(Content Warning: Oh gods Emotions and THERAPY AGAIN?????!!!)
I heard about the death of a friend and my hands began to grieve. I could feel him under my hands, the sensations, the curves in his spine.
In 2020 I got really familiar with the heaviness of grief. It felt as if I was weighted to the sofa and I couldn’t move. I can also call to mind exactly how my father felt the last time I hugged him.
One thing that I really liked in my therapy last year was the idea of feeling how you felt within your body as a way of accessing your emotions. I’ve always subscribed to the idea of emotions held within the body, trauma responses let go as muscles unknot under a masseuse’ fingers, I’ve had tears and laughter just come out of clients before now.
Saying that I feel emotions inside my body doesn’t seem to compute with some of my friends so I’m going to assume that this isn’t a universal experience that I’ve just missed until now. I know where I feel the emtions, I can tell you that sadness is in the front of my chest and along the front of my shoulders down my forearms, I can feel grief, heavy on my arms.
I think perhaps everyday feelings are just in the skin, flowing over you as you blush and pull back and come and go, but deep emotions are deep inside the body. Maybe trauma memory is in the muscles and presumably whatever the happy opposite of trauma is. And then deeper in is the real strong stuff. My abdomen is the centre for love, lower ribcage is where I feel everything about that last day in March when The Bonsai Kaiju and I had our unknown final walk with him in his Gruffalo costume.
All those times I’ve seen and felt the Spiderlights (remember them? Haven’t mentioned them in a while) there’s been movement and the body involved in the whole emotional feeling of it. When I’m out dancing and all the threads are connecting everyone, that’s me dancing and feeling from my abdomen, from my very centre of myself. Maybe I’ve just done too many yoga meditations over the years.
Full on erotic sensation runs in a line as kundalini rises and isn’t she an old friend, right there rising and high on this almost.
One of the things with therapy was that I realised how shut down my emotions had gotten, how much only physical sensations were coming through and then in some weird disassociative way but really, if I’m back in tune then it’s a full body experience this emoting malarkey.
I was talking to someone tonight and I think he’s dismissed my trying to explain the difference between everyday skin feels and full body emotions. Maybe other people don’t locate their emotions so specifically in their body or perhaps the way I’m expressing my sensations is just too out there. If I roll with the connections it feels as if my bone and muscle and blood is practically vibrating with some unheard, barely seen music playing along the threads. I’ve almost got it, almost.
The heaviness of grief, the rising of the erotic centre and love just pouring out like blood and water across an ocean of stars. I missed this.
