an Acupuncturist & Holistic Health Care Practitioner, those who suffer walk through my door on the regular. People from all walks of life seek both counsel and treatment for what is plaguing them. It's typically not a presentation of just the signs and symptoms. There also resides a story about the suffering. There are reasons for the pain - who and what is at fault?
I have found that after years of clinical experience, there resides an attachment to the story. For example, instead of experiencing anger, frustration, or sadness as a sensation in the body, we say, "I AM angry. I AM frustrated. I AM sad." What is the energetic translation here? It is actually, "I am my pain - I am my emotion." Here lies the problem: Being deeply rooted and attached to our experiences change the way in which we experience and perceive them.
So let me pose some questions: Would suffering change if these experiences were just sensations felt in the body? What would happen if we sensed and felt the sensation in the body to its fullest without banishing it as bad or wrong? Would more power be given to the suffering if we gave it our full attention? Does judgement of pain or emotion cause more suffering? How can we all suffer less?
The Secret Surprise
Fluidity of pain or emotion occurs when we feel sensations in our body WITHOUT banishment and WITHOUT judgement. Where does it reside? Making friends with anger, sadness, pain, judgement, and grief give them safe space to transform into something else. In the very peak of suffering, we must understand that these sensations will not remain forever - they will move, change, and transform just as life does. SURPRISE! The action step here is not even an action step at all, but a transition from "doing to being.” The most important take away message here is that becoming an observer to your body and owning those sensations in real time will actually allow you the opportunity to transform or as I like to call it, “get woke.”
I know it all seems too simple. There has to be catch here, which there definitely is. Here is the catch: The process IS FUCKING HARD. It requires curiosity, patience, bravery, and diligence. Here is the second SURPRISE: It is totally worth it because the “pause and observe” without judgment allows us the gift of power and choice. You can decide how you want to feel about things instead of having “life done to you.” These processes don’t have to be automatic trigger reactions, but will actually allow you to hear your body whisper so you don’t have to hear it scream.
Why Is This Even Important?
Whelp… instead of throwing the bird up when a car cuts you off in traffic, you can have a moment to “pause and observe.” You have a choice! Also, you may or may not be surprised to learn that emotions usually occur in layers, so underneath the anger may be another emotion like say fear. The automatic reaction of throwing up the bird doesn’t actually attend to the fear that lies beneath. THIRD SURPRISE: Your body is actually giving you a ridiculous amount of information in real time if you just stop to listen. Leaning into discomfort to its fullest extent doesn’t magnify it or give those sensations more POWER - it gives YOU POWER!
My Story
Don’t get it twisted, I was an absolute master of aversion to my own body. I believed that running away or sweeping it all under a rug was actually me "dealing with it." After being raped and assaulted, I was lost and confused. Dissociation from my body occurred frequently to the extent of feeling like I was just my head and just my mind. I thought that running away and drowning the pain in addictive behaviors would help me "solve my problems." I didn't realize that the answers I sought were actually residing in my own body. There is a wealth of information that comes up as "messages" or sensation giving us a clue to our emotional/painful state before we actually have an automatic outburst. My emotion and pain came through as a chest sensation. If I was asked to delve deeper into the sensation and feel it fully (ie: Is it fixed or moving, throbbing, squeezing, pulling? Can I feel the edges of this sensation? What does it need from me right now? What is called for in this moment?), I would completely shut down. I felt as if I could not experience it fully because IT WOULD CAUSE ME MORE PAIN AND SUFFERING! After many months of practicing, I began to feel more comfortable "entering my own body" to see what was there. I was able to pinpoint the sensations and realized that it felt like my chest had a large rubber band around it squeezing me so tightly that it was difficult to breathe deeply. Staying with this uncomfortable sensation and really working to feel it was painful no doubt, but I also noticed that it didn’t stay that way. The more I was able to stay with it, the more I was able to unpack what was beneath that initial discomfort. Have you ever heard the saying, “the issue is in the tissue?” The truth is that running way from uncomfortable sensation doesn’t mean that you’re “over it,” it means you’re ignoring it.
The Moral of the Story
Unfortunately, doing this practice one time will not be adequate for the body to accumulate the “muscle memory” to acquire this skill completely. It must be practiced continually. An important thought may have crossed your mind: Why would I want to feel all my uncomfortable sensations to their fullest extent all the time? Yuck! That doesn’t sound like much fun. The good news is that by continually practicing being rather than doing, pausing and observing, choosing how we’d like to feel, and listening deeply to our bodies actually magnifies not just painful and difficult experiences (momentarily!), but actually the really amazing, wonderful, joyous experiences too. This is how we view the beauty of what life has to offer us in vivid sense-felt experience. In my opinion, this is how we live our lives to the absolute fullest extent. This is how we all “get woke.”