Witnessing and bearing witness
Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash
This is not a comfortable time. This is a pivotal time of change and transformation. It has been a summer of so much uncertainty and the continuation of fear. I am asserting that we have tools that we were gifted with during this past year and a half to approach this fear with the transformation we need. Having endured a year and a half, where we collectively were witness to this pandemic, and yet alone in our homes, witness to death and experiencing death in our communities, isolated and scared, we have changed. This is a global phenomenon. From our homes, we witnessed murders at the hands of the police, justice unserved now just as it has been for hundreds of years, death at the hands of our healthcare system, the blatant inequalities of race, class and access laid bare, and our nurses and doctors overwhelmed and underprepared. All reflect the racial and class inequities inherent in our country’s foundation.
We have endured trauma and now we are coping with our trauma, using the coping skills we have and developing new ones the ones we developed in the isolation: comfort food, using substances that bring comfort like a glass of wine or marijuana, binging shows, etc. There is nothing “bad” about having coping skills, instead we should thank them. “Thank you for serving me when I needed you.” And we can also use this moment to reassess our self-care practice and ask the question, “Is this coping mechanism still serving me?”
I encourage you to let this moment in time be one where we let ourselves be in transition. Give generous permission to feel the discomfort, fear, anxiety, nervousness, excitement, and exhaustion. We are not going back to normal. We have been indelibly transformed by this collective experience.
In the last year and a half, I have been practicing decolonizing my mind -- from productivity as a measure of my worthiness (untrue!) to mindful language I use in self-talk (lots of self-compassion). I allowed myself many days of doing nothing without reprimand or guilt. To slowly begin to feel what was enjoyable. To connect with pleasure. I spent time creating discomfort tolerance for emotions like grief, anger, rage, and sadness without naming them as hard, challenging, difficult or bad. My ability to be present with my range of emotions with the same loving presence that I embrace joy, happiness, connection, and love, required a renaming. To create more room to be with these feelings I noticed the language I used to name these feelings, and instead called them dynamic! The ability to be present with emotions and feelings is the way we move through them. Anxiety is the body asking me to pay attention to a feeling. And if I continue to compartmentalize or push it down, it starts to show up as pain in the body. If we stop paying attention to the body, the body does not shut up, instead the messages get louder.
As we are in this collective process of decolonization I want to share the powerful realization I had with a new patient. The critic, the monkey mind, the relentless voice that judges, nags, and puts us down, that we ALL have, is more powerfully neutralized with naming. I encourage you to explicitly name it as white supremacy, patriarchy, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, we have internalized. I call it Brody. That voice is not you. You are that quiet voice from your heart, that never nags, or puts you down. This is the voice that I practice to honor and listen to. I am still practicing, and the more I listen the more I am connected to my intuition, my knowing, my guidance. May this version of Self be the one that we collectively connect to so that we can be connected and compassionate with one another.