Touching What Feels Like Annihilation
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A student shares the overwhelming weight of collective and personal trauma, the fear of feeling what seems unbearable, and the unexpected peace that can arise from meeting that pain directly.
Touching What Feels Like Annihilation
A student shares the overwhelming weight of collective and personal trauma, the fear of feeling what seems unbearable, and the unexpected peace that can arise from meeting that pain directly.
My feeling is that this is collective trauma. There is such a massive amount of trauma and pain in the Jewish collective. Two things come up for me. One is that if it feels like complete annihilation, it's because that's what it was. And I want to say: you don't have to hold that alone. As much as you do have to face your own feelings, it's also possible to have somebody be with you while you touch that powerlessness and heartbreak, whether one-on-one or in a small group.
The other thing I want to say is this: when you're in the deepest contact you can manage with the pain, write it out. Write what it made you feel and what you wanted to be different. Then put it away. Read it a week later and look for what your expectations were. It's powerfully effective at showing you where you've formed identity.
I did this around my own trauma. You write it out: "I felt small," or "I felt hatred and revenge." When I wrote mine, it had this really strong theme throughout, like "I feel forgotten, unwanted." Yours might be totally different. But write how it felt for you, what you were wanting to be different, and then put it away for a week so you forget what you wrote. When you go back and read it, look for what your expectations were. It will show you how you've crystallized an identity. It's a really powerful technique for seeing the particular kind of deep structure identity you've created.
It's so heartbreaking.
It really is horrible.
I think so much. I resist. And I don't know what to do or how to be.
You be exactly what you need to be. I understand your sense of helplessness and powerlessness. What we need to learn is to touch those places that we feel we can't.
I feel so much resistance in myself.
And that's okay. The resistance itself is something you can touch and learn from.
That's good to know.
The resistance and what lies beneath it
Do you know what you feel resistant to?
To feel what I fear will annihilate me.
This process, what you're doing right now, is like the alchemist turning lead into gold. It's under that pressure and that burn. That's why they use the metaphor of lead and gold.
It almost feels tangible, the resistance being that lead.
It's a direct, raw sensation. It's hard.
And it's striking how it comes in waves sometimes. I come from a Jewish family, and it's one thing when you read about it in history books, when you hear about it. But when you feel it in your bones, it's very hard to explain.
It probably is in our bones. I relate to it in different ways.
I feel like this has also highlighted something for me, something that may have felt more subtle before but has now come to the surface: a fear of being Jewish. And then I think about what that means in terms of identity, how I identify with whatever this is. It's a hard place to be in, because there is a fear of being hated so much, and also a feeling of not wanting to be part of something that's causing other people pain.
You have a beautiful heart.
Thank you. Why does it feel like it's not enough?
When feeling goes beyond the personal
That's just part of the powerlessness. We are powerless as individuals. But the consciousness that we are, when we feel so deeply, it is not just you who is feeling. And what you're doing sends a ripple effect.
I don't even know what I'm doing.
You are being honest. Your heart is open, you're vulnerable, you're feeling.
This almost highlights for me how afraid I am to die.
And meeting that fear is what can free you. Sorrow is felt by going into it, all of it.
It's strange, but I feel so peaceful now.
Beautiful. It doesn't take much to just deepen. We often just lose the direction. That depth is always available, and it's not far. You'll probably need a lot of time and space for cycling through this in a similar way. Some of it is going to feel very personal and some is going to feel more collective, because there isn't a divide between the personal and the collective. Some is personal trauma, personal, genetic, familial, and then collective. We can hold all of it.
Thank you for being so vulnerable.
Thank you.
Please feel free to reach out later if you wish. Be gentle. With tenderness, give yourself room, space, time. Some music. Explore just feeling, letting everything come up. Dance with it, or lie down, or breathe.