I’ve been learning from my body that behind every feeling of shock is nausea, is the sensation of being sick to my stomach. In order to recover from both acute illness and long-time illness my entire life, during this pandemic-y time, I’ve been doing various detoxes. Within that process, sometimes the herb or food I am consuming is actually “too strong” (energetically) for my body. When my body is too shutdown – i.e., too cold, and I consume something very high energy (mineral rich, water rich, etc.) my body will go into shock. It does this because in order to receive a high amount of energy – in order to receive nutrients, nourishment, we have to have energy to process it. We must have energy to receive and process energy. Anyways, that wasn’t even the point of my journal hehe.
So my body, when too cold and meeting an item that is energetically rich (aka hot) and requiring lots of energy to process, will go into shock. I call that feeling “flat-lining” – you know that numb, float-y, everything-is-kinda-fine-but-also-put-me-back-in-my-body-calm-but-dissociated feeling? Yeah, that. After my body goes through the shock of receiving that “nourishing” food or herb, what always follows is nausea. The sensation of being sick to my stomach.
But what I ate, it was good for me, it was helping me to remove that which does not belong in my body. It was giving me lots of minerals and nutrients. But the way that my body responds, is that I should not eat the good thing, the nourishing thing, that it is too much, too strong, too cleansing.
In the past several years (and really for millenia, but let’s stay focused), we have collectively experienced repeated shocks to our Body. On the surface, we collectively have that numb, float-y, everything-is-kinda-fine-but-also-put-me-back-in-my-body-calm-but-dissociated feeling. The collective Body is in shock. So it makes sense that I personally am just beginning to be able to eat food, go outside, be a human, have coherent thoughts. It makes sense that we are all feeling so much. There is nothing wrong with us. We have experienced shocks to our bodies – and to our Body. And beneath that collective shock to our Body, we are sick to our stomachs. Now that we are beginning to feel bit by bit, how do we deal with our sickness?
Maybe, just like the food and herbs we put into our body that require energy to process, these collective and personal shocks require new types of energy to process them. Even in the face of that which is difficult to process, many of us are engaging in the question: how exactly can we process these shocks that we are repeatedly receiving to our bodies? To our Body? This is the essence of the questions I am continually asking myself, studying, and seeking to explore with others: how do we move energy in the body to create the conditions necessary for deep connection? How do we return ourselves to the ground, in the face of each repeated shock? And how can we do it together?