From "shit shit shit" to "I got this".

Aka, what happened when I stopped telling my feelings to shut up (without letting them drive the car).

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I was driving down the highway at night, in the rain, and feeling afraid.

I wasn’t in danger really, there was just a lot going on at once — trucks roaring in the opposite direction at 70mph, rain hammering my car, my tired eyes trying to keep track of it all. And I felt a little overwhelmed.

Which. Was. Irritating. I’m a strong, independent woman. I’ve sailed through gales in the middle of the Atlantic ocean. I’ve lived at 9000 ft in a Colorado mountain town, cozily driving through snow storms in my trusty 2005 Prius. I had just set out on a month-long solo roadtrip with both jumper cables and tire chains under my seat. And on day four, I was getting spooked by some rain. Jesus, take the wheel.

So my mind did what my mind does, “Leona, you’re fine. You’re being dramatic. You’ve done this before. Stop being silly. Get it together.” 

Bleh. I rolled my eyes at myself for rolling my eyes at myself. 

That top-down, obnoxious, absurd command was all I needed to realize I was about to step into the ring for a losing fight — trying to tell myself I’m fine when I didn’t feel fine.

However, I also couldn’t risk being overwhelmed by my emotions right now. I was still driving in a downpour. So I went searching for Option C.

Feelings are like weather patterns.

Their only promise is that they will change. Unless, of course, we shut them down.

When we decide we don’t want to feel what we are feeling, our emotions aren’t able to finish their process: pouring out their rain, balancing their electrical charge, blowing and blowing in order to reach a fleeting but essential equilibrium. 

(This is actually a thing animals do. After a gazelle escapes a lion, for example, they find a safe place to shake — expending the excess adrenaline and completing their body’s stress-response cycle. This is how they manage to spend their days eating grass in relative tranquility, though by society’s standards they should all have crippling PTSD.)

They’re less stressed about being literal prey than I am about making a phone call.

But if I were a gazelle, I hadn’t actually gotten to the “shake it out” part yet. I needed to stay focused on not crashing and not freaking out.

So what could I do?

• Take a deep breathe.

• Stop fighting what I was feeling.

• Soften my “wtf is wrong with me?” reaction.

That didn’t mean I had to get swept away by the emotion either. Turns out there is a space between between fighting it, fleeing from it, or succumbing to it.

So I just accepted that I was in the middle of a storm, within and without. At least I was dry, unlike on the boat during that gale.

Now… I’m going to use a crazy word: alchemy.

It’s just a witchy way of saying that what I was feeling… transformed.

As I made space in my mind for the overwhelm and fear, my system suddenly started to settle. I felt… relief? Apparently. My body was relaxing. Nothing had changed externally, but internally I had stumbled upon something that felt safe… Trust. It was self trust. Evidently, after my mind acknowledged and honored the stress signals my body was shouting into my brain stem (the shallow breaths, growing tension in my chest, white knuckles clamping the steering wheel), my body felt like it didn’t need to send them anymore. The message had been delivered. My mind had received them without denial or panic. 

(Maybe this is why we often get prickly when someone offers us advice before empathy.)

And just like that, I didn’t need to tell myself that I was going to be ok. I just was ok. My body trusted me to take care of myself. 

Our bodies, our emotions, our stress responses don’t need solutions. They need to be heard. Once the message has been received — the mind has honored what the body is feeling; the body trusts it is being taken care of — the mind can do what it does best. Handle shit.

This just might be what it feels like to have the brain and body on the same team.

Somewhere in the Atlantic.

There is a part of us that likes to get shit done and a part of us that can’t help but feel all the feels.

Some spiritual traditions call them the masculine and feminine aspects of self, which feels just a weeee bit outdated. We can also say the solar and lunar aspects, yang and yin, consciousness and lifeforce. I personally like brain and body, it keeps things simple.

And when these two are in direct opposition, while both contained in our skin, things can go haywire:

We’re never able to fully relax.

Our body needs rejuvenation and nourishment. It’s not a bad thing, so does a tree. But our brain is often endlessly guilt-tripping us when we’re not doing something “productive”. So we have a hard time feeling restored even after the most bougie self-care day because we weren’t able to relax into it.

We’re experience low-level anxiety that we can’t seem to shake.

Again, our body feels, that’s its superpower. It isn’t making logical decisions per se, but it’s making intuitive ones. Ones that help us feel physically, emotionally, energetically safe.

However, if we are constantly ignoring these feels — letting our brains steer the ship in the direction that makes the most “sense”, no matter what our body is craving, fearing, or sensing — they don’t disappear. They just get shoved down into the body, resulting in the physical sensation of anxiety without there seeming to be an external reason for it.

We can’t pull ourselves out of emotional tailspins.

This is when our body’s feelings become too unruly for our brain to channel into productive action. Based entirely on pseudoscientific reasoning and strong vibes, I would argue it’s more likely to happen when we typically exert tight top-down control. The body has to lose its ever-loving shit to get any respect around here, so it does.

Which one do you automatically assume is the devil? Fascinating…

It’s what I was on the edge of — being sucked into a whirlpool of overwhelm where my conscious mind had no authority.

But that night I found the “trust” button. The way that my brain could work with my body, rather than overriding it. (Or berating it. That probably wasn’t helping either.)

Turns out an earnest “I see you”, even from ourselves, is sometimes all we really need.

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