One of the many things that I have learned on this journey is how much of my life I have spent living out of my head, mostly ignoring my feelings and my connection to my body. It was rewarded when I was a kid to be smart, to do well in school, to get a good education, to learn.
What’s funny to me now is knowing that I’m an empath. That I was meant to feel. That my super power is feeling things deeply – my own things, other people’s things, the earth’s things, animals’ things. But yet as a kid I grew up believing that feeling was a weakness. And there wasn’t anyone I can recall who showed me how to feel or helped me move through my emotions. Everyone seemed to be focused on stopping the feeling. How many times must I have heard (and at times been yelled at) to “stop crying”. Or told that I was “too sensitive”, or “took things too personally”?
Now I know that the quickest way to move through your emotions is to fully feel them. The more you go into them and embrace them and breathe through them, the quicker the energy moves through you and you can release it. It is only by trying to shove it aside or down and “make it stop” that you hold onto it and it will come back up at the most inconvenient of times or in the most inconvenient ways (for example, disease in the body that you can’t ignore). But if you just accept the feelings, without having to “understand them” necessarily, and just feel them, they will move through you and then you can get on with your life without those unfelt feelings weighing you down.
I remember when I was about 28 or 29 my paternal grandmother got sick in the cascade of her last couple of years at the end of her life. And I remember that the thought of losing her would send me into these spontaneous sobbing fits anywhere and everywhere that I couldn’t control. Anytime I would think of her I would uncontrollably start crying. I had absolutely no skills or tools to process her loss in my life. And I felt completely unable to control my emotions. At the time it felt like it had come out of nowhere and that there was something really wrong all of a sudden. But now looking back, of course I would have strong feelings about that and would need to process that grief and loss. And it was the beginning of the cracking open of my heart that had been locked down for much of my life.
A couple of years later I was working in a non-profit and was experiencing anxiety attacks. I was hitting up against my drive to meet expectations. They didn’t have any expectations of me AT ALL, and that scared the crap out of me. I had never had anxiety attacks like that before, and thankfully haven’t had any I can think of since then. I was very emotional during that period as well. I didn’t know how to operate in a world where no one cared if I showed up to work or not, where no one wanted to proactively work on anything or collaborate, and I was expected to just sit in an office 8 hours a day without anything constructive to do. I remember one day being at my wits end and calling my Mom and asking her if I was overly emotional as a child, trying to figure out where all of this emotion was coming from. And she said “no, not really.” I guess I learned how to hide it well at a pretty early age.
I have the reputation in my family for being “the analytical one.” When my maternal grandmother was in the hospital toward the end of her life, my Mom called my sister and I down there, and in the car from the airport to the hospital, my Mom told me what she needed from me – to be the level headed one. To help her and my sister (who is the “more emotional one” make the best decisions for my grandmother). She said she needed me there because I am “more detached.” I laugh now at how completely and totally mis-understood and unseen I am in my family. And it is only through my healing journey that I have gotten to know that deeply caring, connected, and emotional side of myself that has always been there, but that I locked away for 35+ years because it was too hard to feel all that I’m capable of feeling. I didn’t have the language or the guidance or the support in learning how to use this gift. And so I closed it down, and I was smart and analytical because it pleased others, and brought me love, acceptance, praise, and “success”.
In telling these stories I want to be clear that I’m not blaming anyone. Everyone in my life was doing the best they could with what they had to work with and what they could see through their lenses. It just highlights to me how disconnected we can get from ourselves when our environments and the people in our early lives can’t really see us for who we really are. We are so wired to conform. To “be normal”, whatever that means in our early environments, so that we can please others and get our most basic needs met.
That drive to fit into our tribe is primal, a first chakra vow, and is so ingrained in us that it can take some effort and time to uncover and excavate the real true us underneath it all. And once it is uncovered, to do the work to accept, embrace, and highly regard that part of ourselves that maybe we had thought was “bad”, or “weak”, or “needed to be fixed” or “makes others uncomfortable.”
It is after all our superpower! And the sooner we can embrace it and see it as such, the sooner we can begin to learn how to use it to help us on our journey through this life. And maybe our superpower is meant to make others uncomfortable to some extent – to change things, to shift things, to hold a mirror up in some way. And so letting go of the responsibility for anyone else’s reaction is also an important part of the process. Their reaction is their stuff. Our reaction is our stuff and the only thing we can control. We are here to know and speak our own truth, as kindly as possible. To put our heart, mind, and soul out into the world to make it a better place in some way. How anyone else reacts is none of our business. It is only information, and we need to determine what information is helpful to our journey and what is not.
What is your greatest super power? Have you fully embraced it? I’d love to hear from you in the comments below.