For the first time it’s becoming clear what ails me. The clarity comes while I’m in a storm in my life - each day I have painful sensations that sometimes make me burst in tears, as the raw bile of my internal discomfort and disappointment ooze freely to the surface.

I’ve been keeping this bile down inside me almost since I’ve had memories. Of course it’s been clear for a long time that a core of painful feelings resides in me, and that I’ve worked to suppress and ignore this during my entire life. What hasn’t been clear (until recently) is just how much, and in which ways this suppression has affected my personality and worldview. I, and everything I stand for, am literally built on top of my own denying behaviors and strategies to keep my mind distracted from the turmoil constantly going on inside my body. It feels like an uncontrolled volcano and explosion of pain waiting to go off at any second. It’s funny that my whole life I’ve sought instant resolution through intellectual realizations and ideas, but that’s yet another form of denial. There is neither a simple answer nor a quick resolution to my issues.

The body as key to your problems

Until today my mind has led me, powered by intellectual ideas of how the world should work, with my physical body in tow, a life support system for the whole train. In my earliest years I remember fighting hard to suppress highly uncomfortable feelings bubbling up in myself. I remember being at the playground or being alone and noticing these painful sensations suddenly trying to take me over, and I fought hard not to let them. Many times I lost and couldn’t quite shake them, but over time I learned to wrap them in a veil of numbness, and was pleased at succeeding. Even when I succeeded it never seemed I had fully resolved the problem - and of course I was too young to realize I was destroying my own personality. My parents were always far away. I had no one to talk to always had to deal with the problems myself.

These days I am trying hard to let all the feelings flow through me. I see how I’ve been treating myself and won’t allow it anymore. I used to be deathly afraid of the consequences of letting the volcano erupt… but now the dangers don’t seem so deadly. Even at work I give myself a measure of freedom to just accept my natural feelings in situations, and don’t try to pretend I’m someone or something else.

But this is what it means to carry around a volcano everywhere. I’ve always known this, and yet did absolutely everything in my power not to see it. There’s no rhyme or reason for it either. Imagine you’re just born or made with these incredibly sad and tragic feelings inside of you. It’s not clear how you got them and therefore it’s not clear how to resolve them. They’re just there.

The message of the body

I can repeat here what I’ve always known about it, and sought to therefore avoid. It means death, simply. Death for my personal relationships, death for my own success, and finally eternal loneliness for me. It’s the dark, gaping hole that Marlon Brando described in Last Tango in Paris. A yawning pit of oblivion.

I’m doing some things differently now to get in touch with these feelings. First, I’m trying to stay more in touch with my body through mindfulness, which immediately releases the floodgates of sadness. I’m trying to ride these waves as well as I can. Second, I think back often about my life and can see the connections between my present behavior of denial and past experiences. It’s obvious now where I’ve come from, at least (though not where I’m going).

All this strangely reminds me of a movie I once watched called Vengo, about some gypsies in Andalusia. They live intensely but their lives are framed by tragedy, which comes out in their art and music. Sometimes the songs from the movie come to mind when I reflect on my own pain. Like the characters in the movie, we are sometimes too aware of our fragile state and seek temporary solace and escape in the pleasures of the body. For sure these are pleasures of the body but we are all too willing to ignore the body and its feelings in other ways.

What else is my body trying to tell me? That there’s no reassurance in this world, reassurance I need and crave. Working in a room full of people, I cannot nor ever will get lasting reassurance from them that I’m just ok as a person. Sure, I will get it temporarily when having good interactions with them, but there’s nothing lasting. After a good day at the office I will come in the next and feel doubly insecure and sad.

This is what you call a “permanent state of affairs.” It’s what I’ve avoided seeing my whole life (with good reason). Again, there is no resolution and no answers. It’s what I must cope with on a daily basis, as sure as I live and breathe. This is not the message society sends us (i.e., happy consumerism; you can be all that you want to be, etc.). It’s frightening and I still don’t know how to deal with it.