I’ve been talking with the Jungian for two years now, ever since my cancer diagnosis. During our engagement, we’ve worked through healing, family trauma, and grief — but the primary goal for me is having a healthy emotional life.
I’m very sensitive to the way our culture talks about the connection between emotional/spiritual health and physical health. There is obviously a connection, but within the context of our Western materialist views on healing, community, and responsibility there’s a real risk of victim blaming. Like the person who called to tell me that their mom died of breast cancer (um, gee, thanks), and that being more positive can prevent and heal cancer (in the same call, yeah). Side note: I decided I was positive that I didn’t want to talk with them much anymore.
That said, I happen to know there is an emotional cause to my cancer, but it wasn’t from a lack of being positive. It was from not being able to access my emotions (negative ones especially) and express them in a healthy way.
Over the past two years I’ve been spending a lot of time talking about and thinking about my feelings with the Jungian. But it’s only recently that I’ve had the personal breakthrough that thinking about feelings (while a good starting point as compared to ignoring and suppressing them into a ball into my chest that then forms a black stone that, hello, manifests as cancer) wasn’t the path forward. In fact, instead of thinking about my feelings, I need to be feeling about them.
Western society has, from the time of the Greeks and Romans, placed a high value on thinking about thinking (I think therefore I am). Philosophy, psychology, sociology, anthropology — all either exclusively or peripherally concerned with thinking about thinking (how we think, how our thoughts impact us, how people think, what did we think). But we don’t even have the correct language to express the act of feeling about feelings.
Let me try to explain. You can think. You can think a thought. But thinking about thinking is different from that. It’s abstracted. One philosophical proof of consciousness is that there’s a part of us that can step back and think about the things that we are thinking.
So, you can feel. You can feel a feeling. But how do you abstract that? How do you step back and feel about your feelings? Because yes, feeling what I was feeling, acknowledging and naming it and thinking about it were great first steps. But what I really need to do is feel about them — go heart first into this process, not mind first. I need to feel about my feelings the way I think about my thoughts.
It doesn’t sound that special really, but this was an explosive revelation for me. There were pointers on the way… There was my own advice to my clients and myself. There was my introduction to HeartMath (another in a long line of gifts from RuneSoup). There were syncs in fiction and music and stuff on TV. And of course the Jungian. But this is very, very hard for me. It’s the end of a long journey from even being able to feel my feelings and name them… and the start of a new one where I embrace this thing that’s sooo alien to my normal approach.
You know, even writing about this is making it cerebral in a way that it’s just not in practice. It’s heart focused. There’s no judgement. I’m not critiquing how I feel or how I should feel or how I should feel about how I feel, I’m just feeling it. I’m not judging how I feel or trying to explain it or excuse it or contextualize it, I’m just feeling it. I don’t have to know why I feel something in order to just feel it.
Even better, I’m stepping back from how I feel in order to feel about my feelings. So I can feel sad and feel compassion for the me that’s feeling sad. Not thinking about having compassion or rationalizing it, but just feeling it. I can feel grateful for the love I feel and I can feel sympathy for the anger I feel and I can feel kind astonishment at the things that hurt my feelings while also feeling joy for the things that make my heart happy. It is incredibly healing and freeing and wonderful.
And I suspect I’ll be working on this for the rest of my life.
