#24: Skin in the game.

Relying on our senses to get us out of our head and into our lives.

Happy Saturday dear readers! It's been a busy international travel week for me — Bahrain and Qatar — directly on the heels of a busy, celebratory weekend with family. Today’s voiceover is happening live from the Doha Westin (shout out to all our amazing teams we visited this week), and I am flying over the Atlantic as the post lands in your email boxes. This interconnected, speed-of-light world is a wild place to live…

Anyway! On to the post…

My most favorite (and only) niece Erin got married!!

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We are a culture that lives mostly in our minds, rather than our skins. 

We solve complex problems. We interact via zoom. We lay awake at night thinking anxious thoughts. We scroll and scroll and scroll. 

We’ve been taught that this is the “right” way to live. Mind over matter. Except… when things are good.

When things are good we’re encouraged to be in our bodies. To dance and sing and laugh as if we’ve been here all along. (And then post the evidence to social media.) As soon as things go south though, disconnect, scold yourself that it could be worse, and push through without complaining (or processing or venting or expressing.)

Before Mike died, I followed the mind-over-matter directive religiously.

I had a smile plastered on my face 87% of the time, but my outward show of happiness only extended an inch deep. Underneath… didn’t know, didn’t want to know. I reminded myself, friends, family to focus on the positive, to get control of themselves, compartmentalize and move on. Heck, I was so repressed that I wouldn’t even listen to sad songs for fear of “catching” the bad vibes.

Me, convinced I could control everything, including my emotional state.

Such was my previous incarnation, Sue the Hard Charger.

When I look back at her, I can’t help but smile sadly. She had no idea what she was missing. Luckily, I found it. Or it found me. When I was stripped of the ability to cherry-pick the good emotions from the bad, I realized I hadn’t been making the choices I thought I had. 

I wasn’t experiencing some… I was experiencing none. 

In comparison to what came next, life was a slog from one not-quite-fulfilling achievement to the next. I kept waiting for some level of success to crack open my shell and finally allow in the radiance of joy and delight and contentment that I was sure was just around the corner (and pretended to already have — fake it til you feel it!).

Well, my shell finally did crack and I’m pleased to report that now all these feelings come visit me regularly! All I had to do was cry like a baby for several months.

I felt similarly confused and disoriented… And hungry.

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Someone who actually knows what they are talking about has confirmed I’m not full of baloney.

In 2014, trauma researcher and psychiatrist Bessel A. van der Kolk came out with The Body Keeps The Score and immediately revolutionized the way we understand the body’s role in storing trauma, processing emotions, and overcoming mental health disorders.

His research illuminates just how futile “mind over matter” is when it comes to emotional (and therefore mental) health. “No matter how much insight and understanding we develop, the rational brain is basically impotent to talk the emotional brain out of its own reality,” van der Kolk explains.

Besides it being ineffectual, the mind-over-matter strategy can actually work against our goal of vibrant, meaningful lives. In one of so many mind-blowing experiments with veterans, van der Kolk discovers that in an effort to stifle the lingering dread and terror associated with their PTSD, participants had managed to shut down areas of the brain that are “responsible for registering the entire range of emotions and sensations that form the foundation of our self-awareness, our sense of who we are.”

They “deadened their capacity to feel fully alive,” he summarizes.

Thankfully, the entire book isn’t so bleak. 

The solutions van der Kolk offers are simple but weirdly radical in our mentalist culture. Basically, we have to stop running away from the “negative” feelings, and instead meet any internal sensation or emotion (tightening, hardening, expansion, relaxation, shiver of dread or of pleasure) with — drum roll please — acceptance!

“Neuroscience research shows that the only way we can change the way we feel is by becoming aware of our inner experience and learning to befriend what is going inside ourselves.”

It’s going to feel awkward at first. Just go with it.

He goes on, “Once you start approaching your body with curiosity rather than with fear, everything shifts.”

There’s no good and no bad emotions. There’s just you. You don’t have to enjoy it all, but if you try to repeatedly jettison any feeling— with toxic positivity or “suck it up buttercup” or Netflix binges — it’ll just continue to haunt you from your subconscious.

“As long as you keep secrets and suppress information [from yourself], you are fundamentally at war with yourself…The critical issue is allowing yourself to know what you know.”

Aka, feel what you feel.

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Before Mike died, I rarely cried. 

I used to wear that restraint like a Miss America sash — with a silly misplaced pride. But when the rubber met the road (and I was faced with more emotion than I thought any human capable of processing), I had to release control.

My carefully constructed compartments, avoidance and distraction techniques, and menacingly chipper inner dialogue… all crumbled.

And thank god they did. Just like van der Kolk predicted, my mind, even after all those years of being supposedly trained to prevail over the matter of my body, was useless to dam the roiling ocean of my emotions. The rising tide of grief breached first the beach, then the storm walls, and finally flooded every nook and cranny of my being. There was nothing I could do but let my body’s natural response take over… and sob.

We fear going down into the uncontrollable-crying abyss because we cannot see the ladder leading back out. But we don’t exit the abyss the same way we entered.

We don’t go back to where we were, we enter into a new space entirely. And we can only see the trap door that’ll lead us out once we’ve allowed the emotion we’ve been trying to contain to flow… and carry us with it.

The emotion is not the obstacle. It is the waterslide. 

This guy gets it.

I’m not saying get stuck in the emotion. I’m not saying dump it all on whomever has the misfortune of being closest to you. I’m saying trust it is arising for a reason. Trust that it’s on your side. Trust it has somewhere important to take you. Trust that it needs to be allowed to move you. And trust that it is about you and for you, rather than anyone else.

Since that fateful day, I’ve done a lot of ugly, deep crying with the cool tile of the bathroom floor pressed against my cheek. A lot.

Gradually I have learned to trust my body’s instinct to start bawling — trust that the breakdown is part of the process, and trust that a not-insignificant amount of relief will follow. 

And not your standard “so glad that all worked out alright” relief. Because obviously, in the case of loss and grief, that’s not an option. But relief nonetheless.

The waterslide’s path to that other side goes like this (at least for me):

1. Utter release. No more fighting or containing or controlling.

2. Purely existing in the truth of my wrecked reality — whether it’s the loss of Mike or just a particularly fruitless and fractured day.

3. The full admittal that “THIS FEELS SUCKY.”

4. Tension I hadn’t realized I was holding in my chest and shoulders and jaw and belly dissolves.

5. Some more crying, just to make sure I got it all.

6. Then, like fog lifting, I find myself in relief. In peace. And acceptance. Even sometimes forgiveness. 

I don’t have to be at peace with the situation, but I have found peace through release in my body. Through no longer resisting the storm surge of sobs. And that makes facing reality easier — because I’m no longer also at war with myself.

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My body continues to astound me with all the ways it offers relief from my buzzing mind.

I touch unfurling baby leaves and am pulled out of work rumination to marvel at the quiet genius of mother nature.

I slip into my breath and end up grinning at how dang good it feels to pull back my shoulders as I inhale, and then release them (and then some) as I sigh out a long exhale.

I dance and weep and hug everyone at my niece’s wedding, letting the celebration of new love crack my heart open to the effervescent, impermanent, oh-so-dear present moment.

Erin & Matt’s first dance as husband and wife.

Sensing — whether it be the early morning Potomac air or the knots in my neck created by work stress or the part of my heart that will always be broken — connects me to my whole self (brain to heart to toes) while allowing me to pause and be present in the moment. Whenever I feel stretched thin, off my game, or about to lose it, I know this is what I need. Because it’s the place where I will always feel both safe to relax and capable of facing any challenge: at home in my body.

In this way, permission to feel is permission to be ourselves.

And permission to be ourselves turns us into our best ally rather than our worst enemy. 

And then everything gets a thousand times better.

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Let’s take a moment to feel together.

What are your favorite body/sensing/feeling activities? Specifically the ones that bring you closer to yourself. Hiking, gardening, journaling, golfing, go-kart racing, a cappella singing, creating art, going on a long drive, catching up with a friend? 

What are the activities (that we all succumb to sometimes, no point denying it) that pull us farther from ourselves? For me, it’s Netflix binging, drinking that second vodka gimlet, or absolutely refusing to cry when I know it will make me feel so much better!

Finally, for my overachievers: Is there an emotion that has been lingering beneath the surface for some time? Anxiety. Stress. Anger. Sadness. Can you find a way to befriend it as van der Kolk recommends, in the comments or in private? Or if that is too much today, just admit it is there and it’s ok to be there?

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After all the grief, I refuse to miss a moment of life.

So I drove out to Erin & Matt’s wedding by myself last Saturday, eagerly anticipating seeing old family, meeting new family, and embarrassing Erin with stories from when she was little. (She had the ROUNDEST toes. They were like little tiny blueberries! Otherworldly soft and squishy.)

Then I felt something. Something I didn’t want to feel… A feather-light uneasiness sliding up from the depths of my belly. A question took shape in my mind. Would watching this new love unfold fill me with that old gut-wrenching sadness over the love I lost? I didn’t honestly know the answer…

All I knew is that whatever feelings showed up, I’d let them flow through as the harbingers of vibrant living I have learned them to be… and it would be more than ok. It would be technicolor.

Did I shed some tears? You bet. Were they all happy? Close enough. Did I reach for my go-to coping mechanisms to help me through — a bear hug from my brother-in-law and a solo tour of the sunset-glowing property? But of course!

Richie (father of the bride) and my rock.

A new love just began. My old love still lives on. And I live in my body and mind to experience every minute of it.

And that is what makes me so alive.

With every atom of my being,

Sue