Freeing myself. A gain.
The expansion of a 3.5 minute pleasantly surprising experience
Grab a cuppa and settle in. This one is quite a ride.
Bodily Stockholm Syndrome
There was a moment, sitting in my green velvet chair, camera on, legs wide open, that I noticed I was anticipating pain where there was none. Anticipating numbness - the absence of experience - something I had grown accustomed to, and reverted to beyond my conscious perception.
I hadn’t noticed, with such clarity, this pattern emerging until last evening. I am aware it’s the pattern I’ve spent the most time in throughout my life. I got comfortable with living in this anticipatory state - anxiousness filling every move. My interactions with self and other, performative. Needing to satisfy. Needing to get it “right.” Telling myself if there was pain or numbness or anything other than what I expected, there was something wrong with me. Something I needed to fix.
When I resist one experience, I resist everything. I stop feeling. I stop breathing. I brace against my own life. It can be tempting to judge myself for not noticing sooner, but I have spent a good 32 years doing that, and it seemed only to bring more discontent.
I’ve learned pleasure is an ongoing investigation. And if I intend to notice it… my chances are much better than if I resist anything but it.
I’ve been remembering more and more often that the journey is never complete and that the point is not to be complete. There’s nowhere to get. No destination at which I’ll finally be “correct.” My path is my path and there is no way around it. It’s my geometry. My destiny. My way of being. Nobody else could live it this way, therefore nobody, no thing, no idea, no precedent - could inform me of what’s correct better than my presence in my own experiment. My n=1 experiment.
To come to the realization of pleasure, I had to make a distinction. The distinction I made was in the valence of the anticipation I was experiencing - I was hesitant to approach myself, not joyfully excited, as anticipation can also be. There was a very particular sensation of tightness in my belly. A tightness I became so familiar with in my early 20s that I learned to identify myself as it. Once it became clear that I was in a state of habitual resistance, I took a step back, breathed, and recognized, ‘Ahhhhh, there is pleasure in my body.’ I noticed there had been sensation trying to peek through the surface. It was there, all along, right beneath my thoughts.
I recognized a veil of illusion so thin, it became insidious.
After the recognition that my thoughts were the only barrier to my exploration, I was able to make a conscious choice to state-shift. I placed my hand on my belly, focused on the sensation, felt the tightness, felt it dissolve into openness, relaxed into it, breathed, let it be. That’s the alchemical process I experience.
“The good news is you’re a little bit more free,” C said to me several months ago, as I described a release similar to the above. A big opening, a letting go of emotional debris, outdated identities, limiting beliefs. “But there is actually a transition phase,” he continued, “since we grow comfortable with our tensions. Like bodily Stockholm Syndrome. It becomes a lesson to be ourselves.”
Bodily Stockholm Syndrome. This has been one of the most useful metaphors I’ve ever received for stepping into my present way of being. I remember it often. If you think about the way your body so readily grabs onto patterns, you can start to wonder, well… am I holding onto things that aren’t useful? Am I holding onto things I’ve grown accustomed to, simply because I’m used to them? Am I being this way, moving this way, acting this way, because the outcome is predictable… even if it is not fulfilling, or helpful, or loving?
I’m coming to realize this process never ends. As I release more and more layers of attachment to a fixed identity, I come face to face with the mystery of my being. I come to see it across all dimensions, from the most intimate and confronting - my pussy (and my subsequent writing about my experience within, which… is why I’ve been a little more absent recently, I’ve been in a calibration period, though intending to notice that safety exists in that space, too) - to the way I show up in friendships and relationships and work, to the way I eat, and dress, and move, and sleep.
Everything, and I mean everything, is shifting. I’m sure you can feel this. It’s a collective movement, and you don’t have to resist it.
Take a moment to notice, actually. Take a deep breath and inquire within. What do you want more of? Can you notice that perhaps, it’s already there, and you’re resisting it because it’s not a familiar energy?