Somatic therapist and healer Prentis Hemphill explores how curiosity and openness to emotions allows us to access their wisdom:
To feel an emotion is to allow it and let it run through, to learn from what it is telling you about you, about your relationships. Feeling is a self-acceptance of your own emotions and the wisdom of your body….
A significant part of feeling is not allowing ourselves to fall too quickly into naming or categorizing what we feel, but to allow and witness. Simply asking what an area of the body might say if it were held … most always elicits stories and more sensations. It can be tricky, though. Just as our avoidance of feeling can become our normal, we can try to live in emotions, or rather perpetually revisit them. Sometimes we can get stuck in a way of emoting, or focusing on emoting as evidence of feeling, and that can be its own means of hiding or avoiding another feeling buried even further underground. Authentic feeling is not performed nor is it summoned. Feeling is allowed. It is emergent. It is a listening that aligns us with our real indicators. Feeling grounds us. It is proof that we are alive…. Feeling itself needn’t turn into an obsession or another kind of supremacy. It is offered as a counterbalance to a worldview that denies its wisdom.
Hemphill explores how strong feelings are brought forward with support and in turn offer collective support and healing to others.
It takes resource to feel. But what we think of as resource can be expansive. Human and animal relationships often provide resource for us to face what was previously unfaceable. If we are open to it, trees can help us feel; their steady strength can be an ally, a way to ease our fear. Feeling needs resource and gives us resource in return….
Feeling and connection bring us into the world and into relationship with one another. Some things seem too big to be felt alone because they are. They require the collective to hold the space for big feeling, for it to move through, and to remind us that we’re not alone…. This is why we meet in the streets. As much as mass protests and direct action are about putting strategic pressure on opposition, they are often a gathering space for our grief and pain because they are too big to feel alone. Protests don’t get reported on this way, as an eruption of collective grief; on the news they are riots, and we begin the cycle of minimizing the feelings that bring people to the streets, and ultimately we miss the message. We need those spaces and others, too, where our grief can swell, where feeling for feeling’s sake can reconstitute us, where our empathy for one another can build. A community, a society, becomes one, remains one, I think, through sharing feeling.
Reference:
Prentis Hemphill, What It Takes to Heal: How Transforming Ourselves Can Change the World (Random House, 2024), 63–66.
Image credit and inspiration: Nsey Benajah, untitled (detail), 2020, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. A gentle openness, relaxed and present, welcomes each moment as it is; neither clinging to feeling nor fleeing from it—simply accepting and allowing it to flow through.
Story from Our Community:
My contemplative practice centers around what I call “The Still.” This practice is based on Brother Lawrence’s guidance to “live constantly in the experience of that sacred presence, the ground of all being.” Yesterday, when I was in emotional pain, I practiced getting still within myself, and I felt a physical gentleness drawing over me from the head down, like a soft, warm, comforting cloak. To me, this feeling is universal love—that from which the cosmos is made. My prayer for each of you reading this is that you become aware that sacred presence is already here with all of us!
—Philippa R.
