An Essay A Day For A Year
By Roe
Day 74, March 14, 2012
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“Hey baby, I like your body language!”
“Wow, thanks. I like the tone of your voice!”
As humans everything about us betrays us. How we walk and stand and move and speak and act, all portray us to the world around us. Much of what we express in our body language and sound and behavior is obvious to us and to those that we encounter, but the vast majority of us is an unconscious expression of our state of being. We are perceived by others who are perceived by us, and we all perceive based on our particular perceptions. Our particular subjective perceptions might in fact be an accurate rendition of reality, but most likely they are a skewed perception based on our own conscious and unconscious histories.
Our hearts and bodies and psyches are storage devices for unresolved issues, and unresolved issues are eventful memories involving trauma and deprivation. Our sound and body language, and the way we look and behave all relate our state of emotional and psychological health. If we are healthy and live without repressed trauma and deprivation and unresolved issues, we can more clearly apprehend the state of pain and suffering of another. If we too are full of unconscious pain and unresolved problems, we will be blind to the same state in another, and in fact view them as normal, since they feel and look and sound and act like us.
We say that the eyes are the window into the soul. If the soul is the true unconscious state of our being, where our suffering self and unresolved self dwells, then that is true. Our eyes reflect the direct state of our psychological and emotional self. I recommend that you the reader take a series of large photographs of people you know and love, both familiar to you and those that you loathe or admire as public figures. I recommend that you look at pictures of Hitler and Mother Theresa, of Ghandi and John Lennon. First look at their whole faces carefully, and speak out one word that reflects the emotional or psychological or actual state of that person. You may feel, “kind”, or “mysterious”, or “intense”, or “lonely”. Pass the pictures around to several other people that you know and write down what each of you feels when you apprehend the faces of these people. Now take two pieces of paper, and place one across the forehead of any given picture, and one across the nose and lower face to isolate only the eyes of each portrait. Now look again solely into the eyes of each person, and you may find that your impression of this person has changed. Pass just the eyes around to the same people, and jot down their impressions.
First, why are the impressions of each viewer different? The reason is whether the emotional state of each person resonates with the eyes of the portrait, and whether each viewer is blocking or not blocking the issues contained in the “soul” of each person in the portraits. I have 4 children who have had a remarkable life of freedom and self evolution. They were all gentle birthed, and have received the benefits of both parents undergoing almost two decades of deep feeling therapy. They have had remarkably aware lives. When looking at only the eyes of Mother Theresa, all 4 children, privately in turn, called out, “murderer”, “assassin”, and “hateful”. Mother Theresa does in fact have eyes equal to if not more intensely rageful than Adolph Hitler. The fact that Mother Theresa fled into theology and service to the church and people, rather than fascism and murder, does not change the feeling of her soul, or our perception of that feeling. If anyone does not apprehend the deep trauma and suffering in the eyes of Mother Theresa, then deep trauma and suffering are both resonances and blocks of the viewer them self in interpreting.
Besides the eyes, the next most revealing expression of our emotional and psychological state is the sound of our voices. Our vocal cords are in fact the memory of our state of maturation and they contain the events both harmonious and traumatic of our lives. When patients undergo many years of deep feeling therapy, where trauma is felt and integrated, and where unfulfilled needs and deprivations are experienced and lived out through grieving and mourning, the overall state of the person changes. Stance and posture and movement changes, attitude and behavior and expression changes, and the state of peace or conflict reflected in the eyes change. After deep healing, and after periods of growing and maturation, the sound of our voices change. Most of the time we accept the sound of a person’s voice as a reflection of “that is their voice”, rather than, “that voice falls short of the voice that that person should have”. Occasionally we hear the voice of a person that does not seem to fit.
The next betrayer of our state of self is the articulation of our mouths and jaws. The age lines around the mouth and lower face of a person tell us a lot about pain and how it is managed. We have all experienced people who manage to talk without hardly moving their mouths, and the pursers of lips, and the speaking out of the side of the mouth. We have all experienced people’s mouths and chins that we cannot stop looking at for various peculiarities. The question is whether we feel the same affliction or trauma or unfulfilled need, and do not notice the expression of suffering or pain, or whether we clearly apprehend a silenced child or sideways child, or restricted child in voice.
There are hundreds more “body languages” and “body sounds” and “behaviors” that betray us to others and them to us. We are all radios and antennas of human expression, and the expression is both healthy and unhealthy, and we perceive these other human radios and antennas in either a healthy or unhealthy way. Sometimes an unhealthy expression from another coupled with our unhealthy reception results in murder and rape and terrible consequences. Sometimes an unhealthy expression from another coupled with a healthy reception results in compassion and healing, or at least wise choices and survival. Sometimes a healthy expression from someone coupled with an unhealthy reception can also end in danger or unfortunate circumstances. We owe it to ourselves to ask, “how healthy are we emotionally and psychologically, and how healthy are those around us?” We owe it to ourselves to pay close attention to other and to ourselves, and to try and tell ourselves the truth. Our truth that we may be able to bear or see is hinged to our state of healthy or unhealthy selves, and this is tied to our pasts. We owe it to ourselves to examine our pasts.
See you tomorrow.
yourpersonalmuse@gmx.com
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