Focusing Tip #333 – “I put my hand on my chest and my chest won’t have it.”

Nancy writes: “I subscribed to your free e-course on Get Bigger Than What’s Bugging You, and I’m enjoying it. However, I’m finding an obstacle when I place my hand on the place in my body where I feel the sensation. For example, I get a tight, anxious feeling in my chest. I say, ‘Something in me feels tight and anxious.’ I say Hello, then rest my hand on my chest, but my chest wants no part of it! The tight, anxious feeling retreats and my hand feels like a reprimand, as if it is telling my chest not to feel this way. So, I move my hand to a place nearby and say, ‘Okay, I sense you don’t like that; I’ll keep my hand nearby in case you want it later.’ Now, the original feeling is gone, ‘Something in me’ is now ‘you’ (which happens a lot) and the whole process stalls. I have tried ‘No wonder’ at this point, (considering I have a history of being told what to feel and not feel), but by then it’s all kind of think-y and contrived.

So, I’ve been skipping the hand but I’m still calling ‘something in me’ ‘you’ and finding my sensations to be incredibly skittish. They are loud and annoying when I’m paying attention to something else (tight neck while typing this, for instance), but I get a kind of ‘who, me?’ reaction when I focus. I’m thinking I’m not giving it enough time, but then it turns into a version of ‘we will sit here until you eat your vegetables’ and we’re adversaries…”

Dear Nancy,
You can tell by the way the “something” is reacting that it feels it has an adversary, it feels it is being reprimanded and being told not to feel the way it feels.

But you don’t feel that YOU are trying to tell it how to feel. In fact, it sounds to me like you are behaving as Self-in-Presence, being patient, accepting, welcoming, and so on.

So what is it reacting to? I suspect it is reacting to another part of you, a part you are not directly aware of. I suspect that these two parts of you ARE old adversaries: the one that doesn’t want to be told what to feel (which you know links back to earlier times for you), and the part that is trying to manage it, police it, keep it under control.

This second part (the one who reprimands) is clearly not in your awareness. It’s a type of part that is often not felt in the body – not at first anyway. We recognize it by its effects, by the fact that other parts of us are cringing or rebelling.

As long as this second part is around, unacknowledged but operating, your inner world will not be a safe place for any of your feeling states, and they will react just as you describe: appearing and disappearing, being skittish, demanding attention and then acting like they didn’t ask for anything. So this second part clearly needs attention.

“I am saying Hello to something in me that wants to tell this one what to feel.” 

Even if you can’t feel it, you can start by guessing that it is there.

Your generous and spacious welcome, as Self-in-Presence, extends to this other part as well. It helps to remember that the only reason it is behaving the way it is, is that it is worried.

In fact, you can come right out and say to it, “Might you be worried about something?”

You can make that as specific as necessary: “Maybe you’re worried about what might happen if this feeling in the chest is allowed to be here unchanged.”

Let it tell you what it is worried about. The very fact that YOU are now in relationship with this “protecting” part of you will make your inner world a safer place for the other feelings, the “somethings” that come. (I’m so grateful for my partnership with Barbara McGavin, without whom I wouldn’t know or be able to articulate any of this!)

You’ve got a good thing going because you’ve got a “parts detector” — as soon as “something in you” doesn’t react to your kindness as if it were being treated kindly, you know there is something else around that also needs to be acknowledged.

(By the way, it’s OK and natural to call “something in you,” “you” — if you are addressing it directly.)