After a 10-day trip back East, I discover that something has shifted in my capacity to be with beloved people in emotionally intense settings–
I am not experiencing any of the exhaustion that would be usual.
I’ve come back from an intensely packed-with-being-with-people 10-day trip to the East Coast with almost none of my usual post-travel exhaustion. I am amazed. Stunned by this unexpected newness in me.
In the course of those 10 days, I moved into and through five different "people worlds" in four different geographies. The journey started with my godson-by-choice, first at his home (in Boston) and then with his new and original extended families (including his two sisters, also my godchildren-by-choice) at his magnificent rustic outdoor country wedding on Long Pond (Plymouth, MA).
Next were my sister and her closest friend at her friend’s beach house (Sag Harbor, NY). And then it was my oldest close friend, my aunt and cousins and an especially delightful former client each in their separate Manhattan hi-rises.
The worlds I visited in were all intense (each in their own different ways) and amazingly complex–either internally or externally or both. Despite my relatively simple and reclusive usual life, I seemed easily able to move into each of these worlds in its own terms. As always, for the time of my sojourns on these "alternate planets," the realities of my ordinary life disappear from my consciousness. All that exists is me-in-the-world-in-which-I-find-myself. That me is both used to and comfortable with being a sort of participant-observer in these now somewhat alien-to-me "cultures."
The customs and ways-of-being in these "cultures" are familiar and recognizable to me. Much of what I witness there I have experienced in myself in other seasons of my own life. Some of it is quite painful to witness. Watching those parts play out in others reminds me of the pain and tangle that were often so much a part of my daily existence.
In the past, during such participant-observation, I would often wind up re-experiencing/re-visiting those old hurts in me. Either that or I would be caught up in doing something internally (and mostly less than consciously) to keep myself at some safer distance from that observed pain. I suspect that one or the other of these emotional enterprises was probably a primary source of the emotional exhaustion I would feel once home in my own world after any trip visiting people I love and feel close with.
When I look back on how it was for me in the middle of this most recent trip, I see that I was able simply to witness and to care. There was neither the emotional revisiting of my own history nor any working to keep my little psyche from going those old places. I could just be in the moment of the caring, feeling-with.
This caring, feeling-with place is one I know well. It has for so many, many years been the place from which I listen to the women who come to work on their lives with me. Listening deeply from this place has always allowed me to be totally present in our work without coming away from it emotionally exhausted or depleted. Yet, in my friendships, relationships with my family and any "social" connections, this special way of listening has never before been available.
Over the years, I’ve reflected on the difference between the listening that I do with friends/family/acquaintances and the listening that I do when I’m working. I’ve noticed how much more tired I get with the non-work listening. Always I’ve thought that the difference has had to do with some kind of protection, some filters that are present in my energetic field only when I’m working. I’ve imagined that this "psychic insulation" was a gift of Grace from Spirit/the Grandmothers as they sit with me supporting the work. I’ve also assumed that some of it was probably fostered by my earlier clinical training.
So often I’ve yearned to have at least some of that psychic insulation in my day-to-day life. I’ve wondered if the absence of it is what makes me so hungry for solitude, for being surrounded only by my own energy field. Much of the time out in the world or in the physical presence of others I feel incredibly permeable, extraordinarily sensitive to others’ energies. Like a sponge I seem to take in so much, both consciously and less than consciously. The psychic bubble I’ve learned to create around myself when I go out in the world does seem to help quite a bit. It dims down the intensity coming from people in general.
Around people I know and care about, there is no bubble and so much more gets inside me. When I used to sit in circle with a women’s lodge several times a year,
I’d have to sit or float in the hot tub for a long while after everyone else had gone off to bed. The water (even baths and showers when hot tubs weren’t available) seemed a necessary helper for shedding the “too much energy” I’d absorbed throughout the day in the being together. Shedding the energy was the only way I could calm my body down enough for sleep.
Even after just being with one close friend for several hours of intense sharing, I seem to need water or a bunch of time alone to calm my being, to shed the energy enough to be ready for sleep. With so much contact and being with people intensely every day of this 10-day trip, there was very little time or room for my usual quota of alone/shedding space. Still, I was amazingly unexhausted by all of the layers of exposure both to the energy and to the emotional stimulation.
Clearly something is very different in me! I really don’t much understand quite what the change is or what has brought it into being. But, this is definitely a new me that I’m in the middle of!
How it feels is that I’ve become even more permeable than ever. But, now I’m like a sieve–what comes in moves through me and out again. Looking from this new place back at how I’ve been till now, it seems as though how it was before was that so much would come in and get stuck in me for a while. That I’d then need to do something(s) to help process the energy/emotional resonance, to help shed the overload. Now, just as much comes in but it passes through and out like a breeze through a screen. I feel so new, so liberated!
When I consider what might have contributed to bringing about this miraculous shift in my being, two possibilities emerge. My practice of taking one week a month to be totally “unplugged” from contact with friends/family/clients (for over a year now) feels like a part of it (though I don’t yet see quite how). And, perhaps even more strongly, the bodywork I’ve been doing this past year with a Feldenkrais-trained (but quite intuitive) healer seems germinal.
The work I’ve been doing with this particularly gifted healer has been helping me to bring to my body the healing release I’ve been able to bring to my heart, mind and being. When we started, I had long been feeling an intense sense of constraint in my body. A hemmed-in feeling of being trapped/locked in a body that still lived as if it were seriously endangered. Even when, on every other level, my being understood that I now knew how to be always safe.
As we’ve worked gently and slowly to help my body to reclaim its true original nature, we’ve been supporting my body to release the constraining patterns it developed to survive. As we do this, I’ve been feeling more and more spacious and open in my body-being. There have been many stages of increasingly free energy flow in my physical being.
Just as with my practice of unplugging, I don’t quite yet see how this body-releasing connects with the new sieve-like experience I have of myself. Still, I have a deep sense of sureness that this changing in my body-being is a significant part of the birthing of the shift.
All of this speculation has left me reconsidering my original ideas about what happens when I’m in my work-listening space. Maybe it’s not a matter of protection, filters or “psychic insulation” at all. Maybe what’s been going on there all these years is just exactly what I am now being able to live in the middle of in my ordinary life: an extraordinarily expanded sieve-like permeability. And, maybe that’s what the gift of Grace from Spirit/the Grandmothers has been all along. More will be revealed, I’m sure!
Originally published June 2003
