Temples of numbness

Musings from a Feminine perspective

I’ve watched the rise of events dedicated to processing grief in the last years and read with fascination about the grief temples Malidoma Somé describes in his book Of Water & Spirit, a fascinating insight into his personal history and the culture of the Dagara tribe he came from, in Burkina Faso.

The reason I’ve never been to a grief-centred event is not that I don’t want to come together with others to give expression to my grief - I think coming together to feel deeply is one of the most important things we could be doing right now. It’s because a lot of my deeper feelings are protected under layers of numbness and I’ve never seen this important element mentioned in an event description, despite it being a massive collective phenomena.

The idea of being at the event where the facilitator isn’t attuned to this makes me feel uncomfortable. Looking back at the emotional processing work I’ve done in personal growth workshops over the years, I’ve barely heard the phenomena of numbness mentioned and when it was, it was something to simply penetrate through (the approach of many dearmouring workshops).

One of the many things that’s probably different from our Western culture to that of the Dagara tribe, is the level of relational trauma we are swimming in over here. It’s the elephant in the room, the water that we fish can’t see we’re swimming in.

While the role that trauma plays in our lives is gaining momentum and an increasing number of people these days are reading books on attachment styles and getting pretty good at self-diagnosing (!), we still see our trauma through the eyes of individualism. We’re focused on our own personal journeys, our worlds sometimes colliding with other people’s worlds. We’re less attuned to the larger web of collective trauma we’re part of and the ways in which this is passed down generations. I think this enables us to normalize trauma and it’s consequence of feeling disconnected from ourselves and the world, which is pretty scary if you think about it.

Thomas Hübl (whose summer intensive training I was in over the past week) describes how numbness and not being able to feel something is not simply an absence - it is vital information. It is a something. And preventing ourselves from feeling is an intelligent trauma response to overwhelm.

The way we can work with numbness is to firstly identify it, and then - rather than see it as a hindrance or something to fix or overcome - we lovingly hold it in our presence. It is this approach of encountering and nurturing that paradoxically supports the melting into more feeling.

Yesterday morning I listened to some participants talk about being the descendants of ancestors who played larger roles in the killings of Jews during the second world war. One was a direct descendent of Himmler. After an hour of shrugging off the fact that nothing that happened had particularly touched me, I paused for a moment and really noticed “NOTHING IS TOUCHING ME.”

I connected with the phenomena of nothing touching me, and my own numbness became palpable. A something instead of a nothing.

A ripple ran through my heart and a memory of my Austrian grandmother emerged, of how she had witnessed living in Austria in the 1940s and how when we asked her about it as kids she always shrugged it off. She would often make jokes and enjoy telling us about making the Heil Hitler gesture during Hitler’s speeches and knocking the caps off the soldiers in front of her.

Could it be that some of my numbness is also hers?

Perhaps.

But in this moment I was reminded again of how powerful it is to become aware of our numb parts and just lovingly notice them. We live in a world in which just being with what is, rather than wanting something to go away or fix it, is quite radical.

Every time I become aware of the numbness I carry within me and let go of an agenda for anything to be different, my heart can crack and allow a little more love and life in.

I wish we spoke of this more.

I wish we collectively reflected more on how we’ve normalised not feeling. And that more and more of us develop a loving, patient connection with own numbness and radiate this awareness into the world around us.

I wish we had temples dedicated to numbness.

I imagine these amplified fields of the future, where we can slow down and listen and become aware. Where we can rest and feel our not feeling together, and where instead of judging, we bow down before these most tender, overwhelmed parts of us. I want spaces to grieve, but meeting life just as it is.