Emotional funeral pyres?
Let me share a little vulnerability with you for a second.
Allowing the full emotional experience without suppressing it is really challenging for me sometimes.
Anyone else?
Caveat here...yes, sometimes it is necessary in environments and situations and it can keep you moving when it's needed.
.... "but coach, what's this got to do with me training in the gym bruh?!"
Let me elaborate...
There is a quote that goes something along the lines of this... Allowing yourself the full experience of an emotion is the funeral pyre of it.
Ancient Greek culture and others would hold pyres as a form of cremation where they would set a body on fire on a wooden structure at death. This would either be a funeral or a sacred sacrifice/offering to the gods. This doesn't really pertain to what we are talking about, other than the burning up/fire aspect haha, but just incase you didn't know what this funeral pyre term meant...
To tie this in here... the idea is that if we can allow an emotion, especially a negative one, to be fully experienced in our body, it is a way to ... burn it up... so to speak... a little faster. It is a way to let the emotion speak, to let it run its course and avoid trapping energy in the body or suppressing it till it bursts out at another time.
In the gym this could mean allowing yourself to feel emotions as they come. Often, in bouts of high intensity, be that suffering through a challenging endurance workout or lifting something that tests all your ability, these emotions may appear out of nowhere. Letting them out through movement, vocally, feeling into them in your body, or even a post workout walk with some tears... can be a really beneficial way to experience these emotions, rather than suppress them.
To add a little more opinion to this idea... what if trapped energy and emotion in the body had some small hand in dis-ease in the body and what if dis-ease over time contributed to other health issues that take years to develop? Of course, there are many other factors that go into this, but imagine if this one practice had some benefit at that type of level.
Take baby steps here if this feels really uncomfortable.
Lean into it if it feels really uncomfortable.
There may be something there for you... and for me.
As always, this is a transferrable skill we can learn. If we can adopt it in the gym, imagine the carry over to life outside of the gym.
Keep going.
Coach D.