Embody Gaïa!
Your feelings are more than you : they are part of Gaïa! An original article from Jeff Shub, edited with comments of James Samuel and the video of Embody Gaïa worktalk.
I feel joy that Jeffrey Shub expressed something about feelings not as a personnal matter, rather as a direct expression of Earth herself. It is a direct link to the recording following.
Jeffrey’s words ere inviting us to dig deeper and wider than workshops for personnal development.
I’ve been realizing lately, after attending/facilitating many online spaces each week for several years, that there’s a big meme going around the healing world, that I’ve also participated in sharing, and that is not working. It is important to bring this meme forth because it is resonating broadly, especially on social media, giving the illusion of progress, while being another form of survival strategy that prevents evolution from happening.
The meme is: ‘say what you feel’
It is one of the most popular narratives among influencers. It has taken the healing world by storm.
“It is healing to say what you feel. It will set you free.”
I couldn’t venture to count how many times I’ve asked people to name the feeling and to say what it’s about without doing anything more about it. “Good work”, I’d say, “you’re doing really great”.
I’ve discovered, painfully, that it’s not true. Saying what you feel is another survival strategy. When you say what you feel it is a way of staying separate from the feeling that is trying to do its work on you. It is how you let it blow by without actually inhabiting the territory of necessity.
It is even more pernicious because saying what you feel provides the illusion of progress. It seems like something is working. You are getting more in touch with your emotional body. And maybe it is a step in the direction of liberation, but it’s not liberation.
Here’s why: Your feelings aren’t yours.
I will unfold this slowly..
Some people use alcohol, some use work, some swear by meditation, yoga, weed, therapy, exercising, psychedelics, ecstatic dance, sex; there any number of strategies to rid yourself of the cultural burden of having to face directly into the instructions provided by the four kinds of discomfort you feel each day — anger, fear, sadness, and joy. (The list above is a log of all the numbing strategies I’ve tried)
It would seem that when you talk about your feelings, you are facing into them. However, what is really happening is that your mouth is acting like a blowoff valve. You talked about it, so now you are absolved of the responsibility to do anything about them. I’ve tried this one, too.
There is a different way, a way to allow yourself to be guided by the natural forces of these feelings — to let go of the programs that filter the information to try to make it fit into the box you’ve made for yourself — to turn up the volume on the energy and information — to be the open channel — put your empty vessel into the proverbial river.
Your feelings aren’t yours, actually. Feelings are forces of nature. That means their source is somewhere beyond your physical body. This is why when one person in a healing circle starts to speak from their heart, everyone looks in amazement thinking to themselves, “I’ve been feeling the exact same thing!”
It is because these forces come from Gaia. For those who don’t have the distinction of Gaia, I’ll take a shot at delivering it.
Just like the name for the collection of all my parts is Jeffrey, Gaia is a name used to describe the expression of all the parts that make up the organism of planet Earth. A human is made up of atoms, cells, creatures, bodies, entities, and electromagnetic fields. The Earth is made up of atoms, creatures, elements, entities, and an electromagnetic field.
In science class you learned that human cells have:
self-regulated functions,
communication with adjacent cells,
and they receive information from beyond by way of nerves, hormones, foreign cells like bacteria, viruses, and fungi, and energetic fields created by the heart and brain.
Similarly, as a human you have:
your self-regulated internal processes,
communication within a community of nearby humans, plants and animals,
and you receive information from beyond that flows through you, just like light flows through a prism.
Gaia has no mouth to create words, she has you for that.
The prism of you was shaped to create beautiful rainbows of expressions of the four feelings of anger, sadness, fear, and joy. Each prism is unique in the way it refracts the same colors of light.
What an insanely beautiful world it would be if all humans walked around in their full blown prismness.
But being a prism in a society that prefers if everyone is an equally sized piece of coal creates a bit of a problem for a developing human. So, your prism gets more and more clouded as you grow up because you were raised in a world that made it unsafe to be the expression of those feelings. When you were a crying baby, they did everything they could to make it stop. When adults felt things around you, they held it all in until they couldn’t anymore. Maybe you even saw ‘conscious adults’ going to therapy to talk about their feelings without actually doing anything with them.
I do see people talking about how bad things have gotten on this Earth, how life and diversity and beauty on Earth is being destroyed. I don’t see proportionate change happening from that talk. I do see small waves of people leaving their corporate jobs in search of something different. I don’t see corporations dismantling themselves. I don’t see governments cutting ties with corporations. I don’t see the billionaires at Davos giving up their private jets. I don’t see the world banks turning their attention away from war and towards reforesting.
And I’m just sick of it. I can’t stand to see another heart begging to scream, to cry, to yell or to explode in uncontrollable laughter until new possibilities explode into their being with a grip so strong that it takes hold.
Gaia is asking for a radical shift. She is asking for all modern-culture humans to face into the grief, the fear, and the abandonment that have turned us all into creatures who want to destroy the organism from which we came and of which we are part.
This is a uniquely human issue. No other species on Earth does this because no other species has the skill of changing their perspective through the stories they tell themselves.
And this is not an every-human issue. There are humans out there who are living in balance. Although they are treated as primitive or less evolved, they are actually a subset of the human creatures whose stories have fostered cultures that did not stray off into a territory where taking more than absolutely necessary became acceptable — where reciprocity was not lost — where treating other creatures with respect was passed down the generational lines.
(…)
The battle between the ‘wild’ people and the modern-culture people is the same battle going on inside of you. It’s the battle between the wild prism that refracts the light of consciousness (of the feelings) and the appropriate, polite, modest, scared, little thinking mind that has chosen its own safety over that of the whole, of Gaia, of life!
So, you can continue to say you feel angry without doing anything, or you can roll up your sleeves and go do what the anger is telling you to do. Go find a Rage Club or a Fear Club or a Heart Gym. Give up the show, let it all fall apart, and start over from the age where you let that prism turn black.
You might just discover what it’s like to stand out there in the world screaming out..
“I want to see restoration, regeneration, and the joy of connection (to the organism from which we came).
I want to see humans as nature in nature, doing what only they can do, with their uniquely human consciousness, guided by the feelings that flow through them.
I don’t want to see more division, between the wild and the modern-culture people.
I want to see all people no longer lost in the bardo, but alive with their hearts wide open and raw and connected to and listening to Gaia in the present!”