During this break from acupuncture school (which is COMPLETELY dependent on my cerebral ability), I am slowly dropping more into my heart and realizing that there is soul growth for me in dropping into and leading from my heart.
As a cerebral Sagittarian-Virgo-Virgo woman (albeit multiple planets in Scorpio)- whose emotions can be overwhelmingly intense when I feel them- I often hide from the world that has no receptors for the kind of intensity that flows through me when I am processing my emotions. I let myself get RAW. I am also very rational. Mutually exclusive opposites are a relic of an archaic, decaying, binary past.
The truth is…I contain a multitude of sub-selves and complex paradoxical qualities, yet we live in a world that tries to fit octagons like me into square boxes. It is societally taboo to be but just a few of our multi-splendiferous sub-(s)elves….in the name of capitalism, gender scripts, religious taboos, and whatever judgmental poo poos society tries to throw at radical, unbridled, authenticity…..let’s face it….it can get messy and weird inside the human head.
There are also times when I become so overwhelmed, that I dissociate and temporarily shut off my emotional body and detach with a rational, almost cyborg-like cool. It seems to be my emotional body’s natural defense to avoid blowing a fuse or frying too many nerves. (I’m hyper-sensitive, empathic, clairsentient). I re-integrate my emotions and process them later when I am out of the trigger situation and it feels safe for me to do so.
It’s a trip to be learning to navigate more from my heart than my head. Let’s face it. There are times and places when turning off one’s emotional body temporarily serves a purpose to get shit done under stress without falling apart- hence the patriarchal pandemic in which men are not encouraged to actually turn back on their emotional bodies. And when you have a job that depends on your mental faculties alone, it can take a body-mind practice like yoga, dance, massage, and Tai chi to drop into your heart and body again.
If you are cut off from your emotions or have unresolved emotional baggage, an uncomfortable physical sensation or pain can clue you into where those trapped emotions reside. When I work with E.F.T. (Emotional Freedom Technique), I am able to get to the bottom of the negative emotion causing the physical pain, re-experience that emotion, and fully release it, as opposed to suppressing it and having it cause pain or discomfort. Instead of compartmentalizing my emotions to cope, I am able to fully integrate my emotional body and release any of the emotionally stressful things that have happened.
Society shames vulnerability and a full range of emotions in men (and women too, but to a lesser degree). This sucks for everyone, since men often don’t know what to do with womens’ emotions because they don’t know what to do with their own. (Obviously there are many exceptions to this rule…. So if you’re a person with a penis, please don’t take this personally if it does not apply. The point is not to blame anyone here. The point is to observe larger cultural and gender trends so that we can evolve as a culture).
As a woman in a scientific field, I actually identify with this masculine dilemma and am also learning to reclaim and work with my emotions, which is why I’m writing this piece. Our culture’s emotion-phobic programming affects men AND women. As a result, many people have LOADS of unprocessed baggage OR live robotically emotion-less, rational or addictive lives (addiction suppresses emotion) without ever fully integrating their emotional body- except for the one culturally sanctioned emotion in men- which is anger. Society has struck men a shitty deal in manipulating them into denying their full range of their emotions. ‘Suck it up son.’ Wait… Why?
Unlocking the emotional body is necessary for spiritual evolution. The world needs more spiritually evolved people to raise the vibration of the swamp we’ve made of things down here. We don’t live in a culture that supports embracing and working with our emotions. We’re taught to repress and hide them or cover them up with addictions or work. We are living in a giant swamp of unprocessed, emotional entropy.
It’s time to learn to balance our inner masculine and feminine and reclaim our emotional bodies if we are going to evolve. Divine androgyny (emotional and spiritual androgyny), is an alchemical goal of a number of wisdom schools: Qabbalah, Gnosticism, and Tantra.
Let’s stop shaming men who DO have feminine qualities. The world NEEDS those men to offset the hyper-masculine patriarchal programming that suppresses the feminine. And let’s face it. Women are craving men to show up more emotionally present and alive in the realm of relating without always being subject to mansplaining ‘fix and change it’ strategies. What about emotional bonding and feeling things together to increase feelings of closeness as an end in itself?
All the logical explanations aside, it still scares the shit out of me when my mind’s tricks all stop working and I have no choice but to surrender to the pure chaotic feeling underneath all the mental static that tries to figure my way out of things. Like most of us, I have lived all my life in a culture that prizes intellect, rationality, science, and I have even adopted these values for myself, with a broader range now which includes feminine, emotional, imaginative, intuitive, and body-centered wisdom as well.
I’m learning how to work through my emotional intensity in an embodied way with E.F.T. (Emotional Freedom Technique), acupuncture, primal screaming yoga, tantric shamanic breathwork, crying, roaring, ninja kicks, and whatever the fuck else my inner lioness needs to get that shit out and move the fuck on!
For me- having methods to deal with the irrationality and intensity of my emotions- is one way in which I’ve learned to balance the masculine and feminine within my own being, so that I don’t polarize and become a stone cold cyborg, or an emotional swamp with no end or edges. There is no wisdom in either extreme if perpetuated infinitely ad nauseum.
If anything, these gendered archetypes polarize into dysfunctional versions of masculine and feminine shadows in the form of empathy-less perpetrator and perpetual victim. While it’s great if we can be honest with ourselves about some shit that went down and needs healing (certainly you wouldn’t give this kind of heady talk to a rape victim whose victimization is all too real), I also feel like the cosmological trip about moving into the Age of Aquarius requires us to fucking graduate and get on with the non-dualistic, androgynous, space age program.
The divine feminine is re-emerging on Gaia, and I’m going to give it to you straight- she’s pissed after being suppressed for so long. It would take every human interaction being saturated with feminine wisdom to bring a balance back to human relationships after how polarized things have become towards a patriarchal set of values that has bled into every area of life.
That re-emergence of the divine feminine will require the co-collaboration of the feminine AND masculine…not shaming men for being men….but re-learning the qualities of divine masculinity (versus patriarchy), and integrating divine femininity. Otherwise, we become caricatures of a media machine telling us what masculinity and femininity are supposed to look like. Last time I checked, make-up and big muscles never caused a spiritual revolution.
