Tuesday, October 6, 2015

"I can be with your feelings but not with your stories"

A few years ago I went through a tough breakup. I loved him deeply and when it didn't work out, I had a lot of disappointment, resentment, sadness, anger, fear and frustration. We had been together for a while, so we had a lot of friends in common, and I really wanted them to side with me and see it from my perspective. He was wrong, right???!!!

One day on the phone our mutual friend stopped me. "Harmony, I can be present for your feelings but not for your stories." Fuck you, I wanted to scream! What does that mean? Through the Radical Aliveness Core Energetics work I do, and meditation, and recovery, and Byron Katie, I am starting to understand my friend's boundary. It's not that she didn't want to support me. She wanted to be present for me. But she wanted to be present for my FEELINGS.

Feelings are really simple yet often verrrrrry difficult. I'll do a lot to avoid feeling my sadness, my disappointment or my fear. I'll tell my stories to anyone who will listen (and many people who wish they weren't listening!) My stories are "He should have done it this way. She is a jerk. They are assholes. They don't get it." It's about labeling. Closing doors. Separating myself from others. I'll also drive too fast, get impatient in traffic, drink, smoke, shop, complain, criticize myself, eat crap... but am I willing to just slow down and FEEL? I can cry. I can breathe. I can call someone and just ask for a few moments of witnessing. It's very vulnerable, which is why I say it's difficult. But it's also simple. And though I often believe there's no way out and that if I allow myself to have these feelings, they'll overwhelm me and I'll never get past them, the truth is that in my experience, they pass much more quickly if I just sit with them.

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