September 7, 2024
_____________________
A quick, true story:
About a year ago,
with a controlled dose of ego
to keep myself grounded
and humble,
*sarcastic chuckle*
I found myself standing in front
of an elderly, psychic woman
(someone I’ve grown close to now).
Surely, she would see in me what others tend to assume of me:
A dignified badass who has her shit together.
After staring at me for 10 seconds
and opening and closing her eyes,
the 1st words out of her mouth were,
“You’re a p*ssy.”
She laughed a genuine laugh.
She literally threw her head back
and began laughing more and more.
My teeth clenched.
She said,
“And you know it.
You’re a p*ssy,
and you know it.”
I clenched my teeth
and cried.
It cut me to the freaking core.
Another layer of my ego’s illusion was now on the table-
Deep rooted fear covered up by control.
_____________________
If you’re like me,
you grew up with people who didn’t show any of their feelings
and you feel confused about what it’s like
to show your own feelings
or to be raw and real with yourself.
To the world, you appear to be a self controlled Badass
who has her shit together.
Your ego has you convinced of the same.
But somewhere in your deepest layers,
you see yourself as barely holding it together
and emotionally needy.
You are scared of what might happen
if you loosen up your grip.
Keep reading if you can relate.
_______________________________________________________________
This letter might help you realize
why you can’t seem to loosen up.
I will tell you some details of my story.
I want to tell you about how my fear went away
as I went inside my own inner space.
Keep reading if you feel a spark.
_______________________________________________________________
If you’re like I was until my late 30s,
your ego tells you
that you possess incredible self control and composure,
and that you’ve created a well-managed, proper,
and perfect life.
But your ego hides from you
the possibility that you’re emotionally shut down,
closed up, and controlled only by your fear.
We are aiming to start feeling and trusting
our intuition again
after muting it for so long.
We’re aiming to get in touch with a healthier level
of self control and composure
while feeling our emotions fully, at the same time.
I call it integration.
Let’s blend and integrate all of this.
_______________________________________________________________
Realizing The Wall of Control
A closed person is a poised, tight, controlled person-
the opposite of spontaneous, raw, and real.
The more tightly she has shut herself off, the more controlled she becomes.
Me?
I realize now some of my many ‘closed’ behaviors through the years.
I served homemade meals around my kitchen table every morning and night
but seldom sat down to eat with my family.
Consuming the meal publicly seemed more raw than I deemed safe in my mind;
so, I worked the kitchen during meals,
happily and dutifully,
patting myself on the back for being so “present” with my family,
and for being such a better mom than my own mother.
I was closed-
containing myself and keeping my composure.
Laughter dismissed everything that was potentially emotionally charged.
If not laughter,
an intelligent, sugar-coated change of subject
got me out of my body or my heart
and back into my head where I deemed the only safe space.
I was closed-
containing myself and keeping my composure.
In my late twenties and through my 30s,
tears became the only response I had to my feelings.
Subconsciously, I chose crying
as my response of choice
so that at least that was a predictable response that felt familiar.
Happy cries, angry cries, lonely cries,
frustrated cries, regretful cries, powerless cries.
Anytime my heart was touched, I cried.
But even the tears stopped in my late 30s,
because they proved to be regarded with contempt
and a threat to a picture-perfect persona.
I was closed-
containing myself and keeping my composure.
I was sealed shut as a woman.
But to the undiscerning eye,
I appeared to be an honorable, self-sacrificing,
prioritizer of others.
Strangely, we can convince everyone around us
(or is it that people around us can convince us)
that there is nothing deeper inside of us than what we are willing to show.
But we will never convince ourselves of that.
Our intuition knows itself;
it loves itself way more than we realize.
You love yourself.
Your intuition protects itself and respects itself.
You protected yourself by creating this wall of control,
because you love yourself.
But your intuition will never let you forget who you are.
It is relentless.
_______________________________________________________________
It takes a great deal of self control for a woman to avoid showing her feelings
and to avoid situations which she knows will elicit feelings from her.
A closed woman is keenly aware of how feelings are triggered inside of her,
and she leaves no room for vulnerability.
It doesn’t feel safe,
and it truly may not be safe for her
in the circumstances she chooses for her life.
Her life is a carefully crafted performance,
and it has been since she was a little girl.
She’s the happy and crowd-pleasing actress
that keeps the real woman hidden and tucked away.
In her eyes,
and in the eyes of the other actors and actresses in her life,
her real self is foolishly vulnerable and sensitive.
She’s a hysterical soul that burdens the more sensible souls around her.
In her eyes,
it’s risky to feel true, strong emotion
and there’s no room for that in an adult woman’s life-
real sensitivity is child’s play.
If she expects to stay put-together,
she will keep everything at arms length.
She has felt this way since she was a little girl
and continues to feel this way,
for reasons that make alot of sense.
It is encouraged and exemplified in her life.
There are a thousand and one ways that a closed woman
imposes control upon herself and in her life.
She does it with the best of intentions-
she does it because she wants to be good,
and she doesn’t want her “excessive emotions” to
overwhelm the people in her life.
She wants to maintain her composure, desperately.
She is deeply scared of her own shadow
and feels totally helpless.
Unchanged routines and habits
ensure she doesn’t come unglued, which is her deepest fear.
Predictability is in everything-
the way she makes love, how she behaves in every situation,
her desires/repulsions/cravings-
very seldom is it spontaneous.
She can be trusted never to venture off the given path.
If she does, she risks becoming uncontainable or overwhelming-
for she feels she is always on the brink of overwhelming
the people around her.
She realized as a young girl that her parents,
usually her mother,
couldn’t handle who she really was.
Her real emotions and thoughts needed to remain unexpressed
in order to keep afloat.
This was ingrained into her as a young girl
and was a fact of life for her.
And it usually holds true if she dares to edge
on being raw and real in her life as a woman, too.
She thinks she has more feelings than other women,
and she wants to be responsible by keeping them all inside.
She believes that she doesn’t understand feelings very well,
and that her ‘overly sensitive’ and delicate side is too much for people to handle.
The people around her are weaker and more scared of surprises than she is,
but she won’t realize this until she feels what she feels and it doesn’t kill her.
So that fear controls everything she does.
Being agreeable and people pleasing is of the highest virtue to her.
And she is extraordinarily good at it.
Certain subjects or activities are strictly taboo.
People are pleased, so as not to attract their disapproval and rejection.
_____________________
If we are this type of closed up woman,
we don’t realize yet that there is a healthier balance.
As a woman, we can still be a relatively private and discreet person
but with a healthy love for who we are-
open and expressive of what we feel and who we are-
EVEN IF we are still nursing a few old wounds inside.
_____________________
We can choose to be more open, or a little more closed,
based on our situation and feelings in the moment-
the goal is to be in touch with our feelings at any given time
and never to fake them, ignore them, or disown them.
It doesn’t even need to be one or the other…
“I am completely open.”
“I am completely closed.”
It’s a flow…
To open up or close up a little bit-
based on our discernment of what is best for us at any given time.
_____________________
If we’re closed off emotionally,
we tend to stage-manage our lives.
We like to leave nothing to chance, no loose ends.
To us, it isn’t worth the chance of something going wrong
and upsetting the delicate balancing act in our seemingly fragile internal world.
There’s alot of wounds we’re trying to avoid subconsciously,
because those wounds evoke the kind of emotion in us that
we believe might make us unravel and fall apart,
or might make others fall apart.
_____________________
Our emotions cannot break us.
In fact, touching our own emotions is the only thing
that will transform all of our past suppression
into a deep, sensitive, and formidable love.
“I want love; f*ck fear,” is a personal mantra of mine.
Seriously.
We believe ourselves to be weak.
We believe it’s our weakness that we have “so many feelings.”
And we believe that the surest way to let people down
is to allow all of these feelings to show.
The people around us as we were growing up
were afraid of showing their feelings
and more afraid of actually feeling them.
We had to play that same game with them.
Conscious emotional shutdown was the name of the game.
So,
every little criticism we notice and feel,
reminds us of the love we missed out on.
We are overly sensitive to criticism.
And every genuine feeling we express
risks the old familiar sting of real rejection.
Because our real person has indeed been rejected by others,
and that is why we decided to shut down our emotions
in the first place.
The real woman we are may still be rejected, as an adult.
We had good reasons to tuck away the young girl,
and maybe we still consider it justified not to allow the woman out.
So, we control.
We orchestrate a play for our life.
We protect ourselves.
We shutdown, emotionally, a long time ago.
And we continue to shut down.
_____________________
Thankfully,
now we aren’t young anymore.
We’re women, not little girls.
As adults, in our own care, we make ourselves safe.
Because of this,
we can go back inside of ourselves now.
We can trust ourselves with our real feelings and emotions.
We really, really love that part of us-
our real, emotional soul.
Always have.
That’s why we put it away-
it was being hurt and was too vulnerable.
We preserved it, though.
We were wise and our intuition preserved itself.
Thankfully, it’s safe now as adults.
We can go back inside.
_____________________
On my Dynamic Meditation Album,
there is a track named ‘The Garden Of Flowers’
where we look at the things we suppressed inside of us
a long time ago-
we don’t interact with what is suppressed;
we only look.
We see that it’s all still intact.
It’s preserved.
_____________________
When I first encountered myself again,
it struck me-
I really loved myself.
I really understood myself and all my reasons.
I saw how hard I tried and all my reasons for trying so hard.
I loved myself way more than I thought.
You do too.
I trusted myself with myself.
I didn’t know that I would trust myself
while I was hiding.
But there was no denying that I loved myself
when I was inside with my feelings.
There is no way around it-
you have to touch your core again.
You have to go inside of yourself
and open back up
to yourself.
You love yourself way more than you think you do.
You’re too close to yourself with all of the control.
You need distance.
You need space.
When you go inside, you enter the space.
Things start to open up,
and things don’t feel so closed anymore.
This changes absolutely everything.
There is nothing it doesn’t change.
Till next Saturday,
Angel