The Firewood 007: Weird vibes only
On how our energy can affect one another -- even though I really don't have any good answers for what to do about it.
Hello, friends.
I’m late to send this out — heck, I’m late to write it in the first place — but I think I can give myself a pretty decent excuse by bundling up the second full moon of the month, Halloween, Mercury retrograde, Daylight Saving Time, another COVID spike, and the 2020 election all into one. So many scapegoats!
At the risk of verging a little too far into the realm of the weird and pseudoscientific, something I’ve been wondering a lot lately is how much we’re collectively wearing each other down. One of the things that’s been keeping me busy lately has been my decision to do a certification program in teaching embodiment-based meditation, a more active, breath-based process that may remind you a bit of kundalini or holotropic breathwork. As you may know if you’ve read Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps The Score, our physical bodies hold on to a ton of emotional and mental anxiety and stress (and worse), and breathwork practices are one of the tactics he recommends for working to release it. (He also talks about heart rate variability, which will be familiar to any fellow WHOOP users.)
Anyway, I got into embodiment work when I went to a women’s retreat hosted by Radical Awakenings last summer at Kripalu because — surprise! — I’d just gone through a horrible breakup. I was totally unaware of embodiment, and going into it was mostly worried I’d get an asthma attack, which is exactly what had happened after I tried doing one of those bro-y, Wim Hof-inspired breathwork meditation classes. (It was deeply embarrassing.) Instead, quite the opposite; I found embodiment not only didn’t leave me gasping for breath, it actually helped to alleviate the back pain I’ve been dealing with since an injury in mid-2018. Which no amount of physical therapy had been able to tackle.
So now I’m starting to teach embodiment myself after a year of practicing it regularly, and something I was telling our program lead in a catch-up call a few weeks ago was that after I lead a session (which is over Zoom these days), I feel intense physical pain that goes away within a few minutes. Usually it’s in my lower back, right where I had the injury, but last Friday after I led a session for three people at once it was my stomach that was hurting (and intensely). And I asked her — if the person I’m working with is releasing stress and tension, am I somehow absorbing it? Could my body somehow sense that unconsciously? Is that even possible? Am I insane? (Don’t answer that last one.)
I related the same anecdote to another woman I met through the Radical Awakenings program, and she told me in response, “Human bodies are wild tools.” We’re still finding out strange new stuff about the brain all the time, so honestly, who knows what’s going on. But collective anxiety is very real. “Just like [coronavirus], fear and anxiety are contagious, but unlike the virus, meeting someone with anxiety will increase the level of your infection even if you were already infected with anxiety,” behavioral economist Eyal Winter wrote for Psychology Today less than a month into COVID lockdown. “Furthermore, being infected with anxiety makes people, albeit unconsciously, want to infect others.”
In other words, I don’t think I’m entirely crazy for feeling like we’re all unconsciously firing around anxious energy that’s driving one another mad, and the election — which likely won’t be decided on Tuesday night anyway — won’t end it. We’ll still be dealing with a worsening pandemic and the inability to safely see one another in person. We’re leaning on social media as proxies for actual attention and interaction, and even if there’s video involved, I think we miss a lot of the signals from which we’d otherwise pick up things like empathy and hope and joy. We’re left to pick through what we can find, and lately, what we find is overwhelming anxiety. (I don’t think it’s a coincidence that many people I know are hesitant to share good news or even trivial amusements on social media these days because they worry it won’t go over well.)
I don’t really have a whole lot of answers, especially since I hate pretentious “digital detox” thinking, but honestly, the most we can do sometimes is just take care of ourselves. These days I find myself ending the day by hopping in a salt bath with some binaural audio on my AirPods (I told you this was going to get weird). I’m avoiding wine and anything else that will make me wake up in the middle of the night. And while I’m more or less stuck working on a work project and then an apartment move for the next couple of weeks, I’m hoping to get back outside soon. Even if by then it’ll be snowshoe season.
Stay wild and VOTE,
Caro
P.S.: Do you have houseplants? Are they dying? OMG, I wish I had taken all the advice and bought a humidifier sooner. I now own this one. It looks less cartoonish in person and a few of my plants that were hating indoor life are now much happier.
This makes soooo much sense to me! The Body Keeps The Score is on my TBR pile! And having lived with a highly anxious person for over 20 years, now that I don’t is an amazing release for me. Thanks for sharing :)
Years from now (and I don't know how many), "reasonable" people will take what you are talking about here for granted. Walk on the grounds of a concentration camp, inside a truly inspired live music show, or interrupt two people who are having a difficult team. Shared human energy is real, we just don't understand it yet, nor do we really have the language to describe it at all. Good observations.