“How do you feel?”<\/p>\n
“How do you feel?”<\/p>\n
The one question that Spock could not answer after his resurrection at the beginning of ‘The Voyage Home’.<\/p>\n
Yesterday<\/a>, I asked the question ‘how do you feel as you’re just starting to accomplish something?’ I touched on analogies from the ‘Wheel of Time’ series, where characters would use ‘anger’ to break through to, or would ’embrace’ to find the flow.<\/p>\n Early in life, I was taught to suppress emotions, the whole ‘don’t let it affect you’, ‘don’t let the bastards grind you down[1]’, and most importantly, ‘pick your battles[2]’.<\/p>\n Whether it was how I was taught, something from our culture, or raging adolescent hormones, I always saw myself as being in conflict. Writer’s block was something to force myself through, and flow was something I only ever reached when under a deadline or in large unstructured blocks of time.<\/p>\n When you stubbed your toe, the ‘correct’ response was to get angry, focus your anger, and use that to move or put away whatever was in the wrong place.<\/p>\n Only when I was really tired, and my emotional overcontrol lessened would I have I have a cathartic cry, and some of the other things would get expressed.<\/p>\n Music (especially singing with The Northern Lights) helped me a lot with this, teaching me to be much more in touch with many of these things.<\/p>\n To me, there’s a fine (but very important) line between ‘don’t let it affect you’ and ‘be like a cat, feel it completely, then let it wash over you, let it go’. One is much harder and brittle, one is much more flexible. But to an 8 year old who is being mercilessly teased at school, it’s difficult to give advice that advocates one over the other.<\/p>\n I feel like I began to understand this when I was teaching safety to undergrads. I would talk about anger and frustration are often proximate causes of incidents and accidents, and how what I do is to draw the emotion in, experience it fully, then let it go. Like relaxing and breathing into a slightly painful stretch or bodywork.<\/p>\n My current tactic is to laugh at myself, anytime I see myself getting frustrated and pissed at something. I mean, we’re just barely evolved monkeys. We’re allowed to feel all of these things, and all of those feelings are valid. What matters is how we act.<\/p>\n But back to ‘anger vs. flow’. The Wheel of Time describes the process of ‘harnessing Saidar’ as ‘submission’ or ’embracing’. But these terms are still very much bound up in hierarchical and gendered power structures (as is the ‘wrestling’ of harnessing Saidin[3]).<\/p>\n For me, I find the analogy of ‘relaxing into it’ to be more helpful, combined with ‘getting out of your own way[4]’. Of course this is easier said than done. Meditation seems to help some, mindfulness seems to help me with specific things.<\/p>\n Sometimes just thinking about something differently can make all the difference. When I was growing up, we talked about ‘hormones’, as if adolescents were just not in control of themselves, that this was normal, and it would pass.<\/p>\n But what I remember feeling was a lot of *anxiety*, and I feel that if that had been addressed directly, that would have helped a lot.<\/p>\n A simple recasting, a changing of words can make an unsolvable problem seem much more tractable, and maybe help people understand themselves a little better and heal our wounds.<\/p>\n [1]’Illegitimi non carborundum<\/a>.’ I love Latin ‘translations’.<\/p>\n [2]It’s always ‘battles’. What does it say about our culture and species that one of our most famous coping strategies has violent imagery?<\/p>\n [3]Lan also uses the analogy of ‘the flame and the void’, where you take all of your fears and anxieties and burn them to achieve a Zen-like state. This doesn’t work for me (as an analogy, or as a technique), but I can see how it could be a technique that could work for some people. It still feels like a crutch, though, rather than a fuller possible self-knowledge leading to relaxing and opening up.<\/p>\n [4]I got this from an excellent vocal teacher Peter Barnes, and it feels like it has commonalities with ‘The Inner Game’.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" “How do you feel?” “How do you feel?” The one question that Spock could not answer after his resurrection at the beginning of ‘The Voyage Home’. Yesterday, I asked the question ‘how do you feel as you’re just starting to accomplish something?’ I touched on analogies from the ‘Wheel of Time’ series, where characters would … Continue reading Anger vs. Flow: How do you feel?<\/span>