Permission to Feel Numb | Mark Whitwell and the Sequence of Emotions
Mark Whitwell | Heart of Yoga
I was teaching recently in Germany and a very sincere young woman revealed her experience of feeling pervasively numb. She described how disquieting it was to seemingly not be feeling very much at all. She thought something was seriously wrong with her as if she was not properly human, somehow.
I saw a great relief response wash over her when a close friend in the workshop made the point that numbness was itself a feeling, and a very valid one at that. Once the taboo was broken about whether it was okay to feel this way, many others shared that they feel numb too and began to cry. So much for numbness!
To close off our tender nervous systems against the world is a logical and natural response. Many of my friends and their close family members have been through actual wars. Many have suffered from abuse of various kinds. Short of outright abuse, I am yet to meet anyone who has not suffered from a lack of emotional nourishment. Our parents may have been neglected and traumatized in their childhood and so innocently pass on their trauma onto us.
Then there is the stress of school and work and the pressure of just trying to make enough money to survive. In our relational lives it takes a lot of effort to carve out a life of intimacy for ourselves amidst the dysfunction of society. The worldwide burden of pornography has undoubtedly numbed our exquisitely sensitive nervous systems to the delicate matter of sexual intimacy.
This year has also seen the pandemic inflict a great deal on pain on our the world both in terms of people losing loved ones and also with the loss of income. The existing pandemics of racism and colonial cruelty continue everywhere including in United States with the public murder of George Floyd.
If that were not all, we are inundated with secular self-improvement programs and spiritual doctrines pushing ideas of enlightenment that deny us our lives and make us fixated on a future person or state that we might one day attain. Without that feeling of being authentic already, we are put on all manner of life-denying linear pathways towards a mythical future state. And so, we never seem to be able to rest, to feel, to digest our experience and our emotions.
We are such sensitive creatures. It is no wonder that we feel numb.
So we are brave enough to acknowledge how we are really feeling. Just like my friends who began crying when they allowed themselves to really feel, acknowledgement of our experience is the healing process.
The Sequence of Emotions
All emotions have their purpose, including numbness. We are connected to our feelings and should not try and dissociate from them with spiritual ideals. We do not need to change our state, to go ‘within,’ meditate our feelings and our disturbed mind away, or to try and conquer our emotions and live in a fairy tale state of permanent happiness. Ignore the social pressure to be happy and upbeat all the time. You are better off living an honest life.
In Yoga, the great advice is to fully participate in our experience, to embrace our emotions, and to feel all that there is to feel, rather than to try and avoid or deny what is going on for us. It is through accepting, surrendering, and being intimate with our emotions, rather than trying to bypass them, that healing takes place.
The natural sequence of emotions tends to be as follows:
Numbness, fear, anger, pain, grief, compassion, forgiveness, and love.
Within this sequence, we need to fully feel whatever current emotion we are in whilst at the same time acknowledging that it is part of a process that we are moving through, rather than a fixed or permanent state. In my early adult life, it was a big turning point when I realized that underneath all the anger I was feeling was a great deal of pain. A larger or more fundamental emotion is always beckoning us so we do not get stuck.
By moving through the honest sequence we eventually get to grief.
I like to say to my friends,
“Get to grief as quickly as possible. Grief for the whole shoddy deal that has been dished up to humanity. In grief, the siddhis (gifts) of compassion arise for yourself and others.”
A Daily Practice of Intimate Connection
Your personal Yoga practice, your daily embrace of body and breath, will go a long way in helping you move through the sequence of emotions from numbness to grief.
There is simply no greater tool than the breath to provide us with an intimate connection to our life and how we are really feeling.
As you do your Yoga practice you will find that sensitivity to how you are really feeling will increase. The practice may raise difficult emotions in us to be seen, understood, and then released. Results come in the body’s own process. The body naturally releases what it does not need. Survival mechanisms from a previous time in our life that are no longer serving us are removed according to the body’s own unpredictable time-frame. So without expectation, without trying to force any cathartic release, just do your practice no matter what and see what happens. Be with people you care about and who care about you.
We can handle the trauma that has been put on us because we are held in a vast nurturing force. We are saying that each human being as arrived at this point in time from a primordial eternity. We are the end result and visibility of eternal power, intelligence, strength, receptivity, and utter beauty of life. It is simply true.
We have an understanding of ourselves that is beyond the contractions and restrictions of culture. We are Mother Nature, we are nurtured, we are the nurturing. Knowing this we are empowered to surrender to our experience, however difficult or painful.
Ultimately, emotional healing takes place in relationship to actual others. Your increased sensitivity to your embodiment and how you are really feeling will inevitably make you sensitive to another.
Yoga is the integration of the whole body with everything in existence, including Sexual intimacy. In this practice of bodily participation in life, the natural state of the body is released from the imposition of trauma — we are strong, stable, confident, and yet perfectly receptive, soft, and fully feeling
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