When Emotions Overwhelm Us

What happens when we are faced with a moment of emotional flooding or emotional deluge, overcome by pain point triggers which seem to find us?

What collapses the spaciousness within us when we become so pinned against our experience that we are held in suffering, rumination, freeze, or reactivity? Have you noticed how usually in that moment, we resist? We resist something—what is, others, or ourselves. We resist life. 

What can we bring to that moment to make ourselves vast enough to hold and stay with ourselves in the experience, without drowning inside the emotion or blinding ourselves with rapid-fire stories which often re-victimize us and justify reactivity or defense?

Can we find the golden wisdom, at times hidden, in our contraction? Even when we feel childish in our emotion and when we feel we should be beyond this? And even when we feel powerless? Can we stay open to what is there? Can we name it and say it without curling up in shame or despair or self-denying? Because we trust that deeply in what life seeks to show us and that life seeks to open us to ourselves? Can we stay open to ourselves?

Our fear of going to certain places within ourselves is often what means that we never leave them. And yet to stay with ourselves in those places can feel like turning a key, ever so agonizingly slow, to a door which seems to promise only more pain. We don't want to give up the lock on that door. But the same door that imprisons also liberates, when we walk through it in a different direction. And with all of who we are, having retrieved more. 

"I don't want to stay folded anywhere, because where I am folded, there I am a lie." - Rainer Maria Rilke 

Collectively and personally, we are going there. The door is breaking open the lock. Which way do we want to walk through the door, toward or away from our liberation? And the moment we commit, it alchemizes the turning of the key, who we are as we walk through it, and what truly lies behind the door.

I ask myself that question all of the time. I notice how what I attach to determines the momentum that I feed. I ask myself to be vast so that I may see this. Because it is uniquely your heart that has the capacity to shine a light that dispels the darkness and imagines new possibilities. And nobody else can translate how exactly that happens within you. It simply does.

I have held a witness to this magic within and as a facilitator. I hold space for women to do the same, to see through and tenderly embolden the Truth that lives in each of us. And more than anything we can say or do in the circle, it is often the energy of the gathering itself that finds the way. All we need to do is show up.

I invite you to join me LIVE this summer from July 11-19th in the Sacred Expression Women's Writing and Movement retreat at Villa Sumaya on Lake Atitlan, Guatemala. I hold already, and with deep reverence, the level of presence we will gift to one another.

All my love,

Aimee