Post-Sharing Hangover
I shared emotional stuff today with my close yoga community and ever since I've been awash in remorse in the form of a barrage of self-judgement coming from Whinnie, my Inner Asshole.
You shared TOO MUCH! What were you thinking? No one wants to know terrible details about your life? Even your therapist doesn't really want to hear it, they have to. You derailed the whole conversation and made it all about YOU! You talk too much, you monopolize everyone's time. You're so selfish!
et certera, et cetera, et cetera.
I'm getting better and figuring out what she's saying to me, discerning the exaggerations and outright lies more quickly now. For years it was just the somatic overload of crushing, physical shame, now at least I get the rest of the message. It makes it easier to tell Whinnie to fuck off.
I also cleaned the kitchen floor, which helped physically burn off some of the energy of the shame of sharing.
Ironically, we were talking about friendship and community. How we do it as adults. I burst in with how I'm really getting hit hard by Richard Miller and iRest's revelations. How I've been trying to become a part of this community and grow into working on studies for yoga interventions around aging and hospice care, but now this and it hurts. Particularly because it's the same kind of disappointment.
My life has been shaped tragically by white men behaving horribly. If you just took the instances of sexual assault and harassment I've experienced over my lifetime alone, without taking into account all the stuff from my Mother and family, it is terrible and traumatic. From my very conception onward.
When you add that to my family, my Mother's ever evolving abuse, including moving constantly, it's no wonder I feel like I never fit in comfortably and feel sometimes at a loss as to how to have relationships with people.
The conversation got steered back to community and friendship. It made me think a lot about how community can be so multilayered, it starts from mere shared interests, but that can only create a really superficial connection. In order to have supportive connection, we need to have values alignment in addition to common interests. When there is an overlap in values, it creates the structure needed to grow trust and love.
When I think about the "Yoga Therapy Community", it's really pretty big. It's easy to assume we're all aligned on some values, because there's ethical standards and guidelines we all agree we adhere to. We're all practicing with the same yamas and niyamas, but we end up on all different sides.
I wasn't feeling very creative today, but I did enjoy the emphera gifts from RS today.
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