But What About the Trophy?
maybe you are holding the holy grail
In my wanderings through wierdness last week, I used a tool from Matt Kahn to explore myself. NO! Not like that! I hardly know you!
Having a lifetime of experiencing my own emotional landscape, and inordinately susceptible to the e-waves around me, I’ve tried a few things here or there to sort out the “feels” of being human.
When I went full woo, learning about “energy medicine” and chakras, I tried to tie concepts new to me into the framework I had as a physician, hoping to understand what a “body” is more fully.
Even though my college degree was in biochemistry, it took way out ways of thinking in the woo to help me connect that emotions were anything but ethereal.
I remembered that when we dissected cold dead human bodies in a basement of a gymnasium my first year of medical school, there was a huge difference between the parts of a nervous system.
The somatic nervous system (AKA voluntary - “soma” means body) included nerves to muscles - the wires that transmitted signals to the flesh to move. Some of the larger looked like pale yellow-white glistening telephone cords. These were easy to distinguish and identify for the most part, mapping their way through the territory of muscle hills and fascial plains.
The autonomic system (“automatic” - makes the background heart beating, lungs breathing thing happen) was elusive. Trying to find a discrete “nerve” was impossible, and the fibers of these were easily overlooked in the mess of organs. Where those tiny cobwebs aggregated into a larger mass, central in the body nearer the spine, they were irregular shiny lumps of the pale yellow white. “Ganglion” they call those, and they are the first way station for the autonomic nerve fibers coming directly out of the brain and spinal cord.
Gross anatomy involved memorizing names and expected placement in the body for an enormous number of structures. But at the same time, putting those pieces in a framework of function - how did it all work together?
So I saw the visible representation of emotions there - real world scene picked up by eyes, signal transmitted to brain, processing there, then message sent to body. In the case of the autonomic nervous system, the tiny filaments covering every millimeter of the territory, the message could be transmitted instantly.
The body could “feel” the effects almost simultaneously with the perception.
Tiger = whole body “Oh shit! RUN!”
Or for most of us: mean boss = tiger = “Oh shit! RUN!”
Later when I was in the “everything is toxic, and cleanses are a must” phase of my woo journey, I retraced the biochemistry of “feelings”. A messenger molecule in the body (neurotransmitter=hormone) was a physical entity that was created when needed, stored, moved about, received causing action, and needed to be broken down to start the process anew.
I saw that the particular chemical soup of an emotional shade has a particular lifetime in the body, and often when the ability to process those chemicals is slowed or stopped, the soup gets packaged in a can on the shelf to deal with later.
Literally fat globules in the liver hold past “emotions”, and a liver “cleanse” meant clearing the real time debris, increasing the capacity of the liver to process, and the dumping of old stuff in the fat storage into the bloodstream.
Which meant they would be “felt” as a present experience.
So the anger you felt 8 years ago when your neighbor’s 5 year old was using your Tesla’s bumper for batting practice, the grief that overwhelmed when you lost your grandmother in your first year away at college….may be waiting to “process” if what was going on in your body at the time was too much.
Ok. So. Last week, using my handy-dandy new tool for “emotional processing” I took a pause when I was triggered. An email from the attorney carried a subject line “Verdict”, and I knew when I opened it I would know the outcome of the 3 hour hearing from the day before.
I felt my heart race a little, faint tingling in my forearms, whole body felt lighter and ungrounded. Then I realized reading that header meant something to my body. I took a deep breath, did not open the email, and instead stood up to pay more attention to what was going on in my form.
It wasn’t a “bad emotion”. Usually “triggered” to me means anger, sadness…but it was a response to that email I was feeling in my body - a “trigger”.
So I sat back down at the dining room table, hot tea in hand, and felt. Just felt the sensations, let my mind get a little floaty instead of immediately attaching a story to what was going on. Tried instead to name the feelings, how had I named these sensations in the past?
A little excitement? Anticipation? Nervousness? Hope? Fear?
Asked myself (ala Matt Kahn) “when was the first time you felt this?” and “when did you feel this the most intensely?”. The memories of piano competitions, waiting for someone important to call, answer to job applications came in, with more intense feelings.
I carried that down to the depths of “what was the message?” “what was my body telling me?” and realized it was the waiting to be validated. “You won!” “You got the job!”
Validation coming after the gap holding the question “am I worthy?”
Seeking the outside world’s acceptance and affirmation that yes, I was ok.
Which meant I could have the sense of worthiness, the deep contentment that I was enough, sometimes in a flood of emotion.
Which meant that the choice to compete, or apply, or put “myself” out there in the “world” was giving myself the experience of those emotions.
Which meant that without the “unworthiness” feeling, I wouldn’t have the “worthy” contrast.
Which made me say “Oh!”…and see every road that had a confrontation dunking booth or competition skeet game very differently.
Not needing the validation, but choosing it somehow…because it is fun.
Fun to be a human, with emotion soup, and feel the feels - the ups and downs.
I didn’t need the trophy. I wanted the experience of thinking for a minute, believing for some period of anxiety-anticipation-filled time that…I didn’t already hold the grail.
Oh…shit.