Insanely Gifted. Jamie Catto
people and experiences we encounter every day. When someone upsets us, our reaction often bears no proportional resemblance to the size of the infraction we’ve suffered. Why? Because we are not only feeling the pain caused in that one moment, we are experiencing the pain body rearing up with the lineage of all the times someone treated us like that, back to our early childhood. All the unexpressed times when we were hurt or unjustly treated wake up, and we howl with decades of accumulated pain. It is so overwhelmingly painful that our mind holds the person who triggered us responsible for how we are feeling, and we attack or control or condemn them, trying anything to avoid feeling the accumulated pain fully.
We each have in us a unique cocktail of accumulated, unexpressed pain influencing how we react, and we all react to different triggers. Someone who upsets you might be totally benign to me, and the guy who makes me want to explode might be just vaguely annoying to you. No matter who we are, if we grew up in a home where our natural, total expression of all our hurts was unwelcome, we will each carry our own uniquely sensitive lump of unexpressed, constipated emotional gunk, usually, in my experience, lodged down our fronts from our throat to our belly. When it is triggered the contraction that happens in our body is so excruciating that we will do anything not to feel it.
This brings us back to how our bodies are hard-wired to constantly mend themselves. Yes, when we scratch our skin it heals over, and when we break a bone it magically reknits itself, but the body is even more genius than that. It knows it has this yucky, constipated lump of over-reactive emotional ‘stuff’ lodged in its torso and so is understandably on a daily mission to flush that shit out.
It is almost as if each annoying experience is tailor-made to awaken a lump of that pain body so that it starts to feel itself intensely, and if we are skilful we can participate in the body/mind’s genius process of clearing out that day’s cupful of emotional gunk. If we resist and control and suppress that feeling, then it gets pushed back under, waiting for another day, another trigger, to give it a chance to release. But if we are willing to feel, we have a chance, day by day, cupful by cupful, to allow Life’s genius to move it all through. From this perspective, the challenging people and trigger situations of our lives are really walking laxatives sent to help us discharge all that emotional constipation.
ASTRAL ANUSES
In ancient China the dominant philosophical principle from around the fourth century BCE was the Tao, which roughly translates as the Way. They weren’t busy worshipping anything or anyone but they were scientifically, and meticulously, generation by generation, mapping the pathways that this life force (Chi) moves around our bodies. To give you an example of what we mean by Chi, think of an apple that’s just been picked from the tree. When you first hold it in your hand it is firm, full of juice, full of life, full of Chi, but if you leave it on the table for a couple of weeks you will see its skin begin to sag and its firmness soften as gradually all its Chi leaks out of it. The human body is the same. Early in life we are full of Chi, our skin is tight and supple, we have lots of energy, and we heal quickly, but later on as we reach old age we have far less Chi and our skin is beginning to wrinkle and sag, our self-healing capacity is drastically reduced, and our ability to leap around withers year by year.
The ancient Chinese developed systems to cultivate lots of life force and came up with methods to make sure you waste the minimum amount of it as you go through your life, so that you can meet old age with more ease and longevity. Practices they developed such as Tai Chi (literally meaning ‘Big Chi’) and Chi Kung are becoming more and more popular here in the West for facilitating health and wellbeing. It is not only keeping the body healthy that conserves and cultivates Chi; the way we think plays a significant role. If we are relaxed and calm we don’t waste so much Chi, but if we are hectic and constantly upsetting ourselves with inner and outer conflicts, we use up our reserves of Chi and end up exhausted and depressed.
The Taoists taught that the ability to be mindful of all this and to, above all, be aware and present with how we are breathing, is the key to conserving and cultivating our life force and living a healthier and more contented life. They have all kinds of practices where when you feel into yourself, you can sense that your stomach is feeling blocked or your throat is feeling tight and you can participate with the body’s genius in releasing any blockages so that the Chi can flow smoothly and unhindered around its pathways. All illnesses, the ancient Taoists believed, are the result of blockages in the complex Chi pathways of the body. Have you ever had acupuncture or seen the acupuncture map of all those pathways? Those are the major and minor Chi channels that the life force travels along, and Chinese medicine is all about helping it flow correctly to keep you well. Here is a big difference between Eastern and Western medicine. In Western medicine, we go and see a doctor only when something’s gone wrong, but in China you see your doctor regularly to prevent getting ill in the first place.
In order to fully participate in this genius yet delicate process of release and unblocking we need to turn our attention inward and get to know how the insides of our bodies feel. We are used to doing this when we have sex. We can easily put our minds between our legs or wherever the pleasure is pulsing, and if we stub our toe or have a headache, it’s not hard to place our attention where the painful sensation is being felt. The extension of this is not only to notice the feelings inside our bodies when they are as intense as that but to be in daily intimate contact with the subtler sensations within us and play an active role in assisting the body’s genius in keeping the life force constantly unclogging itself and flowing smoothly.
Check in with your Body
In the next chapter, Full Body Listening, we’ll go deeper into the specifics of how to do this, but for now just feel your whole body, wriggle your fingers, wriggle your toes, and feel how you inhabit this whole body from crown to toe, not just living solely in your head with all its busy thinking mind and chattering mouth. We are so head-centric here in the West that we often get so top-heavy we forget that our whole body is a sensitive, sophisticated feeling system that is working for us constantly, communicating and transmitting vast amounts of vital data. How does each part of your body feel right now? Don’t analyse the sensations, simply observe them with gentle curiosity.
THE TRIGGER IS NOT THE CAUSE
When we begin to look at the challenging people and upsetting situations in our lives, without playing the victim and instead from the perspective that Life’s genius might be doing something benevolent, we can notice two great benefits available from these. The first is that we begin to see that no matter what anyone does to us, the emotional feelings that erupt in our bodies have not been put there by the trigger. The emotional reaction comes from that old, reactive pain body which has been waiting like a silent time bomb to explode.
Here’s the proof: if someone came into this room now and started being incredibly racist, I mean really going for it with all the forbidden words and angry, ignorant rhetoric, and you and I were standing here, I might have a total emotional meltdown and start freaking out while you might acknowledge they’re a racist and be repelled by them but not go into the same total emotional freakout as me. What does this tell us? We have both been exposed to exactly the same stimulus. I’m melting down and reacting very dramatically, and you, while still acknowledging they’re a crazy bigot, are emotionally calm. That’s because I already carry a dormant, reactive time bomb from my past experiences with racists, or from other violent people, and you do not. The emotionally reactive potential is in me, and although the racist might have triggered my time bomb to go off painfully, he didn’t cause it. That distinction is vital if we are going to take mature responsibility for the reactive parts of ourselves that go off in us day after day. The trigger is not the cause. No one can send us into an emotional tailspin if we don’t already have an Achilles’ heel in that area. So if I acknowledge that although the racist may definitely be wrong and bad and his behaviour inexcusable, the following reaction that I’m experiencing in my body came from my own uniquely reactive potential that lives in my tender pain body. I have that flavour of reactivity in me just waiting to get triggered by a racist, and you do not. My reaction is mine.
It is incredibly seductive to believe that whoever wronged us is responsible for the painful reaction we feel, but it is a mistake which often distracts us from meeting this experience with power and wisdom. I have just been vividly made aware of one