To Feel It All

 

If you communicate in tears and grief and anger and despair and joy like I do, hold these expressions as sacred, because they are. Know that these emotions are your wisdom, not a flaw. Don’t believe Them when They say that how you feel is a sign that something’s wrong with you.

I cried twice today– the second time, just thirty minutes ago– and as the tears slipped down my cheeks a vision came to me.

In it, I was sitting before an ex-shrink of mine. Heavy tears streamed down my face like waterfalls after winter’s thaw. Now, this was a man whose labeling eyes once penetrated my skin in diagnostic desecration. But in this vision, all I felt for him was compassion. For in meeting his eyes with mine, I could feel so clearly how they emanated the very same fear I once felt, myself: 

Fear
of all the waves
and storms and
freezes and melts and
fires and rains of my being.

Fear of who I really was– and of who I had the power to be.

In this vision, he was so afraid of himself.

As I kept looking into his eyes, I could see as clear as day how lost and disconnected he was from himself, his emotions, his authentic state of being. I could see how this had thrown him into a deep state of mourning he wasn’t yet aware of.

And I could see how all of this–
his loss, his disconnection, his mourning and his lack of awareness of it all–
had eventually led him to believe that
answers are best found through
the act of labeling another,
an other.

For it keeps you safe from having to acknowledge that you’re really just an other to yourself.

As his steel blue eyes and my crying ones began to commune with one other, I felt my compassion for him deepen. Because I now saw him for who he really was: a scared, wounded child. A child who, like me, had gotten swept up in the false promises of what our culture teaches us it means to be human, to be worthy, to belong… We were the same, this shrink and I, and we always had been. It’s just that he’d somehow ended up with the swipe card to the double-locked doors.

In this moment of realization I knew in a deep-down way that it was my human responsibility to keep crying– to keep my cheeks good and wet so that he might eventually see his own reflection in my skin. To show him what it looks like to cry from a place of fully human power… That it’s safe there… That there is nothing to be afraid of.

If you feel big feelings like I do, remember this: they are a sign of your aliveness. They are your sacred human power. And they are a gift you are meant to bring forth into the world. Use them as a light and a guide and a mirror and an open hand for those who may still be too afraid to feel it all.

-Written May 30th, 2017