It's not just managing my emotions to get back to work

Post-election thoughts and the collective healing practices I'm leaning on

In many ways I didn’t want to write this. I wanted to keep turning inward and away. Dive back into parts of my work that lends itself to solitude. 

But this morning I felt a deep call, a stirring, really, to speak and put words to the twists and turns going on within me, so that’s what I’ve done.

Below are reflections coming through me post-election. They ended up being couched in terms of practices, the ones I do during times like these, and that I think of as being collective healing.

A small, tingling message that came through me as I wrote this, (and processed things as I wrote) is this feeling that, like, ‘we can do this.’ Whatever this weird, wackadoo time is calling us to do, we can do. And frankly, I don’t know what this ‘it’ even is, but I do know (..believe? .. think?)we can do it, and that things like these collective healing practices can help us do so.

Anywho, I’m being cryptic. Check out what I share below and let me know what you think. And, more importantly, how you’re doing.

Sending you a lot of slow, deep, attentive-filled love.

Liz

It’s not about regulating my emotions to get back to work

Being in this work of collective healing, I think a lot about times like these and the personal lived experiences that come with them. For me, it’s more than just needing to ‘regulate my emotions and get back to work,’ as some might put it (and have interpreted my work to mean). Instead, it’s a much deeper set of practices.

It’s a practice of self-awareness, knowing where my own personal wounds end and the collective’s begin. Identifying how current events brush up against and enflame other stressors and wounds I hold.

It’s a practice of being with what’s here, not pushing it away. Staying present and attentive to the ebb and flow and multitude of energies that come with any given moment. 

And  it’s also a practice of listening. Yes, to my own needs and limits from within myself, but even more so it’s a practice of listening to the collective. Using myself as a tuning fork to sense into the deeper undulations happening for us as a collective right now.

I do all of this with a big does of humble pie. Not taking myself too seriously. They’re practices, after all. So I’m meant to flub up.

But I do it because it’s something I can do when it feels like so little can be done. I do it because the invitation to do so is loud and clear and ripe. Like, all that I feel and sense and see is here in spades for a reason. It’s no coincidence that it’s so palpable and intense. 

So perhaps that’s the best way to move forward in this essay, to organize my reflections based on these three practices. Let’s see how it goes:

Where mine end and the collective’s begin

I think of emotions as being like droplets of water. When they’re close to each other they can merge and coalesce together, becoming a bigger pool of water, like the way raindrops do on a window pane.

At times like these, I can see this coalescence of emotional energy happen within me so clearly. It tends to happen in two ways: 1) the world’s pain gets mixed up with other stressors in my life + 2) personal wounds from my history get activated by current events.

With stressors in my own life, I see it happen a lot late at night, when I’m tired and my system’s low. Other ongoing stresses in my life, in the case of my present day, stuff related to our house, gets caught up in feelings I have about the election. In true shape shifting fashion, the anxiety I feel about home decisions feeds into fear I feel about the future of our country, and like a sticky growing web, ping pongs off of each other until what was once something that was manageable, has now become a behemoth set to send my system down a death spiral.

When this happens, I find it so helpful to 1) just notice that that’s what’s going on. Remind myself that emotions function like rain drops, and have a contagion, amplifying effect. When I’m tired I’m less capable to hold things. It helps me know when to tap out and not take things too seriously. Table it until tomorrow when I can better untangle and sort things out.

Personal wounds tied to my history, on the other hand, I find I need to tend to more. These typically have more teeth to them just by nature of how long they’ve been around.

This Trump shit is such an easy example for me of this. As a figure and archetype he reminds me of people, especially men, in my personal and professional life who had hurt me. They embodied certain power dynamics and ways of relating that were domineering and abusive, therefore of course it ruffles those personal wounds up. Even after years of healing, and holding forgiveness and understanding to these people from my past, the patterning of these wounds still live in me and are affected by seeing Trump come into power.

There’s a tenderness to this that requires extra care. Similar to the personal stressors, the more I’m able to parse out what I’m feeling—what’s related to the current event versus my personal past—the more I can work with those sets of feelings in healthy, constructive ways.

Noticing the things that keep me away

At first I subtitled this “staying present,” but I honestly don’t love that framing. It evokes this image of someone holding their eyes open with their fingers to the point that they’re bloodshot and dry. I think it’s associated with staying ‘tuned in’ to the news or media updates, which feeds burn out.

The practice of presence I’m talking about here is much gentler, personally defined, and internal. It doesn’t have to do with the cognitive, and it’s different from the mindfully-harnessed attention that comes from meditation. 

It’s a practice of staying with, and not leaving, the emotional stirring happening within me; of staying present with the world’s pain and making sure I create enough space for these parts of me to be heard and cared for.

For me, around this Trump stuff, I’ve found a lot of refuge in the intellectualization of things these days. Turning to political philosophy and sociological takes and even campaign strategy stuff. It’s been a nice resting place to perch on and look down on all of the happenings going on on the ground. A reprieve from the madness. 

But while doing so is nice and necessary, it can easily become a defense that keeps me disconnected from other parts of me that need air time. Parts of me that are tender and aching. Parts of me that are uncomfortable to be with because of the angst and anger they hold. During times like these I can see myself all too easily slipping into the comfort zone of intellectualizing stuff, recognizing that it’s at the expense of these other parts of me that need space.

Another one that comes up for me and that I’ve seen come up post-election is spiritual guidance. Ah, my beloved Spiritual Guidance. Water for my soul. Critical and needed, more than ever. 

I was thinking about this this morning while I pushed my daughter’s stroller and walked us to class. The changing trees all around me offered me the reminder that everything’s always in transition. In her book, How We Live Is How We Die, Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön teaches that ‘impermanence never takes a break.’

I’m lifted by this teaching and the natural world all around me that offered it. Everything’s always in flux, and that’s a good thing.

But there are also very real world affects to all that is happening.

Similar to over-intellectualization, decontextualized spiritual guidance can also be a defense. It can be something that keeps me separate from being present with what what’s happening on the ground.

And the things that my heart and body are feeling are channeled from the real world. They are the humanness of it all—the human suffering, the human condition, the human experience of the push and pull and pain held within this time we’re living through. And they deserve space.

The more I can notice when defenses are keeping me away from things that are important to me the more I can lovingly work with them, and the parts of me, that need extra support to do so.

Listening for the collective within what I feel

If I can sum up a larger theme within all of these practices so far, it’s about creating space for multitudes. These are practices that create space for the multiple parts that live within me and that make up my experience. By doing this, I make sure each part has air time; it isn’t accidentally getting stuffed in a corner; it’s being cared for; and is ultimately able to serve the function it’s meant to serve in the highest way.

Within these multitudes, there’s a part of my experience that I believe to be the collective. As I create space for my heart’s ache and the heaviness in my body, I do so with a gentle eye towards what might be the collective’s. What tendrils within what I feel are tied to the larger collective body I am a part of.

I’m in an ongoing process of this post-election. There’s the discombobulation and desperation I feel within these times; that I’ve felt for a bit. But I don’t want to speak too soon at this moment. I do feel that it’s all part of this larger process of political disintegration we’re in the midst of. But, again, maybe that’s my over-intellectualization jumping in.

Ultimately, I do these practices to be in relationship with this new world we find ourselves in. A world that is changing so fucking fast it’s mind bending and that is in a tremendous amount of pain.

Figuring out how to be in relationship with all of this madness is an excruciating endeavor, at times. And even with the waves of disbelief and anger that have been coming up for me the last two days, I also—maybe naively—believe it’s an endeavor that we can do.

Evolutionarily speaking, I think all of this stuff is here, at least in part, because we’re able to work with it, even when it involves devastating consequences. We’re being pushed and pulled in a direction (multiple directions?) and don’t know what it means or where we’re going. But I believe that these collective healing practices can help us unearth wisdom and guidance held within what we’re feeling that can serve as little starlights to help get us there.

That’s what I pose to myself, anyways.