Expanding Communal Somatic & Emotional Range
LONGING FOR CHANCES TO LOVE EACH OTHER AND LOSE OUR MINDS
I’ve been fixated on this scene from Midsommer ever since I saw it six years ago; the women in the cult gather around her and mirror her pain — they too hyperventilate and scream. I remember thinking:aghhhhhhhhhhh, I know it’s a cult, but I’d honestly prefer this over the clinical distance of therapy. The times I have felt most connected in my pain are when someone has been generous with their time and tears and cried with me. We can’t bluetooth our lived experiences to another person (lol Apple Vision memories don’t count), but we can share somatic states. The power of living in “I want to feel what you’re feeling” — setting aside “I want you to feel what I’m feeling” even for just a moment.
Yet, my therapist will never cry with me. I’m curious what a world looks like where we’re somatically, emotionally generous like this scene from Midsommer. (I’m not saying let’s do away with emotional boundaries and project our feelings all over each other. Emotional sovereignty is key to collective liberation; we must know how to hold our emotions alone, tenderly, to do so for each other.) But what do we do with the pain that is too large for an individual body to bear alone? The griefs we are up against now - just this week the fires in LA - are immense and unsayable.
need a container bigger than this body
to grieve with me
weep with me
shake with me
rattle more than just these bones
grind more than just these teeth
my griefs are every body's Therapy’s psychoanalytic roots are in insight, the development of understanding. But what comes after understanding? I know I have daddy issues. I see the multitudes of manifestations it’s had in my life. Now what? I still want to fucking scream sometimes.
In this scene, the women don’t know why she’s having a panic attack. They don’t need to understand to help her through this moment. Something beyond the mind, beyond language is essential to what it means to really be with someone. To really behold someone — in all their joy and pain.
When my brother visited me in December, he talked about the mark of true closeness with his roommate of several years: a large percentage of their “conversations” were incoherent blabber.
freedom = being far from people
When did freedom become being far from other people?
This Atlantic piece (this link takes you past the pay wall, if you’d like to access it), “THE ANTI-SOCIAL CENTURY,” beautifully laid out why we cannot blame screens or the pandemic for the rise of social disconnect — though they sure have exacerbated it. American’s sociality has been steadily decreasing since the 70s, long before the smart phone even existed. For these technologies to take the hold over us they have, our social structures must have already been vulnerable; the ways we were together must not have served our deeper desires for solitude to become so preferable.
Solitude and loneliness are not one and the same. “It is actually a very healthy emotional response to feel some loneliness,” the NYU sociologist Eric Klinenberg told me. “That cue is the thing that pushes you off the couch and into face-to-face interaction.” The real problem here, the nature of America’s social crisis, is that most Americans don’t seem to be reacting to the biological cue to spend more time with other people.
What if the ways we’ve been taught to be together don’t completely satisfy our biology? What if this moment of cultural solitude (side note: 2025 is the year of the hermit in tarot)is about imagining new ways of being together?
It’s easy to look at the numbers and say, “okay, just try harder to put yourself out there,” which is of course valid and worthwhile, but it’s not the whole picture. If being at home in solitude with screens to numb out is the current cultural preference, let’s trust the body’s intelligence and ask, what’s the pain that’s too much to tolerate? What are you protecting yourself from? What makes other people too much?
“The cruelty to the earth we witness shatters our psyche" — Pat McCabe
We are extremely sensitive creatures. Though Western society’s myth of the individual as a separate closed unit has successfully cloaked our view of reality, our bodies cannot lie. Through our bodies, other people’s energy is revealed to us. Through our bodies we feel each other - pain and all. It makes sense to me, that in times of intense societal collapse, daily gradual apocalypse, it’s even harder to be near each other - it’s even harder to be outside. We love each other way too much to witness each other hurting like this. We can’t bear to feel each other’s aliveness being contorted and suffocated.
Where are the accessible third spaces we can go to feel this despair and tend to our unshakeable hope? Are the institutions that historically brought us together — churches, unions, schools — enough? Were they ever?
“Everybody is dealing with how much of their own aliveness they can bear” — Adam Phillips
For many people with a more privileged experience of the pandemic, it was an opportunity to get to know themselves beyond the social masks they wore; perhaps this is why there was an upsurge in conversations around neurodivergence, for example.
I’ve experienced more solitude in my post-pandemic life than I ever did before. From it, I’ve developed a deeper relationship with my creativity and nature, and therefore myself. My memories alone are strongest. This is when I feel most in my body and alive through all my senses; I feel the radiance of life — the sacredness of everything around me. In this space with myself, I can feel my feelings in their bigness to completion without fear of overwhelming others. I can cry as hard as I want. Dance as weird as I want. Zone out as long as I want. Think about anything I want. Laugh as crazy as I want.
a little ode to species loneliness (and envy):
swan and i
enjoy the same sun
for a few songs
it makes me wail
which makes swan
move onIt’s taken me a lot of work to feel so free and uninhibited in my solitude, to make my aloneness generative instead of numbing, to expand my capacity for aliveness. However celebratory, the realization of my expansive aloneness brought a twinge of melancholic yearning and grief. Is this level of Freedom only possible alone? Do I have to be far away from everyone to access It? To be so full?
For a while, the closest I got to feeling alone with another person was in my first romantic relationships. It’s common for emotional transparency and real time processing to be contained to partnership.
Couples mimic intense childhood friendships by spending free-flowing time together, marking the relationship with symbolic tokens such as rings, and developing a miniature culture, complete with inside jokes and a shared vernacular. But celebrating adult friendships in this way is rarer—and harder. {Atlantic}
If these relationships end, the grief is unparalleled; you’re not just grieving the person’s absence but the precious space you created together to feel safe enough to be wildly alive. Outside these pockets of intimacy, I quickly feel inhibited around people.
Alone I’m an animal. Making sounds. Just having fun. Smelling smells. Moving stuff around. Then oh shit, another human - I have to be human again. I have to talk about stuff. I have to be normal. I have to stop experiencing and delineate my experiences. Keep my emotions close to feel them later in full.
But humans ARE animals, so what the fuck is normal? What is this image of being human that we have created, and is it actually serving our deeper needs and desires?
To answer these questions, it’s helpful to understand how psychiatry has changed our understanding of the human being and created the notion of a mental normal through pathologization. I recently finished the book Strangers to Ourselves and it blew me away. Rachel Aviv weaves spectacular (and true) stories into patterns of meticulous detail that let you decide what to make of the shapes. One of my favorite sections was about Bapu, a woman in India diagnosed with schizophrenia, whose story maps the beginning of British “civilizing programs” in the country through the introduction of psychiatry and asylums.
“In a Bengali journal, a doctor warned that ‘in India, European civilization is the main reason behind this citta vikriti,’ a Sanskrit term for insanity…
Indian healing cultures were meant to raise the self to a higher ideal — detached, spontaneous, free of ego — rather than simply restore the person to a baseline called normal…
Healing rituals created a sense of catharsis, purpose, and spiritual connection. ‘Psychiatry and psychology have described only a small part of human consciousness.’
Bapu’s love for god, her unending devotion, appears like madness through the Western clinical lens. She spent the rest of her life escaping hospitals to return to the temples. What turned her to god was an extremely clear picture of the injustice around her.
The 2024 film, All We Imagine As Light, is a tender portrayal of feminine friendship set in Mumbai. Two women help their friend through eviction and move her back to her rural village. Together they contend with what the city has taken from them and attempt to find a sense of home in each other.
“Some people call this the city of dreams, but I don’t. I think it’s the city of illusions…you have to believe the illusion, or you’ll go mad.
I didn’t realize so much time had passed. The city takes time away from you. You have to get used to the impermanence.
You see that building there…it is the same builders…they are building everywhere nurse…building their tall towers that reach up to the sky…they think they have replaced god.”
It is only once the women are in the coastal village that a spaciousness opens up in their emotional and spiritual lives. It’s the first time we see the main character’s laugh. The film doesn’t follow the other two women back to the city; it ends on the beach. As an audience, we’re left in a moment of oceanic eternity yet anxious for how their aliveness will survive the illusion upon their return.
The spaces we built don’t leave space for us. What happens to all that doesn’t fit?
These genius lyrics from Father John Misty’s song “Mental Health” put it perfectly:
Mental health
Mental health
No one knows you like yourself
You two should speak
In the presence of a licensee
This hallucination
The cathedral in the prison
Where the dreams of a citizen
Can only tell you what is wrong with them
Forgetting:
The engine of civilization
Coffee and a cigarette
Found no better means of revolt yet
Ah
Mental health
Mental health
Maybe we're all far too well
Mental health
Mental health
A less pathetic cry for help
Mental health
Mental health
There's no higher virtue held
In this crazy world
It's more than a little bit absurd
Oh, insanity
Babe, it's indispensable
For the true endeavor of your soul
To find the edge and baby, go, go, go
Oh, magic child
Run, baby, run, baby, run, baby, run
The one regret that's really pretty tough
Is knowing I didn't go nearly far enough
Oh, magic child
This dream we're born inside
Feels awful real sometimes
But it's all in your mindEmotions in the Age of Convenience
“I think part of why AI-companion apps have proven so seductive so quickly is that most of our relationships already happen exclusively through the phone,” he said… With AI “You can set them up to never criticize you, never cheat on you, never have a bad day and insult you, and to always be interested in you.” Unlike the most patient spouses, they could tell us that we’re always right. Unlike the world’s best friend, they could instantly respond to our needs without the all-too-human distraction of having to lead their own life.
What does it say about the origins and nature of psychiatry itself if we are able to outsource human intimacy, companionship and therapy to AI? Circling back to the response of Indian doctors to the introduction of psychiatry: it’s “described only a small part of human consciousness.” Yet, this small sliver is the foundation of our Western cultural illusion. We are subjected to it and exploited by it at every turn.
Outside the bubble of illusion, other animals feel their feelings to completion — immediately - without requiring conscious awareness of the “feeling” itself. Emotions are experienced and therefore released somatically through physiological changes in their bodies like heart rate, breathing patterns, muscle tension, hormone levels, movement, and vocalization. My somatic therapist once said to me, “the nervous system desires completion.” Humans bodies are no different, besides the gap that our consciousness creates in an awareness of the process itself. The societal expectations around what is an acceptable level of emotion and release widen this gap as well.
In the stiffness of the illusion, unable to fully emote and experience, we’re left to search for a set of feelings and avoid another set of feelings; everything in our lives becomes a means to this end, which is why solitude has increased with screens. People cannot perfectly, reliably entertain us the way screens can. People are not feeling delivery or feeling avoiding mechanisms but AI is.
when songs structured our days / recovering our communal somatic emotional range
Susan Sontag
European colonizers could not comprehend how the indigenous people living on this land got the day’s work done while also having fun. They described them as childlike, overly emotional.
"Indians are impressionable and impulsive, with little or no control over their emotions."
— James Mooney (Anthropologist 1896)
"The Indian, a child of nature, is prone to extremes of emotion, from the wildest ecstasies to the deepest despair."
— Carl Schurz (U.S. Secretary of the Interior, 1877)
"The Indian is a creature of impulse, swayed by his passions, and is incapable of the steady discipline of civilized life."
— Francis Parkman (Historian, 19th Century)
"The Indian mind is too volatile, swayed by emotion rather than reason, to appreciate the value of settled, industrious life."
— Frederick Jackson Turner (Historian, Frontier Thesis)
These horrific quotes offer insight into the false colonial dichotomy between the emotional worlds of children/adults.Instilling fear of emotion perpetuates numbness and robs us of the full breadth of human emotion and play. Pleasure and tears are only for the not yet schooled (civilized) child. To touch joy, we have to touch grief. Children flow between crying and laughing with ease. And they are much freer for it. Much more whole for it.
Now, I’m thinking about Marika Heinrich’s writing on whiteness:
People don’t choose to disconnect from life, they do so when there is no other choice. This living death is the open wound we are seeing pour out all around us, and which has been left unattended for a long, long time.
I’m nudging us towards this question: What has to have happened to a people for them to trade interdependence for control?
What has to have happened to a people for them to believe emotions should be controlled and not felt? What were they afraid to feel? What were they afraid would spill out?
In December, The Hinterlands embodied voice trainings were a window into communal non-mind, non-word activities. Without having exchanged names, we launched into vocal, physical experiments, wandering around the room as dogs, as birds. To meet each other through sound that didn’t need to have meaning was beyond refreshing. To listen and move closer — or farther — simply as a sound maker, silence collaborator. We also sang ancient songs of fairies and fiddles. Like Susan Sontag wrote, this “given,” passed on form of verbal means, is a thread that keeps Knowing close; conversation is important too, of course, but in too high doses, as our main way of Knowing, we lose other necessary things.
I love this video of me as a munchkin because it’s a reminder that young ones who haven’t developed that second-guessing consciousness don’t edit their physical / vocal / emotional expression. Here, I’m clearly making this repetitive sound because it feels pleasurable in my body to do so. Lol, you can hear in the background my mom say, “you’re so dramatic.” What a word that would come to haunt me! The fear of being too much. Too expressive. Too emotional.
Mushrooms have taught me a lot about what it means to communicate and feel without words. Most of what I’ve learned from psychedelic experiences has been communicated visually, symbolically, almost telepathically. I see and I know. Any time I’ve entered that space with someone we reemerge non-verbally connected. More than being perfectly understood we want to be truly with — thats where the healing is — in playing, in collaborative expression. We don’t need people to be perfect (or make us feel anything) we just need them to be fully themselves, present, flexible, collaborative, and responsible for their emotions.
On a solo trip last year, I saw the sonic soundscape of my neighborhood. I witnessed how individualized sound had become. The cacophony of cars blasting their separates songs. With the internet, we can practically live anywhere (nowhere), accessing any sound. We used to organize ourselves around the preciousness of sound. We used to live next to the people who shared our songs. We used to sing everyday with them.
rewilding our play
One of the most blissful days of 2024 was up at a cabin with some friends in the summer. We sat in the creek under the sun for hours looking at rocks in more silence than speaking. It didn’t feel like the silence of my childhood, avoidant and empty. These silences were full and rich and made the words that emerged magic.
The problem is no longer getting people to express themselves, but providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don’t stop people from expressing themselves, but rather, force them to express themselves. What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, or ever rarer, the thing that might be worth saying.
— Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations
Lol there’s a deep irony in expressing all of this to you with words arghhhhhhhh, so I want to end with some embodied invitations / prompts. Let me know if you try any of them. The macro culture is obviously not ready for our undomesticated emotional rawness, but it’s in these small acts of somatic emotional resistance that we practice new ways of being together.
spend a day in silence with no entertainment, conversation, screens or sonic consumption
ask a friend to go on a silent hour long walk - maybe make an altar to your friendship with stuff you find along the way
cry somewhere new (outside your house) — at the diner, on the train, a museum, a library…
invite several people over to your place to make art (paint, collage, dance etc.) without talking - maybe in silence, maybe with music
cry for someone else - it doesn’t have to be in their presence - really meditate on the essence of this person, your love for them - this is not about how you would feel if you were them / stepping into their shoes shit - this is about taking in their fulness from where you’re standing and praising their existence
We have the strength to build communal spaces to meet our actual emotional somatic needs.
Love you always!!!
Veronica
