THE POWER OF BEING WITNESSED IN THE MESS

It’s Tuesday afternoon, and I am flying home from Santa Fe, NM after a week outside of my day-to-day matrix in Baltimore. My body feels light and airy. It was a week of purging weighty story after story of personal history during a Transformational Speaking intensive hosted by the OG of public speaking herself, Gail Larsen. She has coached powerhouses such as Gabby Bernstein, Marie Forleo, Danielle LaPorte and Suzy Batiz to name a few. Gail aka the "Midwife of the Soul" professes, “If you want to change the world, tell a better story.” It was such an honor to be her student for four days.

The thought of speaking in person was intimidating and messy. I struggled to pierce the protective fortress my computer provided for the past year, and I now have to wear pants again.  
As someone who, for a living, provides a container for people to honor their most powerful and powerless selves, I still get nervous-excited to jump into someone else's container. My inner “performer” emerges as a guard from my inner basement of emotions. 

I look around the room and see five other wildly talented women ranging in age from thirty-four to seventy-nine. The amount of life that has been lived in this room is awe inspiring. As we dive into our stories, the tears and laughter flow like the Mississippi River. 

Prior to our arrival, I received devastating family news, and as a true stoic, I tried to dissociate from the reality back home. Instead, I attempt to cling to the present moment. It did not work. As the days progressed, a range of emotions intensified within my body.  Feelings of rage, anger and past traumatic memories came to the surface that had yet to be healed. I was unable to have compassion for my family’s current circumstances as the triggering took me back to every unhealed emotion that resonates with the present. As I live a life without most of my old numbing agents, my mind takes me into a tailspin of confused thoughts. I splatter my guts in front of an intimate audience and yet there is an internal emergency brake shutting down my voice. I couldn’t tell if the stories I was telling were inspired by the past or the present because so much of my history was repeating itself. I shut down internally and felt like I was retraumatizing myself. 

My natural ability to communicate faded as the days passed. Gail confronted me compassionately when I struggled to tell a story.  It was challenging to stay in my body, but I promised myself that I would not abandon my little girl. I was unsure of what to ask for, but I needed something badly. Gail was able to perceive what I couldn’t as I tried to tidy up after a workshop exercise, and she reached out to wrap her arms around me. The power of human touch soothed my soul as I relaxed my body into hers. I was baffled at how all I needed was a hug and couldn’t come to that conclusion myself. My unconscious emotional deprivation was present and alive. 

I continued to show up each day and let the imperfect, raw, and confused version of myself show up fully exposed. Luckily, I was not alone and every high achiever in the room was also coming up against their own insecurity and perfectionism.

“You all are the messiest group I’ve taught to date,” wailed Gail as we laughed hysterically together after a full day of deep transformational medicine work. 

The baby lion cub was outgrowing her small cage as the Lioness of God emerged. I questioned the deep voice calling within me and wondered if it would be easier to stay small and quiet. But I kept going and continued to surrender to the unraveling.  

In this weekend of guided instruction, my greatest lesson was the power of sisterhood and the value of being witnessed while I fought with myself internally. To have other women witness my most authentic self and feel completely cherished in my humanness.  Gail taught us to listen to our souls and let our bodies guide us as we channel spirit through our stories. We are here with our own unique medicine to bring to the world and holy hell are we powerful. 

Within my weakness there was strength and within tears there was so much laughter. When we shine our lights in the basement of our deepest emotions, a treasure chest awaits.  

For this soul initiation, my heart directed me straight through the pain of my story so that I could get to a place of neutrality. This was so different from my default, which was hanging on to it as a control mechanism until it took me down.

Four days of intense mirroring through Gail Larsen’s Transformational Speaking intensive will bring anyone to their knees in the best way. I entered a new portal of awareness within myself and created more freedom and wild abandon in my speaking abilities. World watch out, I’ve got a story to tell. 

Edited by Patrick Shannon