Boundless Enthusiasm - The Enthusiastic Musings of Marshall Ian Sontag

Ok, I know I said I was gonna limit the emotional talk, but this is definitely one of those days when I just can’t stop it. I just returned from a rather powerful experience at group therapy. I’m probably not supposed to discuss anything specific about other people in the group, so I won’t. But, someone was discussing an issue in their life that I found paralleled things going on in my own life, which I shared with the group. I told them I felt subjugated by my current work conditions. I felt overwhelmed and burdened by the new responsibilities and increased workload that come when your eemployers step up their aspirations and start new businesses. If that wasn’t bad enough, I felt stifled by strict scheduling and excessive demands on me and my time. And it doesn’t help that my bosses fight over me either.

Peter, our resident group facilitator, seized upon this opportunity to do some work with me. “What would you rather have in your life?” he asked.

“I don’t want to be tied down by a restrictive schedule. I don’t want to feel burdened by the demands of my job.”

“Now that I know what you don’t wan’t, why don’t you tell me what you do want,” he replied.

“I want to have freedom and flexibility.”

He nodded and continued, “Ok, but then what would you do with your freedom? What do you want in your life?”

I froze — Did he really want me to discuss my goals and dreams? That’s not something I ever feel comfortable sharing unless there’s a blog in between me and the other person. I get a sense of vulnerability and mistrust in regards to revealing my internal workings to other people. For some reason, most likely as a result of childhood experiences, I think people are going to ridicule me if I reveal myself to them.

And that’s how I felt sitting in this room. Peter asked if I wanted to work on the mistrust, which I affirmed. He said he wanted me to try saying something to everyone in the group, but it was OK for me just to say it to him.

“I’m considering telling you something very important about me — don’t you dare betray my trust.”

Wow. Such a willfull and direct assertion of my right to stand up for myself felt very alien to me and I still felt very vulnerable. Regardless, I still managed to get out those words, albeit in a muted fashion. Not the same intense “HOW DARE YOU?!” that I’ve witnessed from others in the group, but powerful for me nonetheless.

The whole time, I had what felt like a warm energy vigration going on in my upper torso, around my heart and solar-plexus chakras. (For my orange friends, I’m simply referring to physiological locations in the body! ) I knew it was some kind of caged-up energy, some repressed emotion longing to be free. I was trying to honor it, relax into it, let it be, give it space to develop and flourish. During this time I was silent and staring off, as I had taken my attention away from the outside world and into my body (although, there was that slight mind-buzzing of “Am I boring these people? Are they waiting for me to say something?”), so Peter asked where I was. I told him I was trying to be present for the feeling.

“If the feeling made a noise, what would it sound like?” he asked.

That was kind of an odd question, but I knew almost instantaneously what the sound would be. However, I still wasn’t comfortable making a weird noise in front of people, so I intellectualized it. “It feels like a warm vibrating energy inside,” I told them.

“Yeah,” Peter replied, “Ya know, the sounds that come out of your vocal chords are from vibrating energy too.”

I found his comment very insightful and appropriate and it reframed the situation for me because now, I was merely translating one kind of energy vibration into another. “Oooooooooooo,” I went, making a low, muffled humming sound, kind of like the sound a dishwasher would make if it was inside your closet. Or maybe a microwave in your trunk.

Peter nodded and replied, “That sounds a bit muffled. Is that your experience of the feeling?” I nodded and he said, “Yep, that’s emotional inhibition you’re running up against.”

So I sat with that feeling of emotional inhibition, along with the feeling of that warm energy trying to emerge. Peter asked if I was ready to share what it is I really wanted in my life, but I said no, not this time. What I had already disclosed was grand enough!

I drove away from the group with a big smile on my face. Grand Opening, Grand Disclosing.

To be continued…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 31st, 2006 at 1:00 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.