From Body to Heart
While it can be easy to hear what our bodies are saying, tuning into our hearts can be a bit more complex.
In the summer of 2015, I first sat down with the therapist that, today, I affectionately describe as my Yoda. After doing an extensive intake where he asked an array of questions about my personal history, looked for evidence of traumatic brain injuries, and at one point asked, “You were a c-section, right?” (his assumption was correct), he concluded with, “Tell me five words to describe how you feel.”
I couldn't give him one.
That’s right, when asked to give five words to describe how I felt at a time when I was desperately hopeless, lost, confused, broken, thoroughly inadequate, and certain that my whole world was falling apart, I couldn’t come up with a single word to describe what it felt like (and for those of you keeping count, yes, I intentionally put a bonus adjective into that sentence).
But it’s not just me.
Last Friday, I happened to be just a few blocks from my parents’ place, so I decided to stop by. I arrived about 15 minutes before the hospice social worker, so my quick visit ended up lasting a couple of hours. Initially, I was planning on hanging out with my dad while my mom and the social worker went somewhere to talk, but when she checked in with my dad, those plans were quickly derailed.
While my dad said quite a bit about his pending death during that conversation, not once did he talk about how he felt. He repeatedly opened sentences with, “It’s interesting that…” and would then make an observation about something that was going on. It’s almost as if he was a third party offering commentary on the dying process rather than the reflections of someone who is in fact dying.
There was no fear or no regret, nor was there a sense of accomplishment at a life well lived. And while I wish I could believe that he was pulling a Spock in Star Trek Into Darkness, purposefully choosing not to feel the anguish that most people experience at the end of their life, 50 years of history with him tells me that’s not what’s going on. Rather, I have every reason to believe he was just like I was sitting in that therapist’s office almost 10 years ago … disconnected from his heart.
From Body to Heart
In my last post, I asked what I’m guessing is an easy question for most men: What is your body saying? We can recognize things like pain or exhaustion rather easily.
But what happens if we turn to the heart?
What do you feel about life right now? Don’t tell me you’re busy or list everything you have going on that you’re responsible for. That’s all the mind-oriented stuff that we do well. That’s playing the third-party commentator on our lives.
What I want to know is how do you feel about your life?
If you can answer that question with adjectives, good for you! You’re an exception to the rule.
If you struggle, odds are good nobody ever taught you how to listen to your heart or how to express your feelings, and if they did, those same conceptions of manhood that prompt us to push through pain and not take care of our bodies quickly told us to shut that feeling shit down.
But here’s the thing: just like listening to our bodies can guide us to better physical health, listening to our hearts can guide us to improved physical and mental health. It is also a key to healthy relationships with our partners and can help us excel at work. In other word, being in touch with our hearts helps us be better men.
So maybe it’s time we dusted off our hearts and said hello.
How To Listen To Your Heart
So how do we get to a place where we’re listening to our hearts and benefiting from the emotions they uncover? Here are some thoughts:
Work Out Regularly
The truth is whether we’re in touch with our heart or not, our emotions are still there and they still influence our behavior.
When we “go off” about something or at someone, that’s emotion. That emotion might be in response to the present moment, or it might be an old emotion stirred up by the present. But it’s still an emotion.
They’re always there, and we always have them, whether we recognize them or not. But when we pretend they aren’t there, when we aim to suppress them, we set ourselves up to go volcanic on someone (or have them manifest as a physical illness).
So when I wrote that working out sets the stage for delving into the heart, I meant it. Working out relieves stress and sends endorphins flowing through our body. Both of these things can help us get a better grip on our emotions.
This is especially true when we first start listening to our hearts, as working out makes emotions more manageable and less overwhelming.
Be Kind to Yourself
When I encourage you to be kind to yourself, I mean it in two ways:
Anytime you learn something new, it takes time and practice. Figuring out what you feel and why doesn’t come easy at first. Give yourself grace and know you’ll get better at this in time.
The odds are good, that as you get in touch with your heart, you will start seeing the world and yourself in new ways. There were those times when you were reactive and went off, spewing out emotion that had nothing to do with the moment you were in. You’ll notice times you failed to practice empathy, after all, it’s hard to connect to another person’s feelings if you can’t connect to your own. For me, guilt became a constant companion for a good 18 months, because I began to see with clarity how my behavior hurt others and I felt the pain I caused them.
Being kind to yourself at this moment means learning to hold in balance the reality that what you did wasn’t okay and never will be, with the simultaneously true reality that you didn’t have the skill set at the time to do better. If you hold these things in balance, it will drive you to live a life of amends.
And if kindness to yourself doesn’t sound all that manly, think about these two points this way:
You are devoting yourself to a new skill and showing the discipline it takes to develop it.
You are taking accountability for your actions and seeking to fix whatever you have broken.
Prioritize Observation and Curiosity
The goal of connecting with your heart is not to surrender control of your life over to your emotions, but to recognize that they are offering you valuable information about the present moment.
You might recognize that something upset you and now you’re angry. But why? Why did what happened produce anger? Was it something about the actual event, or did it remind you of something that happened in the past and bring those old feelings to the surface?
Once you have a better understanding of what you’re feeling, you can ask yourself what you want to do about it. Odds are good you’ll decide that blowing your lid, while good for releasing some of what’s locked up, ultimately does more harm than good.
Use a Feeling Wheel
If you’re anything like me, then a Feeling Wheel is an essential tool as you seek to observe and get curious.
The idea is that you start in the center and identify which of the seven base emotions best describes you. From there, move to the next layer and pick the word that best describes your base emotion. Then go to the outer rim and choose the most refined option.
The idea is that you’re drilling down the nuance behind the emotion. Then you can start asking why. What comes to mind when you reflect on this feeling?
I actually took my mom on this journey the other day. As she thinks about my dad passing away she feels sad, but it’s the kind of sadness that makes her feel lonely. When we took the last step, she settled on abandoned and realized that she was handling my dad’s dying the same way she handled (or didn’t handle) the death of her dad when she was 13.
While she can’t change what happened to her when she was 13, she can go back and process some of the emotions surrounding that event in a way that helps her process my dad’s cancer.
So How Am I Feeling?
So how do I feel these days? I’ll admit, much of my emotional energy is wrapped up in my dad. I’m grieving, and that grief comes at multiple levels.
The other day my friend Peter who’s behind The Men’s Room texted:
I’m sorry, I’m imagining that’s been very painful. Father stuff is so difficult yet rich to work with. One of my favorite quotes that I’m sure I’m misquoting is: every father comes into the world, wanting to love a certain way, and every son comes into the world wanting to be loved a certain way, and only rarely do those match. And the only proper response is grief.
That’s certainly part of the grief I’m feeling, even if I’ve already worked through a lot of that hurt. But there’s more to it.
I’m also struggling with my dad’s lack of feeling about the life he’s lived.
He and I see the world in radically different ways. He’s very much a product of needing to justify his experience in Vietnam, doing his MBA as popular economic theory embraced a more laissez-faire approach (if you need a primary on economic theories, here’s a 30-minute overview from a Lex Friedman interview), and the Republican operatives takeover of American Christianity (Season 6 of the Truce Podcast offers an even deeper dive).
Basically, he’s a Reaganite (whose basic economic philosophy has dominated American politics on both sides of the isle ever since).
As I see it, all of this fueled a life that worked out well for him but simultaneously served as a small contribution to crafting a society that is far worse for future generations:
Justifying one war fueled the justification of endless wars and the diverting of money that could create a better America to the Military Industrial Complex that Eisenhower warned us about.
The economic ideas of his era placed profit over people under the guise that money made at the top would trickle down. So they did things like offshore jobs, crush labor unions, drive down wages, and strip away the social safety net, all of which returned us to a level of wealth inequality we haven’t seen since the Robber Barons of the Industrial Revolution.
The Republican Party’s takeover of pop-Christianity, among other things, functions as a divine stamp of approval on all this, giving those who partake a sense that they are justified and even right in doing so.
As my dad and I talk about the world as it is today, he can see the challenges his grandchildren have to overcome, but I grieve that he can’t see the link between those challenges and the philosophy he embraced. But in the end, as I see it, his generation, as a collective, is more interested in their own bottom line than the well-being of their children and grandchildren. That even fails the John Dutton, “Look out for me and my family.” take on masculinity.
Then there’s the internal tension brought on by the radically different ways we see the world, After all, what little boy doesn’t want to be like his daddy? But given the difference in how we view the world, I need to choose to be like my dad or do what I believe is right.
To top it off, feeling this dynamic with my dad highlights the reality of my own failures as a father and leaves me struggling to sort out what I can do to help those wounds heal, be the parent my child needs, and create as much opportunity as I can for the next generation (which extends far beyond what I’ll do for my own kid).
Back to the Start
Which brings me back to where we started. 10 years ago I was sitting in that therapist’s office completely disconnected from myself and hurting everyone around me in the process. It’s the wounds caused by that season of my life I want to see healed. But being disconnected from my own heart for so long means there are a lot of amends to be made.
That said, guilt isn’t the only feeling I have today. There are also feelings like graciousness, compassion, empathy, generosity, and love … and without those I’d still be disconnected from my own heart.
Those feelings remind me that my dad did the best he could with the tools the world offered him, just as I was doing my best before my Yoda set the stage for me to see a bigger world. They tell me that while what’s happened in the past matters, it doesn’t have to be the final word, which soothes my frustration and grief, and gives me hope that the energy from these painful feelings can be transmuted into action that brings out something good.
But where does the graciousness, compassion, empathy, generosity, and love come from? That is best for the next post, because these feelings intermingle with soul.
So, how are you feeling?