Becoming RAW: a Radically Alive Woman

“This lights me up.”

How many times have I said this during my 5+ decades of life, in reference to so many kinds of things?

More than I can probably remember.

What I didn’t realize about this experience of “being lit up” until I was reflecting recently, is that there are as many varieties of ways to be “lit up” as there would have been Christmas trees worldwide during every December of the 5+ decades of my life. It is not an on or off thing. It’s not a Ben and Jerry’s 49 flavours thing. Variety is the many spices of life.

Going with the Christmas tree analogy, there are many qualities/colours of light, and parts of a tree can be lit while other parts remain dark; this makes for a myriad of patterns of Tree-lighting.

To take the metaphor even further, the tree lights can have a variety of sizes and shapes and lumens of brightness. And where are they plugged in ?And what ‘ornaments’ exist between the lights?

Coming Radically Alive as a Woman, I have discovered I have many patterns of lighting up. I have many parts of myself that can come alive — and sometimes, they go dark again. Sometimes other things get in the way.

I can go dark…dead. Dark…numb. Dark…fake.

Coming alive has given me more awareness about the ways that parts of me have been dead, deadened, numb and alive in pretend or wonky ways.

When it comes to parts, an example comes to mind.

During experiments about using feelings consciously to come alive, I sensed parts of my physical body that I didn’t remember sensing before. I noticed, for example, the vertebrae of my spine more distinctly after an experiment called Spine Rage Club, during which I relocated Fear and Sadness from my vertebrae into surrounding nerve and soft tissues, making sure that Anger was the only Feeling residing in the bones and Joy in the cells of my bones. I moved the sadness into the discs between the bones, and my fear into the spinal cords.

I had never before had such distinct clarity about my physical back parts. It was as if they had hitherto been rumours, and were now part of my actual experienced reality.

It was not that my spine had been dead, but it certainly had not been so distinctly alive.

Consciously feeling has been hugely consequential in this process of coming radically alive as a woman.

It “really” began about 3 years ago when I participated in my first Rage Club. At the time I thought that I would not learn anything particularly new. I had already become intimately familiar with my anger, I thought. I was already using it consciously, I thought.

And it isn’t that I wasn’t.

It was that I simply had no idea — nor experience — how much MORE intimately familiar I could yet become, and how much more there was to discover about anger. There was much more to learn about how I could use it. I did not yet appreciate so much the difference between theoretical understanding and the consequences of experience-based learning, certainly not as this pertained to anger.

In the first two hours alone several assumptions were dismantled:

I assumed that raging would make me tired.

I also assumed that if it didn’t make me tired, raging would rev me up so that I’d have trouble sleeping.

I discovered that consciously raging lit me up, and that sleeping afterward was no problem.

Further into my adventure of Conscious Feeling I moved into the experimental territory of Fear. This was similar and totally different. Similarly, I discovered that Fear also lights me up, but where anger is akin to fire, warm and quick to turn up with intention, fear is more sporadic, electric, and requires something more than intention; a patient, persistent setting-up.

Sadness is again entirely different, it creates aliveness differently. Sadness lights me up by activating gravity, liquifying me, and then opening the way for anger to rise from deeper down.

These descriptions are my own, and I will not be surprised if others would describe the process of coming alive using feelings differently, or if after a few more experiments I have new and different descriptions about how it can happen.

These describe the way that feelings bring aliveness, but another thing I have discovered about coming alive is about how it is that parts of me went dead in the first place.

What I discovered, simply put, is that feelings that led to my becoming — by choice — dead, in parts of myself.

When feelings happened during my childhood, and no one was present or present enough to complete my feelings by reflecting them back to me, I often, time after time, buried and numbed the feelings.

In time I developed many strategies to turn parts of myself off in order to keep from feeling the layers of incomplete feelings. I numbed pain upon pain upon pain.

At times when numbness started to come unnumb, the pain of it was more than I could hold or bear alone. Without someone to skillfully hold space, be with me, coach me about how to let the feelings and dead parts come alive, I went back to being numb.

I found more ways to keep from feeling what was in me to feel.

As I avoided feeling, I avoided healing and I avoided the rawness of coming alive again.

It reminds me of a playground game that came around during my elementary school years.

Someone would hold out two fingers and say, “squeeze my fingers as hard as you can!”

Someone always did. The person having their fingers squeezed would say, “harder!” and then start counting, “One….two….three…keep squeezing!…four…five…six…” until something like 10 or 20, and then: “Okay, now stop squeezing but do not open your hand…”. And they would slide their fingers free while the squeezer’s hand remained in a loose fist.

Then the person with the squeezed fingers would lightly tickle the squeezers fingers and hand…often counting again, “one….two….three…” or using magical sounding words like, “aaaaaabaracadaaaaabara, I am casting a spell on your muscles, they will be weeeeak as a baaaaaby’s…!”

The with a flourish, the counter/spell-caster would say, “NOW…slowly try to open your hand!”

And the hand would seem frozen at first, immobilized. The person would try harder to open the fingers and it would hurt like crazy!

Another example of how the pain of coming alive again can feel comes from my experiences playing in Canadian winter-scapes; skiing, ice-skating, ice-fishing. My toes would many times get cold. Sometimes so cold that I could hardly feel them. When they would warm up again, often in a heated car on the way home, it hurt!

I remember whimpering from having cold feet after a day on a frozen lake, only to end up screaming in the car on the way home as they warmed.

It hurts to come alive, to come unfrozen, unnumb.

I think this is why many people avoid doing it.

So why do it? Because the consequences of coming alive are worth the pain.

Worth becoming light-able-up like a Christmas tree with five strings of lights rather than one, shining with higher luminosity, and greater variety of colour.

To feel the tingle of life coursing through my physical body, and the ever-changing inner orchestra of feeling playing within, bringing energy and information for me to create with, is worth the pain of coming unnumb.

It has been sobering to discover how dead I have been in various parts of myself: in my Physical and Emotional Bodies as I have described, as well as in my Energetic Body and Archetypal Body. What are those? I will leave those for another article and turn to the Mental Body.

The ways I have been dead in my Mental Body have most often seemed like “liveliness.” Thinking has been one of the ways I kept my Emotional Body in dead patterns. Eating ‘Mind Candy’, thoughts that are tasty, gave me the semblance of lighting up the mind. Mind Candy is delicious for the Mind, and widely available. Twitter/X, YouTube, Podbean…so many sources for tasty Mind Candy. So what is there that is more alivening for the mind?

Some things I have so far discovered about that are:

Information that emerges from my newly alivened feelings is more satisfying than ideas I regurgitate after hearing or reading them, spinning them and weaving them maybe in new ways, so much like candy; sweet, tasty, but without substance.

My mind relishes in working on problems that exist as consequences of the world that partially alive humanity has originated, and in inventing/designing new ways to empower people to come alive. These mental foods turn out to nourish my Mental Body. Some Mind Candy for desert? Sure.

Back to what I assumed when I first went to Rage Club: another assumption was that there was not so much more aliveness to experience than I had already experienced.

Since then I have discovered how radically dead I had become. Numb, frozen, desensitized.

I have been coming more radically alive, and there is far to go.

Physically, Mentally, Emotionally…and Energetically and Archetypally coming alive is radical and raw, and the doorways that lead to it can often be, at first, painful place to go.

Those doorways also lead to spaces where the company can be at times hard to take; real, honest and clear. It can touch on those numb parts and start bringing them in to painful re-activation.

The people who inhabit such spaces can hold space for my pain. They are familiar with how it goes and what it takes to navigate through the layers that I have stored away in my Emotional Body, and in my Physical tissues.

With those mixtures unmixed, with those feelings replaced into the resonant tissues where they belong, my Bodies move more freely, and sense more acutely. Realms of possibility open up.

In those realms may we meet to joyfully tackle the problems wrought by humanity.