When something you feel doesn’t reveal itself to you, perhaps it’s because it doesn’t feel safe. Read on…
Last week, a reader wrote me this:
In most of my Focusing sessions, what I sense in my body is a part in my stomach that feels numb. I spend time with it, give it company, wonder what emotion it has and usually the rest of the session is spent there with not much communication from the part. Do you have suggestions or ideas about what might be happening?
Dear Reader:
Last week I suggested that you might spend a longer time at the stage of sensing the first quality, the quality of numb. I said you might find that it has a particular quality of “numb,” that might even be a little different each time.
But there’s another possibility that occurs to me. Sometimes when we feel something that doesn’t open up and doesn’t change, that’s because it itself doesn’t feel safe.
And perhaps it doesn’t feel safe because there’s another part it’s hiding from.
I remember a time in my own Focusing when I was spending time with something I could feel in the middle of my body. It felt “closed” and “shut off.”
I let it know I accepted it completely. It could be the way it was and didn’t have to change. I didn’t think I was putting any pressure on it to open up and reveal more about itself.
But then I got an image of this place in my body tightening up and cringing, as if it believed it was about to be hit. It was looking at me! It seemed to believe that I was about to hit it.
I looked around — Who is it who wants to hit this part? Because it’s not me!
And then I realized there was another part, invisible to me because it was standing behind me. This other part was angry at the closed, shut off part. The closed part was never going to reveal itself as long as the angry part stood ready to attack it.
I was able to acknowledge and spend time listening to the part that was so angry. When it felt understood, it calmed down… and the closed part felt safe enough to show more about itself as well.
Invisible parts can take us over and keep us from being truly Self-in-Presence. And one way to detect an invisible part is from the behavior of a part that we are aware of. The very fact that a part isn’t changing can be a sign that another part is around somewhere.
