Oowwee, ‘I am Alive to Myself’ got right through the cracks into some invigorating places! It was such a vivid practice. So centering, and enlivening to each moment.
So yesterday… I got tumbled over by a client email, right at 9pm on a Friday evening. They were sparring with me. over a case their party has purposely prolonged over months. Ergh…. ‘Sparring’ again… But I’m the ‘healer’ MBTI type and want everything/one to be ‘nice’! It troubled me, the email. And it interrupted my sleep. And it had me getting out of bed early today.
So I brought the feelings to my QT and to my reading of TPP today:
THE EMOTIONAL INTEGRATION PROCEDURE (TPP p183)
STEP ONE: DISMISS THE MESSENGER. Whenever we become emotionally upset, the first step is to acknowledge that the person or event setting us up has nothing to do with what’s happening. They are “the messenger” (mess-ender). The messenger reflects a memory that’s currently surfacing from within our unintegrated past. “Shooting the messenger” is futile because Presence has an unlimited supply of such messengers! The first step in the emotional integration procedure is therefore to dismiss the messenger. Internally, we may thank them for their service and let them be on their way. Instead of reacting to and venting at them, we might say, “I could use a little time alone right now.” In the beginning, this step of gracefully sidestepping our urge to react takes courage because it requires dismantling our lifelong habit of knee-jerking into drama.
Ok, so it’s not about this client who has ‘upset’ me… I’m not going to ‘react’ by emailing back over the weekend. In fact, even when I do write back on Monday, I don’t need to react to their sparring words. I have side-stepped the Urge To React (UTR :)). I might even thank them for their service internally at this moment.
STEP TWO: RECEIVE THE MESSAGE (insight). The second step is to get the message. To accomplish this, we turn our attention inward and, through wielding felt-perception, encounter the underlying energetic resonance of the emotional reaction we experience through the setup. We know we are succeeding when our body resonates. When we engage the felt-aspect of our upset, our face may flush, our hands may buzz, or we may feel a downward movement in our solar plexus. Whatever we feel as a consequence of our intent to feel is valid.
I sat with the feelings swirling inside me when I thought about this person. Eventually the felt-perception spoke to me:
- “He’s UNFAIR! He’s not being FAIR!”
- Which then revealed early childhood incidences of my shock at people being UNFAIR:
- eg. Caroline stealing my marbles from my school bag, and none of the grown-ups making her give them back because she flat-out insisted she had “brought these marbles to school” with her. – UNFAIR
- eg Dad having a meltdown and chucking away our belongings in black bin-bags, and no one holding him to account, or making him apologise – while we had to apologise for trivial childish errors. – UNFAIR
- Mum saying “No one said life was going to be fair.” And that grating so hard on my little Aspie-child sense of right and wrong.
- Then a more adult-orientated perspective: “They’re being UNREASONABLE!“
STEP THREE: FEELING UNCONDITIONALLY. Instead of externalizing our discomfort by resorting to blame, we now consciously contain and digest the uncomfortable resonance of the upsetting experience. We feel it as it is, without agenda, without manipulating it, and without trying to fix, heal, or understand it. Through this particular step, we trade projection for integration, which we accomplish through unconditional containment. Containment isn’t to be confused with suppression. Suppression is the act of “pretending it didn’t happen” or doing whatever it takes to wipe our awareness clean of the experience. Containment is a declaration that “this is happening,” and that what was initially perceived as happening “out there” finds its cause within our energy field.
Containment is a responsive mode through which we accept complete responsibility for the quality of our experience. It’s an active realization that the emotionally triggered discomfort we feel as adults is a cry for help from our child self. Containment is our way of answering this call. It’s our response to our child self – a response in which, through our unconditional felt-perception, we declare: “I know you’re hurting. I know you’re feeling fear, anger, and grief. I’m now choosing to acknowledge this. I’m choosing to give you my unconditional attention by consciously feeling this discomfort, and to consistently respond this way for as long as it takes for the awareness of peace to be restored.” Through feeling without condition at the causal point of our discomfort, we initiate integration. Integration is the conscious digestion of the unintegrated aspects of our childhood.
It was really good to sit with the intense, physical discomfort of ‘UNFAIR/UNREASONABLE‘. There is/was a lot of dismay, sadness, confoundedness associated with my past experiences of ‘UNFAIR/UNREASONABLE‘. My Aspie being, and my ‘mediator’ self, wants everyone to bring reason and fairness to the table! As I sat with these feelings and contained them compassionately, I started to see what would make a person act in an ‘UNFAIR/UNREASONABLE‘ manner: fear. A spiked amydala. The ego aka Overstimulated Nervous System (Matt Kahn.)
So…… what is my best response to someone being in an ONS state? Well, either I can co-regulate down to their state – maybe the simplest reaction as I’m highly empathic…. OR….
Another phrase of my mother’s arose: I can rise above it.
But this came to me in a new way. Before I’d seen it as ‘ignoring’ the ‘UNFAIR/UNREASONABLE‘. (shrug your shoulders, Mum would say.) But here I saw it as being ‘REGAL’. Like the portrayal of the young ‘Queen Elizabeth’ in early episodes of The Crown, holding her head high and maintaining her composure and boundaries, when Churchill and the cabinet were being ‘UNFAIR/UNREASONABLE‘… and seeking to undermine her authority. She simply wouldn’t descend to their rabble-rousing. She super-imposed a queenly RESPONSE where an emotional personal REACTION might have been emerging. What dignity. What self-composure. What self-sovereignty. Talk about emotional boot-strapping.
Nu?
So you are saying: “I am fair and reasonable, even when others are not.”
Heavens… Maybe?
This appears to be the RESPONSE you are offering yourself. When the other is ‘UNFAIR/UNREASONABLE’ you can be FAIR/REASONABLE.
I can feel the reaction arising in me: “Why should I be fair if they won’t be?!” I guess this is the definition of growing up……….!?!
You could certainly say so. The ability to hold your self as you would wish to be and to feel, even in the face of someone who is unconsciously emotionally charged – and lunging at you – is a sign of your integrating this Presence work. As you integrate your own charged emotions with breathwork and conscious Present Moment Awareness, the charged emotions of others are no longer acting as lit matches to your internal fuel. Because YOU have burnt up that fuel yourself, through your own containment and digestion of the stuck childhood emotions. Beautiful work!
Thank you. This is so helpful. I did also notice that, if work is seeping into my weekends… I can counteract that process, by consciously enacting the Five Ways to Wellbeing (aka CLANG: Connect, Learn, Active, Notice, Give). I talk of this a lot… but need to practise it more consciously. So, after the meditative work above, I made a flipchart to list my main activities across the weekend, and then to note how/if they hit one or more of the 5 Ways. This is good counter-action for some intense work this week, and a good way to redirect my beautiful, vigorous, intense, attentive mind.
And so, any more thoughts?
Your ‘dragon-breathing’ of last session was a really valuable practice. This is how breathwork coincides with burning up the fuel of trapped and unintegrated emotions. The out-breath is ‘purging’ in qigong terms, as you know. This burn, burn, burn of charged emotional fuel is really sacred work. And it dissolves the pain body so well, largely by keeping you in the present moment, which is entirely where the integration is received.
Man, when I practise it, I am astonished at how much ‘fire’ there is! So, I just sit and feel the feels as I breath out, and imagine I am breathing fire through my nostrils… and that does the work?
Think about the FIRE element in Qigong.
Fire = Heart = Joy/Hatred
It’s also enhanced by ‘summer’ and ‘heat’… environmental factors naturally reduced now. So it’s for you now to feed your Heart. Fan the flames. Burn the fuel.
Autumn is also seen as the time for the METAL element, when we sense GRIEF/LOSS – represented by the trees losing their leaves, and the sun retreating…
The METAL element is seated in the LUNGS. So your breathwork processes the GRIEF/LOSS… and restores JOY to your HEART. The heart wants to feel hatred for another when there is not joy. But joy is restored by LETTING GO and RELEASING that which is no longer serving. Like the leaves on the tree.
So, yes, work with this ‘dragon-breathing’ you have developed for yourself. Discern its power to rebalance you internally. Once you are rebalanced internally, your external mirror will reflect your shift.
Lovely. Tysm. xxx
I am dragon-breathing
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It feels a bit like the retreating factions setting their oil wells on fire so no one else can benefit from them…
You mean: burning up the charged louche inside you so there is nothing for others to pilfer or trigger? Excellent.
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Googled ‘dragon breathing’. It’s a thing!
https://www.yoremikids.com/news/july-strike-a-pose-dragon-breathing
I had sensed it was nostril fire breathing vs mouth fire-breathing, but you can do both obviously. Maybe I should work with both. Ty for this work.
Interesting to be evoking the dragon archetype/element. Breathing exercises have often left me cold…. but this dragon element makes me think about how these exercises are not only ‘relaxing’ me, but also helping me embody my strong, powerful, boundaried self.
Bingo.
<3