Humans, we swallow a lot. Many feelings, boundaries, needs, truths. We women especially come from histories and pasts where women had to swallow a lot to survive. Many of us have mothers, grandmothers who had to stay small and quiet.
Many of us learned early that swallowing our feelings was safer than expressing them. We learned to hold back tears, anger, needs, truths, and instincts in order to stay connected, accepted, or safe.
Swallowing interrupts the natural movement of emotion.
It is a rejection of intuition, of the body’s signals, needs, and inner knowing.
How many tears have been held in?
How much anger?
How many moments have we wished to express something, only to bite down on it from fear?
How many times have we had this gut feeling, this feeling to act or speak, yet push it down?
I know for me it’s been many times.
To simply let something vulnerable move from my lips has been a scary and tough process.
I was never taught how to move with my sadness, with my anger, my frustration, or my fear. And there have been many moments where these emotions have risen, asking for a release and expression. But I couldn’t bear to face them myself or to allow such vulnerability to show with others.
Other times, it’s been hard to simply admit the truth of something to myself. The refusal to let the reality of something sink in, for example, the gut feeling of needing to leave the relationship. Or of admitting that something actually really hurt me even though I brushed it off as nothing.
Our swallowed voices, truths, and feelings keep us stuck.
It creates distance from our intuition and inner knowing, and often, resentment.
Resentment toward the people with whom we couldn’t speak our truth, and anger at them for highlighting that incapability in us.
And anger at ourselves for staying small.
And everything we swallow doesn’t disappear. It collects in the body, in the nervous system, in the parts of ourselves we learn to hide even from ourselves.
The swallowed grief is still grief.
The pushed-down anger is still anger.
It lives there, waiting and subtly influencing.
For me, my whole healing process and journey of connecting to myself has essentially been a process of letting what I pushed down finally move through me, and practicing the art of no more swallowing.
It’s been a journey of letting the toughest of emotions move through. The emotions I tried to push away.
The grief
The pain
The anger and fear.
A journey of admitting to myself the reality of who I am and what I want for myself, and daring to choose this.
Of constantly trying my best to listen to my intuition when it points me in a certain direction.
To listen when it tells me that this person or place is not for me. And find the courage to act on it.
When I swallow less, when I speak from truth and steadiness, I find myself more present, more here, more me. And there is more space for joy, love, and celebration to also come through.
It is an ongoing life’s work.
Time and time again, meeting the parts of ourselves that learned to swallow.
Slowly building the capacity to express more clearly, more honestly, and more quickly when something does not feel right, or when something does feel right and needs to be acknowledged.
And I believe we do this work now because many of us are finally in the position where we can. We are finding language for things previous generations had to silence. We heal for our ancestors by starting to speak clearly, to own our sensitive, emotional, and beautiful selves and, through sharing our gifts, our words and wisdom, our self-expression.
For the women to come, for our daughters of the future. And for this world that suffers so much from this collective swallowing.
For ourselves, for the women before us, and for those still to come. Perhaps healing begins each time we stop swallowing what is true.
What have you been swallowing lately?
What is one thing you can admit to yourself today?
Where are you desiring to express yourself more truthfully?
If this resonates and you feel the desire to work with your own patterns of swallowing, to feel what has been held down and express more of yourself, this is the work I love to guide women through.
Feel free to reach out with questions, insights, thoughts or to explore working together!