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It’s hard to feel uncomfortable in your body.
Sometimes it can feel unbearable.
I think this is why I get so many questions from people about how to move through this kind of discomfort.
Questions like:
How can I release old trauma patterns faster?
How can I learn to control my body’s anxiety response?
How do I ground into my body and stop disassociating around toxic people and situations?
When I read these questions, I hear the same thing in all of them:
How do I gain greater control over my body so that I can feel less uncomfortable?
I get this, I really do.
As someone who has struggled with high anxiety all my life, I truly feel this.
Because when your body is freaking out, it feels awful.
However, the answer is not trying to get more control, or trying to make your body move through things faster, or feel comfortable in situations where it really shouldn’t.
There are stages to the healing process that your body needs to go through, and some of them feel very uncomfortable.
Suffering is one of the first stages, and it can be gnarly. But it does have an important purpose. When we’re in suffering, our body is asking us to see and acknowledge our pain, because it’s the first step toward giving ourselves self-compassion.
There’s another stage in the healing process, a few steps further on, called discharge. And this is where we experience a (sometimes huge) build-up of tension that needs to be released. This is when we’re getting ready to let go of old energetic material that no longer serves us. During this stage, we may feel angry, cranky, weepy, and we may experience physical symptoms like swelling, bloating, flare-ups in skin and immune conditions, or acne or abscesses.
These are just two examples of healthy normal ways the body works as our energy processor, and how it cleanses and releases old emotional patterns within us.
But when we experience symptoms that make us feel uncomfortable, our first reaction is not to slow down and let our body do its thing, but to begin panicking and then start rushing the body to resolve the symptoms as we push ourselves to move into a more “comfortable” state.
What we really need to know is:
You are never really “stuck” in old trauma. Your body is processing behind the scenes and working at its own pace. More is going on internally than you think.
When you’re feeling uncomfortable in your body, more control is not the answer. Trying to get control usually results in you suppressing the normal symptoms of one of the stages of the healing process. The best thing you can do is let go of control.
When you’re around toxic people and situations, you’re disassociating for a reason. Even though you believe you need to “get over it” and smile and nod your way through yet another family gathering with your narcissist mother, your body knows the truth. You need to get away from people like that and make some hard decisions about severely limiting or cutting off your interactions with them.
The body is always willing to give us incredible amounts of information about our emotions, our beliefs, our relationships, our purpose, our heart, and our true self, if only we are willing to be temporarily uncomfortable and listen.
I’m teaching on this topic and more in my new class, Intuition and the Body. This class starts this Wednesday, August 7.
There are only two more days to register. You can find out all the details and register here:
INTUITION AND THE BODY
Questions? Reply to this email.
I hope I see you there!
Lauren
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