one of the wildest things i’ve had to repeatedly relearn is that emotions only feel like they last forever if you resist them
if you open up to them they flow through you like water
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you can feel like total shit about yourself or your life, all of your worst fears can feel objectively and eternally true, and then one big enough cry later you’re completely outside of that reality. just transported somewhere else entirely
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calling it “emotional processing” makes it sound like a skill you have to learn but i’m still convinced it’s mostly about unlearning - there’s a natural process that animals allow effortlessly that we actively train children to interrupt in a million ways
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when an impala is captured by a predator it plays dead; if the predator goes away it literally shakes off the experience until it's able to move normally
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meanwhile, human children are raised as follows:
sit still. be quiet. don't make a fuss. don't start laughing or crying in the middle of the classroom. you wouldn't want to bother the other children would you
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hey remember how we went to school where we spent 8 hours a day for over a decade having what our bodies could do completely under the control of authority figures
boy i wonder if that had any lasting effects
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taught us that the three main somatic approaches to releasing an emotion are "sound, movement, and breath" and we teach children to suppress all three for hours every day
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this kind of thing is why i never felt comfortable with sitting meditation and why i wouldn't recommend other people start there if they have any kind of trauma history at all. you're just practicing a freeze response. we need sound, movement, and breath
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meditation does not have to involve sitting down, you do not have to be still, you do not have to be quiet, you do not have to be alone, you do not have to be in a group, you do not have to be inside, you do not have to control your thoughts, you do not have to control anything
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We teach a different approach in opening awareness sitting meditation (in evolvingground.org) radically different to the renunciative freeze response. It’s more likely to give rise to sensations & emotions that have been previously unseen.
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