"And every day, the world will drag you by the hand, yelling, "This is important! And this is important! And this is important!

You need to worry about this! And this! And this! And each day, it's up to you to yank your hand back, put it on your heart and say, "No. This is what's important" - Lain T.

My tire was running on low last week. I pumped air in it a few times and moved on quite carelessly but every time I turned the car on on there it was, the big sign: LOW TIRE PRESSURE! I think to myself: Oh come on, how low can it be? And after a careful look closer, I verified it’s pretty low. There, standing in thestreet, in between carrying my bag, my daughter’s random and most important items, like rocks and sticks plus what not (somebody needs to study a woman’s ability to carry multiple things in her hands), standing there I melted while confessing to my insides: Yes, I definitely need to take the car into the shop. The melting gives both me and the tire permission to deflate. To fall flat. It makes me think of our relationship with honesty. How long do we run on a flat fire when the signal is telling ourselves otherwise? “How nice - to feel nothing and still get full credit for being alive”, this his quote from Desmond Tutu comes to mind and is one of those gentle shakes that grabs you by the arm. This tire situation made me think of how I’m sensing both internally and in my surroundings a collective feeling of numbness, which it’s not a surprise given the past year we’ve all experienced. To be in my body isn’t a difficult thing anymore. Yet here I am, observing myself at any turn following a need and an attempt to escape, deny or ignore the space I inhabit. What does this have to do with honesty? We know our tires are low, we feel it, we get the signals and yet we can’t admit it, we can’t say thetruth. We create this internal dynamic that furthers us away from our capacity to be with what it is, we lose our trust. And in this dance away from honesty, numbness arises. Emotional numbing is the mental and emotional process of shutting out feelings and may be experienced by emotional responses or reactivity. It can surface in many different ways, but mostly it’s a feeling of distance and detachment from others, loss of interest, not being able to access our feelings, or feeling flat both physically and emotionally and a tendency to prefer isolation rather than being with others, amongst many other manifestations.

It might sound obvious, but why are we numb? Because we are feeling discomfort and pain. Numbing comes as a result of an attempt to protect ourselves from others or life. It’s a very common factor in PTSD. In order to deal with the pain or in some cases, the trauma, we turn to emotional numbing or avoidance as a way to manage the load of this pain.Margaret Atwood says “I’m feeling fine. I remember these words and recite them. These are the things you say when asked how you are. After all, it would be odd to say: I’m not feeling. Or, more to the point: I’m not, I have ceased to be. Where am I?” Before we jump into Googling self diagnosing with numbness, let’s pause and actually connect with the body. The word numb is used to describe a physical sensation. My leg is numb, for example. And when that happens, what is really going on? You aren’t able to feel your leg. You know it’s there but you can’t quite feel thesensation internally. So followed by feeling numb, what do you do? You immediately shake your leg, trying to touch the floor while holding your breath for a few seconds as you feel the tingling and the discomfort until it comes back to normal. When we numb ourselves emotionally it is like we go through all these steps except for the last one, we don’t shake our leg. We simply let our leg be numb until it isn’t anymore. The catch is: emotions get stored in the body. So though we are avoiding to deal with the last step, we are actually creating more pain internally, by just ignoring or denying. Within time we get caught up in a cycle. I’m aware that this a complex topic, but my invitation here is simply to begin observing. Really, observing your body immediately after a conflict, a lash out moment or while you scroll down the comparison world of social media. Observe your body at the end of the day, in the presence of others. What’re you carrying? What’s there? Can you name it? Can you feel it? I finally took the car into the shop and it turned out that there was a huge nail stuck in the tire. The gentleman who helped me said, while handing me the keys, “The tire is brand new, you are good to go." And off I went, a little more refilled. Numbing can be a compass, it can point out where you need to go. It’s a road to honesty. Go there, right in the middle of your truth.


With love,
Mariana