Why hasn't understanding my past changed anything?

Because understanding happens in your mind, and the thing that runs your life doesn't live there. You can explain your childhood beautifully. You can name which parent did what, and roughly when the wiring was set, and connect every dot between what happened then and what you keep doing now. All of that is real, and none of it reaches the place where the pattern actually fires. That isn't a sign you did the work wrong, or that you need to understand it better. It's a sign you have gone as far as understanding goes. What comes next happens in your body, and it is smaller and slower than you would like.

I could explain everything and still struggle

Last week I listened to an interview with Geneen Roth, who has been writing about women and hunger for many years. Somewhere around the twenty-three minute mark she said her mind works like the wind. Quick, agile, fast at understanding.

Then she finished the sentence. She is able to understand things without feeling them.

I hadn't named it that way before. But since I heard her say it, I see that it is so.

I can explain a lot about my childhood. I have been able to remember what happened and connect the dots to the habits and patterns that keep me suffering. I know which parent did what, and roughly when the wiring was set.

And I was still struggling with life. Understanding what happened didn't change my experience, and it didn't change the meaning I made from it.

Me, too, if that's where you are.

Understanding is part of awareness, not all of it

This is the distinction I circled for a week before I could say it plainly.

Think about eating for a moment.

In the beginning there's no awareness at all. Something gets triggered and you find yourself eating. Trigger, then hand, then food. Nothing in between.

Then you do some work. And one day you can say it out loud. I eat to comfort myself. I eat to rebel against my mother.

That is a real gain. It is more awareness than you had.

And you will very likely keep eating when your body isn't hungry.

Understanding isn't the opposite of awareness. It's a piece of it, the piece that happens from the neck up. It arrives, it explains, it satisfies, and then it stops, well above the place where the thing is actually happening.

Werner Erhard said it in five words. Understanding is the booby prize.

A booby prize is what you get for showing up. You did the work. You get something real. It just isn't the prize.

The hijacker nobody suspects

I used to think of this as a staircase. Understanding first, feeling second.

I don't think that anymore.

It's more that the staircase has a landing halfway up that looks exactly like the top floor. Capable women stop there. We furnish it. We live in it for years, and it looks from the outside like we arrived.

The patterns I name most often are perfectionism, control, and approval seeking. But the sneakiest one in a competent woman is comprehension.

It doesn't look like avoidance. It looks like maturity. It gets applauded.

This is also why the body can keep its old settings while the mind gets wiser. The aging default is built partly out of emotion that was never actually felt, only explained. Explaining it again doesn't discharge it. It files it.

Why "just feel it" is so hard

Geneen's whole method rests on one instruction. Go into the feeling.

Later in that same conversation she described what she does when irrational fear comes up, when her husband is late getting home. She puts two fingers on her heart and takes a breath.

Then she said, candidly, that many times she forgets to do it. After all her years of her own therapy, and all the workshops she has led for other women, she still forgets her own practice.

I appreciated her honesty so much.

Feel it is easier said than done. Ask a woman who has spent fifty years living in her head much more than her heart to simply drop into her chest and stay there, and she will do what she has always done. She will understand the assignment brilliantly, and then, when the old feeling comes, forget.

So the answer can't be a better explanation of why feeling matters. You already agree. The answer has to be small enough to survive the moment when it counts.

Where to start, and why it starts there

Breathing is done in the body.

Thinking about breathing isn't breathing.

You can understand a memory. You can understand a wound, a pattern, a mother. You cannot understand a breath. You have to take one.

That's the whole reason the practice I teach opens where it does, with anchoring and then with breathing, before anything else. They are the two things your intelligence cannot do on your behalf.

Try this for the next minute.

Put both feet on the floor.

Find one thing in the room that has nothing to do with you. Light on a wall. A sound from another part of the house.

One slow breath out, a little longer than the breath in.

Then, without explaining it, notice where something in your body is tense or painful. Jaw, throat, the space just under the ribs.

Don't interpret it. Feel it.

That's it. It's smaller than you want it to be. It's also the only part of this that your intelligence can't do for you.

If your mind is racing too hard to land anywhere, the three-minute practice is a gentler doorway in.

What it looked like when I actually did it

When you have longer than a minute, there is more.

Once you've located the tension, stay with it. Bring it your care. Be curious about it. Ask it what it's trying to tell you, and then actually listen.

I worked with this over the weekend.

I had an intense pain. I stepped into it, listening, asking what it was trying to tell me. It showed me images of a past event. I felt lost and alone. I felt a deep longing to be cared for and supported.

I cried.

It was truly agonizing, and I didn't want to continue. Instead, I stayed with myself for over an hour.

I brought the love that is my true nature, what I like to call my living flame, next to the pain like an inner salve. By the time the process was complete, the pain was almost gone. The rest of it faded over the course of the day.

That is my own experience, not a promise about yours. But I'll tell you what has changed with repetition. The more I allow myself to feel these deeply painful feelings, the less my identity is tied to past pain. Every time I do this, I find my identity more in the love than in the pain.

Your mind is not the problem

It would be easy to read all of this as an accusation against your own intelligence, so let me say it plainly. Your mind is not the problem.

It thinks about things as a way of keeping you safe from your own interior experiences. It has done that job faithfully, for a long time, and it has probably done it well.

So go slowly, and go with some tenderness for how long this habit has defended you against difficult feelings.

The experience of the love of your own inner flame is always there. It is the most powerful healing force available. It waits for us to connect with it, and some of us know it by another name and trust it is held by a God who has never once misplaced us.

Understanding that you have a flame is not the same as feeling it.

Reconnection comes from feeling it and letting it revitalize you. That is the way to a radiantly alive life.

You already understand. That was never the missing piece. The next part is smaller than you want it to be, and it happens in your body.

Kristin Milan

Coach and author for women in the third act of life, holding faith and consciousness in the same hand. Master's in Social Work, degree in Psychology, HeartMath trained, and nearly five decades engaged with the science of change. She writes about outgrowing the aging default and coming home to a wholeness you already belong to. Meet Kristin