Where do injustice and trauma show up in your body?
You know that subtle feeling that something is missing — that you’ve got unfinished business somewhere? There’s a way to be at peace with it.
The trick is to actually face it head on rather than pretend it doesn’t exist. Ignoring it makes it a problem, something to fix, which makes it worse. It digs its heels in as an almost permanent feature of your way of being.
To face it, try to find it in your body. It shows up as a clench, a tightness in your stomach or shoulders. Those tense shoulders are you closing off to the present moment, to its wide open space and infinite possibility. Your mind then comes up with a story about the clench — I’m missing something. I need to fix this situation. You turn the external world into a problem.
My clench shows up most in my stomach. I’m going to a party tonight where I don’t know many people. I’ll probably go into my head once I meet everyone. My head will follow thoughts into other thoughts. I’ll craft all kinds of story lines for why what is happening is happening. I’ll worry about how I appear to people. My breath will become short and my stomach tight, like I’m trying to pretend I have six pack abs.
Isn’t it tragic that we suffer so much? It’s also sort of funny.
Set aside deep depression or PTSD. If you need professional help go get it. If you’re privileged enough to have health insurance, get involved with fighting for Medicare for All, which would make sure everyone has great care.
I’m talking about suffering, what all of us do as human beings in the face of the fact that we’ll never quite know who we are or why we are here.
Your clench is your particular style of suffering. You learned it from your parents, who have their own styles. You came up with it to cope with the trauma of being a baby relying on others to care for you. You inherited from a society that’s been constructed to maintain power for those who have it by valuing certain people and styles of suffering over others.
Suffering is what we do to avoid feeling the pain and pleasure of life head on. If we felt it directly we might realize that we could handle it, that we’re alive, that this life is all that we’ve got, and that someday we’ll die.
It’s so tempting to avoid all of that but the very act of avoiding it is what causes us to suffer. All that clenching causes energy to build up in your body that at some point demands being released. You might grab a beer or masturbate to porn after a long day of biting your tongue at work, or text a friend some gossip because you feel lonely.
Your clench and the ways you avoid it are like words carved into a drying sidewalk — they aren’t set in stone, but they’re getting close. But the good news is, they never quite set all the way.
We can change — not necessarily our patterns, but how we relate with them. Learning where you clench is a solid way to start.
