This week on Medium I wrote about a night I did not drown my partner in my disappointment. A call I had wanted did not happen the way I had pictured it. I felt the size of the feeling. I did not make him feel it with me.
What I did not say in the essay, because the essay was about men and the bigger picture I write about on that platform, was where I put the feeling instead.
I put it in my body. I held it there. I let it be exactly as big as it was, and I asked it what it was actually about. I didn’t always know how to do that.
This is the move I want to talk to you about. Once a month on Substack I offer my paid subscribers a practice similar to the ones available in my $27 memberships. It’s a somatic meditation that can create fast change in your life! Scroll down if you are subscriber for the recording.
We live in a culture that treats disappointment like an ending.
A thing to solve, or to numb, or to text our way out of, or to spin into a story about what someone else did wrong. We have religious frames for avoiding it. Energetic frames for avoiding it. Cultural frames for avoiding it.
Some of us pick fights with our partners specifically so we do not have to feel disappointed in them.
It feels safer to be in an active conflict than to be disappointed.
It is not safer. It is just more engaging.
The reason disappointment is hard is that it is information about what you wanted but didn’t get.
It is information about your desire. Most of us were taught somewhere along the way that wanting something is dangerous, embarrassing, selfish, or naive. So when the wanting shows up in the body as disappointment, we route around it.
But underneath every disappointment is a desire that did not get met.
Just like underneath every flash of jealousy is a desire to be adored, to be enough, to be chosen without comparison.
Underneath every wave of anger is a desire for things to be restored.
Even revenge, if you go far enough underneath it, is usually a desire for things to be put into balance or as my shamanic teacher’s call it “right relationship".
There is no human feeling, if you sit with it long enough, that is not information about something you want.
So the practice is this:
The next time you feel really disappointed, before you text the person who caused it, before you pull away, before you write a brilliant therapy story about what they did, before you call someone to ratify your version, see if you can do something different.
Find it in the body. Breathe into where it lives. Move what wants to move. Make a sound if a sound wants to come out. It might sound weird but just let the body know you are not going to abandon the feeling this time. Let your brain know that you are not under attack.
Then ask the disappointment what desire it is information about.
Desire is not a list. It is a feeling in the body. It does not arrive with an agenda. It just arrives. Some of my favorite teacher’s would say desire is assigned to you. You aren’t really the author of it, you are just the receiver. I deeply resonate with that idea.
Sit with the answer.
The most powerful way to communicate disappointment is to communicate desire.
When you communicate disappointment, the person on the other side hears blame. When you communicate desire, with your body, your words, your energy, the world around you reorganizes.
I am not promising you will get the thing you wanted. Sometimes embodied disappointment does initiate an ending. I am promising you will know what you wanted, and that the knowing changes you, which changes everything around you.
This is the practice underneath the essay. It is the practice I keep coming back to when I cannot find another way through. Find the link below.
