The Only Way Out is Through
The red pillow on my carpet where it all went down.
Monday around 9:30 p.m., if you had walked into my house you would have found me sitting cross-legged on the floor, rocking back and forth, sobbing, heaving, and thrusting out deep, guttural, staccato sounds of agony.
This is not what I typically do on a Monday evening.
But something serendipitous is happening. Not fun, no not fun at all. Not even a little bit. But definitely serendipitous. I have found myself in a moment of my life where I’m faced with an extremely challenging and painful emotional situation. And (finally) the universe has simultaneously presented me with the tools to address it. In fact, not just to address it but to use it and evolve through it. (“The only way out is through.”) The tools have appeared as the work of Michael Brown and his two books The Presence Process, which I spoke of a few days ago, and Alchemy of the Heart
The essence of Brown’s work is this: Every time you get upset (set up) by a situation in your life, it is simply a trigger, a reflection of unintegrated emotional charges from your childhood. Every time. Without exception.
We spend our entire lives running from our deep pain and hurt. We drink, we eat, we fuck, we pray, we do this, we do that, anything to avoid really, really feeling anything. When an upsetting situation arises in our life, we attempt to fix it by changing our physical circumstance. We switch lovers, we move to a different town, we get a different job. Or we simply believe that the situation that’s upsetting us is the fault of whomever is involved, and we ask ourselves questions like “Why does this always happen to me?” But because we’re not addressing the causal point of our experience – the emotional signature from our childhood that hasn’t been processed and integrated – we just recreate the same circumstances in a “new” place.
Being With the Emotion
So Brown advises the following I’d-rather-stick-needles-under-my-fingernails exercise instead: He says to sit down and simply “be with” the emotion without condition. Do not tell yourself the story about what’s happening and why and who’s to blame. Do not try to suppress or criticize what you are feeling. Just sit your ass down and be with it. Feel the feeling. And in doing so, just as we don’t need to tell our body how to breathe, we don’t need to tell ourselves how to integrate these emotions. By allowing ourselves to have the experience, we’re finally allowing the innate wisdom of our body to do the work. We don’t have to know how. We just need to trust and know that it will integrate. And once it does, we have cleaned up the causal point of this anger, fear, and grief. (At least one of them anyway.)
Which brings us back to my grief-stricken spasms Monday night, sitting on my living room floor. Because what happened was this: Without the story to accompany this feeling, something opened up. As I sat there emoting all over myself, I felt very surely and deeply that what I was crying about did not in fact have a damn thing to do with what I thought I was crying about. I was grieving from a place much older and more expertly hidden. And when it was done, I felt a calm take over. I didn’t feel “good”, but I did feel…at rest.
Dis-ease
But what was really interesting for me was that as I sat there, still and centered in the aftermath, I understood from a place that didn’t involve thought that what I had just released healed a part of what Multiple Sclerosis is in my body. Because I know, as surely as I’ve ever known anything, that my illness was born of that pent up dis-ease. I know that I have just begun – I mean truly begun – the gritty, dirty, ugly, uncomfortable work of becoming exquisitely healthy (and it doesn’t have anything to do with prescription medication). And what I love about this particular model is that Michael Brown is not a guru and he doesn’t claim to have the answers. He has simply communicated a path that works. But the work, and the answers, that’s all us.
When I asked Bruce Lipton how to change my beliefs, this is the answer I was looking for. It’s not as pretty and clean as I would have liked, but it’s powerful, and I know as I’ve ever known anything that I’m on my way, and MS is on it’s way…out.
And as for the extremely challenging emotional situation I’m dealing with right now, I’m going to trust in one of Brown’s favorite statements, which is that we don’t get what we want or need, but we do get what we require. We always get what we require.
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I beliEVE THAT HEALING IS SELF INDUCED. I hate MS. I aM 57 YEARS OLD AND THIS DISEASE MAKES ME FEEL 75YEARS OLD. My sense of humor hasn’t changed, the only thing that has changed is my walking and temperment.
Karen, I just want to thank you for mentioning Michael Brown’s books. I bought both of them and quickly found that this stuff really resonates with me. I’m sure it doesn’t grab everyone this way, but it really did grab me. The process certainly is NOT easy, but I have already had many powerful insights just while reading the books. I just know that this is really MAJOR!