I know, I know…
Horror and disgust; not the lightest topics to learn about, but I’ve been feeling a pull to make a video on this for quite some time so here we are.
I believe themes like these are important because they are part of humanity and they’re all around us, whether we like it or not, so I think it best to learn about them, acknowledge them and even feel into them.
‘Cause hiding from them won’t make them go away.
When we get more comfortable with these concepts, and learn a little about them and what happens in our nervous system when we encounter them, it can help us when we might be faced with things that are horrific and bring up a taste of disgust.
These somatic experiences can be intense when they arise. But by acknowledging these real emotions and sensations, we steer away from getting stuck in fear, survival, dissociation, anger or all of the above. And that keeps us on the road to healing.
This is something missing in our health and healing mainstream media channels. I don’t blame anyone for leaving this out because it’s touchy and tough to open up conversations that revolve around the feelings and visceral responses that come when we acknowledge and witness all the bad things that happen to our fellow human beings (and sometimes to ourselves).
I think we’ve got enough content showing the serene, blissful and grounded side of the healing worlds, so here’s my piece to help shake things up a bit and level the playing field.
We need to get to know horror and disgust
Yes. I said it. We do. When we see and feel something horrific that might disgust us, the act of NOT acknowledging that and pushing or suppressing the somatic experiences down into our body and cellular state makes things worse. A lot worse.
At your individual level, that suppression and pushing down will store up a large amount of added stress that comes with NOT expressing what you are feeling and sensing when faced with something horrific. Remember that every tear, cry, and scream you hold in builds up like a dam inside you and that immense energy is what makes us unwell and it stops our flow (think of a dam in a river that holds back water – there’s a reason we can generate electricity from such held ‘tension’ !!).
From a more global and community level, each time we don’t acknowledge, and process, what we feel and sense as a result of seeing or hearing about bad stuff, we shutdown not only our own system, but the reality of what is actually happening outside of us. We start to shut down community and global systems. This is bad medicine for our planet. Our actions impact us but they also impact that which is external to us. By bringing more acceptance, feeling and integration to the table, it offers that up to the rest of the world and to our communities, which I think is something much needed right now.
Healing is not only about finding rainbows and unicorns, it’s also about what happens when we face and feel into the darkness and how that hits us at our core.
Irene's Musings
This post on Instagram was a favourite last week and it has inspired the topic mentioned above for this week’s Facebook live stream.
If you are on Instagram you can check it out here, and for those who are not, here’s what I had to say about these five words:
The more one trusts the organic nature of the human system and all that it has the capacity to express and experience, the more one realizes the neutrality of emotions. We’ve codified emotional experience to be big, or low, accepted or bad or better, but they are simply human sensory experience and expression. There is no right or wrong. They are just neutral. Once we wrap our ‘heads’ around this, a lot of healing will take place in ways that are exponential.
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Resources I Mention In The Vlog:
VLOG: How to find a good somatic practitioner
VLOG: What is healthy aggression?
VIDEO: Anger Is Essential
VIDEO: How to work with anger in a healthy way
ARTICLE: Anger As Medicine: How to Cure Self-Sabotaging Behaviours
VLOG: What to do when you ‘want’ to hit your kid
BOOK: Satan’s Children, Shocking True Accounts of Satanism, Abuse, and Multiple Personality
