Tragically sealed off from our internal experience and disconnected from the faint whisper of our souls, we become strangers to ourselves. We're left with a numbness, the only feeling we can come close to describing.
Avoidance and repression become our sense of sanctuary, a sacred place to escape to when things become too much, not realising its finite capacity. Countless behaviours serve as beautiful distractions, strategically shielding us from the burdens we carry.
Emotions bubble and shift under the surface, poised to disturb the performative calm and eager to shatter the masks we wear.
They deeply desire to be expressed and seen.
Tears roll down a stoic and weathered face, someone who has witnessed life's most heart-wrenching moments until one more heartbreak overwhelms them.
A hand trembles as it reaches for a loved one in their final gasps of life. A soft smile becomes a facade of strength, to ease the passing of the one they dreamed they could be with forever.
A long held truth emerges, spoken with a cracked and wavering voice for the very first time to someone who might turn away, but the weight of secrecy has become unbearable.
And if the moment should arise, where we finally do learn to feel, to allow ourselves to make the transition from the cognitive prison of our heads and into our feeling bodies, it's a cacophony of confusion.
Opposing and contradictory emotions arising together, fighting for attention so intensely they feel as though they are one. Grief and gratitude interwoven, wrestling to be witnessed. Sensations that dynamically pull and push, flitting from hot to cold, expansiveness to contraction.
A knot in our stomachs so tight it feels as if we are being pulled into it, swallowed and consumed by a black-hole-like void, which becomes the gateway we must use to embark upon the painful but necessary descent into ourselves.
Feeling has been so demonised by our culture, positioned as an inherent weakness and a fundamental failing as a human despite it being as natural to us as it is to breathe the life-giving air that nourishes our every cell.
This has occurred to such an extent that so many of us don't even know how to feel, how to make space and be with an emotion, how to articulate them in such a way that feels authentic to us.
We don't know how to give an emotion something real instead of it remaining vague, something we can reach out to and touch. A handhold into our lived experience allowing them to cross over from the purely internal to the external.
So my question to you is this...
Do you have the courage to fall apart, the strength to be weak, to bare your soul for others to see?
To shine a light on the darkness that we hide deeply within, tucked away in places we daren't even look. Shame growing and thriving in the dusty vault of our mind, enveloped by the same sharp hush you experience if you were to speak at the movies.
Do you have the heart to crumble in the arms of a loved one to surrender fully to the intensity of your inner world, allowing yourself to be witnessed for all that you truly are...
Human.