The elephant in every room
The despair caught me last week.
Normally I run pretty hopeful. Perhaps it’s some innate part of me — childhood photos show me sunny and wide-eyed from day dot — or maybe it’s born from the privilege of a generally-stable-enough nervous system. The beauty and possibility of the world are usually not too far from my grasp.
Not so last week.
Last week the perfect storm of late winter’s interminable grey, Trump’s chaotic first week in office, and a sheath of worries and grief about existing in capitalism rose around me like a wave. Swept my feet out from under me. Pulled me, tumbling, into the undertow until I no longer knew up from down.
Powerlessness. Fear. Rage. Hyper-vigilance. Urgency. Collapse. Despair.
I felt it all rattling through my system. Alarm bells ringing as I struggled against the tide. My mind on overdrive, trying to think her way out of it. But the more I worried at it, the bigger and more intractable it felt. Waves crashing one after the other, barely time to breathe before I was under again.
I know I’m not the only one in these rough seas. Every client I see lately is having a similar experience. The world is heavy and we’re carrying it in our bodies. Maybe you are too.
The fun thing about being a somatic practitioner, living in a body navigating chaotic times, is that you have language to name the experiences. As the despair flooded me, I knew was looping. I knew I’d been pulled out of present time and right size. I could feel the high activation running my nervous system.
When our body is activated, we forget our right size. We believe ourselves too small or too big. We lose our centre. We can easily succumb to the loudest energies of the moment, and unconsciously echo them inside our own systems.
We can forget who we are and what we are capable of. Forget our strength, agency, and power. We can run autopilot on old old stories, created when we were too small to do anything or affect change.
And let me be clear, activation isn’t a bad thing.
Being frightened and furious about the state of the world is a pretty reasonable response to fascism and climate crisis and the mixed bag of delights of late-stage capitalism.
The idea isn’t that we should be in some permanent state of nervous system regulation, like bland beige Valley of The Dolls extras. But we do need to be able to tend to our activation. We can’t live there. Or rather, we can’t thrive there.
And I want to thrive as often and as much as possible in this one precious life of mine.
To get out from under the waves I spent a lot of time last week, getting right sized again. Coming back to my body in present time. Remembering who and when I am. Remembering my agency. What a powerful beast I am.
And to be perfectly honest, it was inconvenient. I resisted. I didn’t want to have to tend to my activation. But starting with the tiniest doable piece, I met myself in present time. I turned towards rather than running away. Paused my flailing against the waves long enough to feel the way they moved through me. Let the grief and rage and fear that underpinned the despair rise and recede.
After a couple of days of tiny doable pieces I found that, while the waves might still roll in, I can dive through them instead of getting tumbled in their chop.
