Episode 220 - How to Feel Less Numb
When seeking more aliveness, expression, and embodiment, it's normal to meet numbness along the way.
But what if, rather than a barrier to feeling, numbness itself is a feeling?
What if rather than a detour, feeling anything - including numbness, is actually a destination?
What if you could become so versed in the subtleties of your own body, you became a sommelier of your own sensations?
In this episode you'll discover how to:
Meet numbness as a feeling, rather than trying to force it away
Use a practice called “layer by layer” to gently explore sensation
Expand your sensational vocabulary
Question your preferences around “good” and “bad” body sensation, without invalidating your experience
Find the difference between protective fear and the fear of moving beyond the familiar
Stay embodied in conflict and redirect your life force from freeze into flow
Let's become more intimately acquainted with the full spectrum of sensation, and all the power and pleasure that lives inside of it.
LINKS FROM THE SHOW
✨ Download Mary's free Sensational Vocabulary Guide
🌙 Check out The School of Embodied Arts Coaching Certification
💫 Watch the layer-by-layer method in action on Mary's Instagram
-
How to Feel Less Numb
Hello beautiful beings, and welcome to today's episode on how to feel less numb. So. What I find paradoxical. About that statement is that numbness is something that describes the absence of feeling. And yet what language we're putting around this experience is how to feel less numb, indicating that numbness itself actually is a feeling. And so in today's episode, I am going to share some gems with you on how to be a Somalia of sensation. So if you've ever watched a Somali at work, you see a process of inhaling the scent of a wine, examining the body of a wine, and bringing words to those flavors that the everyday wine drinker might not think to use because they have a certain depth of experience that is potentially in some ways wired in. They may have a higher sensory sensitivity or synesthesia, but also because they have become really intimate with the object of their affection, which is wine.
And similarly, embodiment practices allow us to become Somalia's of sensation when it comes to our own bodies. And so with that, let us now dive into our gems on how to feel less numb and feel more alive, more expressed, and have more access to the life force that yearns to express itself through you as you in this temple we call the body. So our first gem was loosely referred to in the beginning, which is that numbness is a feeling. And so I invite you to drop that awareness into your own body right now. And when you feel numb, maybe there's a part of you that feels numb right now. How would you describe that feeling? And so I'm going to pause there for a moment. In my own body. Some words that come are dull, empty and absence. And this first gem is a method that I use with myself all the time and with clients. And it's called layer by layer. So in embodiment. Right. So I'm a certified feminine embodiment coach. I've worked in the field of embodiment in different dimensions for over 20 years, and I've been professionally guiding people through embodiment for over ten years.
And if there is one thing that I know to be true, it is that one of the biggest blocks to the sensation and aliveness that we call embodiment. Is disagreement with how the body naturally feels. And one of the things that inspired this episode is currently, there's a lot of headlines out right now about Cornell University and about trigger warning on the use of the R word here. Rape culture and what rape culture runs on, in my opinion, is disembodied, and it is disagreement with our body's natural signals. And numbness is a natural signal when there is a range of feeling that is either unsafe to feel or unsupported to feel. So, for example, you may have grown up in a home that didn't show anger, and if you showed anger, you were met with disapproval, or maybe you were ignored or neglected. And so that pathway of healthy anger never got established, and you learned how to turn down the volume to almost nothing on your anger. And now, later in life, that lack of access to the volume might come out in explosive volume as it tries to set itself free. Or you might notice. That volume stays low despite your desire to increase it in healthy ways, but still expresses itself through things like insomnia and anxiety and self-criticism and depression. If you've had experiences, who hasn't? Where your pleasure is shamed, you may have unconsciously made the decision, oh, we're going to crank the volume down on that one.
And so even though you might want pleasure and you want sensuality in your life when you move towards it, or when you have an experience that quote unquote should feel pleasurable, all you feel is numb. And in my experience, both personally and with working with client and I, I'm very careful to say my experience because everyone's experience and everyone's inroad to embodiment is different. And so just like everything else here on the podcast, I invite you to hold this information and hold these tools up to the light of your own experience, because what works for me and in my coaching practice might not be what works for you. And I invite you to try this practice on to see if it does. So this practice is called layer by layer. And essentially, rather than trying to feel the full breath of a feeling we are taking, like the skin on the top of a pot of boiled milk, and we are just lifting one layer at a time and giving exquisite attention to just that one layer.
So I recently did a video about this on Instagram. I'll pop that link in the show notes if you'd like to see me demonstrate it. But essentially what we're doing is we're meeting the numbness with an experience of validation. And validation gives the numbness permission to relax, not with the agenda of okay, good, it's relaxed. Now we can get to the real work. You know, that's kind of the. Elevator of personal growth. Like, let's hurry up and get this numbness over with so we can get to real resolution. But the feeling of the full spectrum of your sensational sensitivity as the destination, including your capacity to feel and look at and absorb all the gorgeous prisms of the numbness that your body presents. And to give an example of this, I was at an event this weekend to Sensual Somatic Event, and there was a moment where the facilitator asked for like word popcorn. Like, let's go around the room and share some of the sensations that you're feeling.
And words were shared like relaxed and stay pleasurable. And then I called out numb. Because I had an experience that caused my body to shut down. And as soon as I spoke that word out, it was like a magic spell and my whole body relaxed because I no longer carried the tension of agenda for how I should be feeling. And something that really helped is when I said that the room went mhm. Wouldn't you feel like you hear a lot in somatic spaces. Mhm. Yeah. Um and that was really helpful to not be met with pity, to not be met with concern but to be met with. Oh thanks for sharing that. I see you in that. And so that's our first jam. Is honoring numbness as a valid experience and placing it on the altar as a valid expression of your body's aliveness. Layer by layer by layer.
The next gem speaks to that language of Somalia, of the senses, for Somalia, of sensation. And it is expanding your sensational vocabulary. And I actually have a PDF around this that you can download for free. It's actually probably my most downloaded opt in that I've ever created, and you can grab it through the link in the show notes below the episode, or at Mary Löfgren sensation. And to demonstrate the power of this tool. I want to use the example of color. So when you were really, really little. And you were first learning the names of different colors. You may have seen a box of crayons and thought an entire section was all blue. But then as you grew and as you grew in your awareness around color, you saw that there was turquoise blue and there was azure blue, and there was Syrian blue and ultramarine blue and Prussian blue. And my favorite periwinkle. When I was a kid, I remember I had the periwinkle crayon, and I loved it so fiercely that I wouldn't use it. And then one day on the school bus, I was sitting with my friend and we were coloring, and I said, you can use every crayon, but this one.
And she was a little rebel. She took crayon right out of my hand and started coloring with and. Still hold on to resentment about that. So these different names give us different expressions for the nuance of color. And similarly, language can help us land on the nuance of sensation. So let's say, for example, you might have some pain in your belly. And some words to be used to describe that might be sharp or pointy. Which is very different from a bellyache that is achy and heavy. It might feel burning and tingly. And all of these are words that can fit under the umbrella of a painful experience. So you say I'm experiencing pain or discomfort. Let's study and taste and touch and smell the nuance of that experience. And paradoxically, every one of those words can also be used to describe a pleasurable experience. Have you ever felt a pleasure that almost aches? Have you ever felt a pleasure that tingles so much it's almost burning? Have you ever felt a pleasure that lands you in your body. To where your body feels so pleasurably heavy. Like a ripe fig that bends the branch? And that brings me to our next and our final gem, which is questioning preference. So when we say feeling less numb, what we're really saying is feeling less of this experience we call numbness and more of an experience of full feeling and connection.
And I find that this requires a willingness to surf along the full spectrum of sensation. And one of my embodiment mentors, Jenna Ward, which is where I did my feminine embodiment coaching training at the School of Embodied Arts. Highly endorse the school, put a link to them in the show notes I've worked for and with the school before on their teaching team. It is a stellar somatic program. Can it recommend it enough? But Jenna talks about this spectrum of sensation not as being pain or pleasure. And not as being good or bad, but as welcome and unwelcome. Because, as we just saw in the previous example, sensation in a way, is somewhat neutral. But what impacts our experience of the sensation is how we perceive it. And I want to be really mindful here that I am not saying that if you feel pain from something, someone outside of you told you shouldn't be painful or isn't painful, that you're imagining it, or that there's something wrong with you. You know, I think about the gaslighting and the racism and the misogyny and sexism when it comes to pain threshold in the medical industrial complex and the minimizing of our own individual experience of pain from those in authority. And I want to be really clear that this tool is a tool that can help you deepen your experience of embodied sensation to kind of suspend or question preference around sensation, but should not be used by you or anyone else to deny or invalidate your experience.
Questioning preference simply speaks to that spectrum of sensation. And the way that we might even be able to get a little pleasure from things that are painful. So, for example, this weekend I did something brave, and before I did it, I felt both excited and very uncomfortable, and I felt my mouth going dry. I felt my throat closing up a little bit. I felt my heart beating. And these are all sensations that set off alarm bells in my mind of like, danger. Danger. Something's wrong. Turn around. Do not do this. But I know from being a sommelier of my own sensations that there is a difference between the kind of fear that is genuine protection from a harmful situation, and the kind of fear that is trying to keep me safe by keeping me in the known, even if what's in the known isn't serving me.
A good example about this too, is my own work around unraveling and dismantling my own internalized racism and unconscious bias. It's really freaking uncomfortable, and my white privilege and white fragility steps in to keep me protected and keep whiteness protected, because it's a system from which I benefit. And so when I feel the nausea that comes up as I confront these parts of myself and the dissociation that happens across my eyes when I'm called out on it, I am slowly learning and slowly growing my willingness to perceive those sensations as something good and welcome, because it means energy is moving inside of me, rather than a reason to fight back, to stay protected or run away. And so going back to that tool of sensational vocabulary, when I went to do this thing that felt brave to me this weekend, I had an experience where I got super activated. And in that moment, I felt it in my throat. I felt my mouth going dry, I felt my heart racing, and I felt this phenomenon that happens for me, which I called cream cheese face, where my bond impulse takes over and I smile and I make sure my eyes are really warm, so nobody has any frickin idea that I'm freaking out.
You know, it's like basically pulling the curtains around myself so that you won't see what's happening inside of me. And when I slowed down and gave myself the opportunity to kind of bring on that witness consciousness and suspend those preferences and those ideas about what is good and what is bad for my body to feel. I could see like, oh, my mouth, it's just dry. And my throat. It's just squeezing and my face, it's just weirdly soft and tense at the same time. And what that does is it personalizes what's happening in the body, because what my mind wants to do with that information is you're a loser. You're too fragile. You're imagining this. Why can't you be more assertive? Why are you such a pleaser? Are you ever going to learn how to value truth more than being nice? You know, these are the words of my internalized critic who is there to also keep me safe. Because if I dare accept and celebrate green space, then what defenses are we left with? And this brings me to my fourth and final gem.
Wasn't planning on sharing this one, but let's toss it into the basket, which is that you get to say I feel numb and I'm shutting down. I remember one time being in a conflict with a friend, and I could feel I that my sommelier kicked in and said, oh, it's happening. My face feels like a sinkhole and it's caving in and I feel like I'm immobilized and I'm a gazelle being chased by a hungry lion. And you know, in that moment, what my brain said is, think of something to say, you idiot. You're mad at her, you know you're mad at her. Why can't you vocalize? And I couldn't vocalize because I couldn't access my truth. Because my body was literally caving in. So what I said to her instead was, can we pause? I want to hear every single word you're saying. It's important to me. It matters to me. And I notice my capacity is shutting down a little bit. And to make more space, I need to stretch my body. And then I'm going to sit right back down and listen to you and share my own experience and my own truth. And I do this all the time. When I'm public speaking or when I'm teaching is I notice that.
The motor of my mouth starts moving faster than my brain and my body. And like my friend Mo says, the karaoke ball is bouncing three words ahead of where the karaoke track is. And so I'll just say, you know what? I need to slow down. Let me pause. Close my eyes. Place my hand on my heart. And just give myself a moment for that ball to reconnect to the right. Lyrics. And I do this not just because I need to, but also because I want to normalize. Slowing down, pausing, allowing things to align so that expression can be authentic. Which is just another way of saying who I am. Below my protective mechanisms. And so, my friends, my hope and prayer is that this episode helps liberate some of the life force that dwells inside of you that may currently be very wisely residing in what feels like absence spaces, so that you may know yourself more intimately and you may be more intimately known by your people and by this world. If you enjoyed this episode,
I would love to hear from you in a five star review, either on the I Always Want to Say iTunes Apple Podcast app. If that's where you listen to your podcast, you can comment on Spotify. It means the world to me to receive your reviews, and also helps keep this podcast moving through the world, and makes it possible for me to keep podcasting and sharing this free content with you. So thank you for listening today. Sending love to all your life parts and all your parts in equal measure, and I will see you in our next episode.