🌧Sometimes we just need a place to cry and feel our humanity.
Often our initial reaction to a person being upset is to try make it better, to wipe tears, to say “everythings going to be okay”. This is our training and its well intended but it leaves both you and the upset person with this unspoken goal to push everything down. It can leave the person feeling like their feelings aren’t welcomed, like they need to apologize for their tears or like they need to be alone so they wont make anyone else upset.
In reality, there is nothing more potent than witnessing a woman in the depth of her rupture and telling her that she’s right in her emotions and that she’s right exactly where she’s at. This is the untraining.
Intuitively we know how to do this. But society has told us vulnerability is a sign of weakness, that our emotions will be used against us later. And that’s how we’ve created such shame around dark emotions.
So the practice is the undoing. It’s subtle, but it’s actually a reallllly big deal. Because by doing this for another woman, you’re going to find it easier to do it for yourself. Often when we can hold space for others it allows us to flex a muscle that then shows us how to hold space for ourselves.