We are brains AND we are bodies.
Gently challenging the urge to retreat into my mind when things feel hard
It was sometime in June that I quietly set out to make this my Summer of Substack™.
In my head it would be this magical seasonal container where I’d throw caution to the wind, where I’d find my creative groove again by writing freely and often without the pressure of having an established audience here. I’ve always loved a shiny new project, and my big hope was that this type of creative container would both strengthen my writing muscle AND create the kind of momentum and flow that would help me fall back in love with my writing practice.
As of the original time of writing this, I’d published exactly zero pieces.
I should point out, that's different from saying I’d written zero pieces. There were a handful of drafts in the pipeline that I’d been tinkering with, in states ranging from ‘rough sketch of an idea’ to ‘in-progress draft’ to ‘I’ve over-edited this piece to the point of losing the thread entirely, and might need to scrap the whole thing.’
Being short on ideas has rarely been a problem for me. But there’s a difference between having sparkly ideas that seem like they might be fun to write about, and actually showing up to slog through the process of wrestling those ideas and doing the actual writing.
The latter is where I’ve been hitting major resistance for a while. Months. And honestly, it makes sense! It’s hard to want to show up when my inner critic starts roaring and tantrum-ing the second I open my writing inbox.
The fact that it’s felt impossible to get any piece of writing to a place where it feels ‘good enough to publish’ (whatever that means) has created a TON of friction in my writing practice this summer. And friction tends to turn up the volume on fears and self-judgments.
😈 Your writing is murky and hard to follow.
😈 Your work falls painfully short of other writers you admire.
😈 If it’s not pithy tips about people-pleasing like you used to share, no one will care.
I promise I’m not fishing. There’s definitely a part of me who’s wise enough to know these are the lies of a scared, vocal inner critic and not the capital-T Truth. But still, those stories stir up big fears and other difficult feelings. And when that happens, I’ve noticed an interesting pattern of retreating into my head where I can safely rationalize my hard feelings from a comfortable distance.
As someone who generally does my best to avoid feeling big, hard feelings, I’ve gotten really good at intellectualizing my emotions.
As a kid, I was a big feeler. Like, a BIG feeler. And being a deep-feeling kid led to a fair amount of rejection and shame in my peer relationships throughout my childhood. So it does seem natural that at some point, I figured out a way to avoid having to feel all those painful feelings by disconnecting from what was happening in my body.
I found ways to hack the system: I’d retreat into in my mind where it felt safer, and where I could distract myself or even think about the feelings from a comfortable distance without the agony of being IN them. Over time, intellectualizing my emotions became an escape hatch when it all felt like too much.
Call it what you want—internalized perfectionism (✔️), disembodiment (✔️), straight up avoidance (✔️)—but what began as the wise coping mechanism of a sensitive kid continues to be my M.O. to this day a lot of the time when hard feelings bubble up.
When it comes to my writing practice, my way of leaving my body when things get hard has been to find ways of distracting myself from feeling my feelings and doing the thing.
I’ve tried all manner of distractions—from taking classes and learning new skills, listening to podcasts that take me down fun rabbit holes, to researching new shiny topics, to scrolling through Instagram. And not only are these all great strategies for dodging uncomfortable feelings like fear or resistance, they’ve given me somewhere else more fun to flit off to—places where I can avoid the uncomfortable work of untangling my ideas, moving through creative resistance, and hitting Publish.
The obvious flip side is that they’re the same strategies that are keeping me out of my practice.
I share all this because I suspect many of us have a penchant for intellectualizing our emotions; a tendency to run away from the big feelings in our bodies, and seek shelter in our minds.
And for as much compassion as I have for myself and for us all, understanding the origins of these coping strategies and honoring the wisdom of our younger selves who found a way to keep us safe… I’m becoming more and more interested in what we might gain by learning to stay in our bodies and ride out the storm.
There’s an episode of Glennon Doyle’s podcast about How to Follow the Wisdom of Your Body with Dr. Hillary McBride that I haven’t stopped thinking about for months. Dr. McBride uses the metaphor of standing at the edge of a cliff to raise the beautiful question of how we might learn to be okay with how scary it is to stand at the edge, rather than rushing to make that feeling go away.
“What we need to do is learn how to see that our fear might be telling the truth, and learn how to be in relationship with it … Actual safety is actually only an option when we've been able to experience fear and know that it won’t end us.”
This feels like such an obvious thing to say, but I think I’m only just starting to understand and integrate this idea that we can’t learn from our big feelings if we don’t know how to stay in them, or trust ourselves to survive them.
If dodging a perfectly-appropriate fear response is an example of being disembodied… what could it look like to step into the terrifying fullness of more embodied living? To experience life as not just a brain, but a body that feels it all? To believe, as Dr. McBride says, that “I am just as much my fingertips as I am the thoughts that I have about them”? (🤯)
I love this question, AND this question overwhelms me. But here’s what I know: I (we) cannot make a transformation like this overnight.
This is something I know I want to work on. But despite what perfectionism would have me believe, there is no gold star to be earned here; no linear timeline, no tidy before-and-after. Like any other quest to unlearn years of conditioning, this is the kind of shift that takes time. One that will ask me to deepen my noticing and treat myself sweetly and buckle up for a lifetime of nonlinear progress.
And… even when we know the road ahead is long and windy, we can still stay devoted to the process through the messiness of it.
We can show up for personal practices that help us mute our brain chatter and return us back to our bodies. And as I was reminded during my own personal embodiment practice recently as I wept involuntarily into my eyemask during a community breathwork session: we can continue trust that our bodies are telling us the truth (even when we aren’t sure wtf they’re saying or what we’re supposed to be learning) and that feeling our feelings will not break us.
We can choose to stay present. We can trust ourselves to make it through to the other side of whatever big, hard, confusing, disorienting feeling wants to be felt.
May we learn to feel safe staying in our feelings and trusting our bodies.
🎧 Podcast du jour
Common Shapes from Cody Cook-Parrott
I'm obsessed with this new show from Cody. They just up wrapped the first season and I devoured it from start to finish. If you're into exploring practices, systems, and rituals for living a creative life, run don't walk.
🤯 Can't stop thinking about
This little nugget from Nic Strack (!!)
My god, what a potent visual. I’ll almost certainly be exploring and writing more about this soon.
✨ Personal practice
If you've been around a while you've heard me talk about this, but OH BOY has breathwork become an important grounding practice for me. Amy Kuretsky hosts a monthly community breathwork where she does such a beautiful job creating a supportive container, and offers sliding scale pricing. Whether or not you have experience doing breathwork, highly recommend checking out her Patreon.
Meme of Delight:
Until next time,
Michelle
KNOW. ME. What a powerful glimpse into the heart of the matter. Thank you!