We are at a turning point in the year when day and night are about equal.
What can be easily seen and what is hidden are in balance.
Last week a friend invited me over to see the house renovation she’d worked on for 3 years. The house looked amazing. I assumed that she had just made surface changes to it.
Turns out that while the house looked really good, it had a BIG hidden problem.
Shortly after she bought her house, it started sinking. Unbeknownst to her it was built on fill dirt. A structural engineer had looked at the house before they bought it, but the engineers had been fooled by the appearance of the concrete apron on the outside of the house and failed to see what was behind the apron. Turns out, there was any real support. It was out there to fool everyone. It worked!
Last week I had a student talk about how their interior world, their experience of who they are, does not match how they appear to others. This brave soul shared that while she can observe herself and how she appears to the world – successful, healthy and capable – on the inside, she feels the like poo 🙀.
Through our work together she wants to close that gap and to experience and sense herself as capable, successful and healthy. She wants to FEEL it!
Most of us know what it is like to have those gaps in our self-image – to look one way to the outside world but feel another way inside. I sure have.
For many years after my Dad died, I had to fake it until I made it in order to survive. I played a role at work. I was happy to do it because it was the only time I was not crying. I liked answering phones and doing administrative tasks because they were concrete and gave me a relief from the difficulty.
That was smart at the time. I needed to income to pay my rent and to eat. I also needed to go to work to catch a break now from my mind and heart.
This pattern lasted 3 years. I got stronger.
A few years later, during my Feldenkrais Professional Training Program, I was receiving a hands-on lesson, called Functional Integration, in front of 60 students from a guest trainer I did not know very well. To get a lesson from a Trainer is a rare thing. I was really excited. Little did I know what was about to go down…
We sat side by side on the table, and while he was chatting to the class he was gently moving my vertebrae toward my head and down toward my pelvis – very gently, very small beautiful rocking movements. I melted. I rounded, my head dropping down and leaned back toward him. I wanted lean on someone else – literally and physically. I was bone deep tired form holding myself up for so many years.
Because he was teaching, he said something aloud he would have never have said to me if it was a private lesson. He said, “On the outside Astra holds her chest up high, but on the inside, she wants to collapse.”
He was right. I was humiliated. I thought I had been fooling everyone.
I had done a tremendous amount of healing, but now, to improve and grow further, I could no longer just give the appearance of being strong. I needed to learn how to be supported and strong internally. I had been willing and working hard to hold my chest up to cover up my vulnerability. Now, I had the opportunity to learn how to hold my chest with real functional support instead of pure will alone.
This is why so many of us report a gap between how we experience ourselves and how we appear to others or on paper. Chasing the exterior solution alone NEVER works. You may fool other people, but you can’t fool yourself.
And here’s why that really stinks – it is so sad, so tragic, to spend our lives covering up how we really feel so we can appear a certain way. You spend your life being you. Your waking hours are spent sensing and feeling YOU.
You can build success and strength internally. To do that, you must have a real lived, sensed and felt experience of internal strength, of adaptability, of functionality. Once your nervous system has had that experience, it is yours for life. Your body and brain will not forget it.
You have biological optimism on your side. Your nervous system wants you to succeed.
When students do lessons, they have an opportunity to build real lived somatic experiences of themselves as capable and functional. As they do this, they care less and less about the appearance of their life. Their lives become an outgrowth of the internal infrastructure they have built.
We all have this innate capacity. We just need to learn how to use it.
This weekend, I hope to plant some peas. In the months to come they will send up shoots and beautiful, sweet vegetables to eat. But first, while deep in the dark soil, they will use the nutrients and water to build a root system. From that root, they will grow. I hope you will too.
