Embodied (E)motions
The image of my face, hazy yet mouth in sharp focus, came to me while I was meditating. When I opened my mouth, out flew a flock of black birds. The birds took flight, even as my heart was sinking. I drove into the Sonoran desert, hoping a change in scenery would unburden my heavy heart. The limitless horizon revealed, however, that my heart is as wide-open and expansive as the desert sky, encompassing a spectrum of emotions. My heart is spacious not in spite of the heaviness, but inclusive of it.
The birds and the desert sky represented my throat and heart, my fear and sadness. I understood these messages, but I was not confident that I knew how to embrace the emotions or push the sliding door in my throat open and voice them. And even before the sadness, there was the disassociation and the numbness. How do I face any deep feeling at all?
It is curious to me that one of my top values is motion, and yet when I defined that value years ago, I did not connect it to my emotions, despite the one letter difference between the two words. Motion to me, back then, meant pursuing. Goals, dreams, adventure. It could also be the pursuit of physically moving my body — such as in dance — but there was always a goal, a destination.
As the news of COVID-19 hit, and we were ordered to shelter-in-place, one of the first questions I asked myself was: how do I stay in…
