Feeling Fully
After I'd become a mother, my mother revealed to me that she had always worried that I might be too sensitive to have kids; that I was such an empath, so sensitive, that I might not have been able to handle it if my child was in pain or hurt. I proved her wrong, and raised two very well-rounded and highly successful people. But I'm crying as I write this. And instead of trying to figure out exactly why writing this brought on such emotion, I'm just going to feel it, allow it. Then it occurs to me that somehow feeling – being intensely sensitive – may have been seen as a weakness in my upbringing, and here begins the saga.
I am very sensitive to smells, tastes, sights, sounds, colors and ideas. I'm a peace and environmental activist, so poisoning myself and polluting the planet went totally against my core ideals. When it came to smoking and then drinking, one of my biggest rationalizations was that it desensitized me from the things I found unacceptable. When I joined the ranks, I no longer judged them. After not smoking for decades, and surrounded by smokers, I started up again rather than be repelled. (And what we all know now, is that it is the substance itself that creates the need for it.) If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. In times past when I would entertain the idea of stopping drinking, it would always be something – a feeling or feelings – that I did not want to feel that led me back to the 'fuck it' stage. In a world that seems doomed, I might as well be doomed, too. Gonna die anyway, bla bla bla.
Looking back, I now know that all of this is bunk. Fact is, I drank to not feel the most basic of human feelings, not because the world is falling apart or there's so much pollution and war and pain and unfairness, and I'm gonna die anyway. I drank because somewhere along the line I learned, not only that drinking was what we do, but that Feeling = Vulnerability = Weakness = Bad.
Over the course of the past few months I have experienced life without the buffer. I realized I'd traded feeling for false comfort. I now own my vulnerability. I see how I had been habitually, unconsciously squelching basic human feelings, and with the bad went the good because you can't selectively deaden one feeling without deadening the others. Squash the loathing, squash the joy. Deaden the senses, deaden the whole self.
As my joy returned, I realized those deeply ingrained beliefs were totally false. As I stripped away the layers, all emotion became equal – one. As I saw past the stories, I saw past the lies associated with them. This is what This Naked Mind is all about. When we peel away all of the bullshit conditioning, what we are left with is Truth. This is living.
Copyright © Heidi Mayo All rights reserved
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