The Somatics of Self-Possession
We tend to think of composure as a kind of control. The Cambridge Dictionary defines self-possessed as “calm and in control of your emotions at all times.” I’d like to suggest a different meaning of the word, or perhaps a way one can exude a deeper quality of self-possession, a calm and unperturbed equilibrium that comes from holding our emotions with attention and care instead of controlling them. I believe the fight – the resistance, the internal tension and anxiety – we feel often comes from pushing away our experience as it is. At least, this was true for me.
In my early twenties, anxiety and worst-case-scenario thinking were a daily constant. Eventually I stopped pushing my fear and anxiety away and learned instead to hold them with curiosity and compassion, the way you might hold a child, or a rock from a stream that you treasure for its unique shape. Only then did I find a deep calm that abides beneath the ups and downs of my life. I’ve found that when we turn toward the parts of ourselves we don’t want to see or acknowledge and learn to sit with them gently, true self-possession can arise. It’s a process, like building a new muscle. It can start with spending just three seconds noting the sensory quality of anxiety’s tension, as it moves through your body and before you act on it, when you get a new assignment at work or receive criticism from your partner. From there, you can begin to listen for what it has to tell you.
It helps to look at the word’s paronyms. To be possessed means to be influenced or dominated by some supernatural, perhaps demonic, entity, or more simply to be controlled by the sway or force of another. It can also mean to be driven by obsession or strong emotion, consumed by a passion, mania, or intense feeling. To be dispossessed means to be deprived of a home, land, property, or basic rights. I’ve come to think of the body as our first home. Every emotion arrives there first as sensation, and every moment of our lives is lived from inside it. Self-possession, then, means both belonging to and living within ourselves. When we are possessed, something else claims us, and when we are dispossessed, we are no longer at home in ourselves.
I believe the spiritual path to actualization is really a path back to wholeness or to inhabiting one’s self. Often, as a way of surviving in the world and coping with the challenging experiences across our lives, we merge into the other, get lost in the swirl of our own emotions, or leave ourselves completely.
Maybe you had an angry parent, and it served you to be closely attuned to their emotions, to know what kept them happy or made them sad. Maybe you believed the only way to connect with them was to share in their experience, so you subtly took on their way of seeing the world. Maybe their anger or the shame you felt in response was so overwhelming that your system couldn’t process it, and it was left swirling in your body. Or, to endure it, you learned to vacate yourself, if only for a time – to lock the door and daydream about being somewhere else, or to turn up the TV and spend the next thirty minutes with the characters inside the gray box instead of in your own life. Merging with another and being swept up in our emotions are both kinds of possession. Vacating is a kind of dispossession. In each case, we displace ourselves to survive, and later must rediscover the ground of our being.
Today a client told me about a situation that was bringing up a fear of potential rejection in them. When they meditated and journaled with this feeling, though, they realized that the fear, which felt like dread sitting in their body, was actually a desire for connection, something deeply important to them. By sitting with the fear, choosing to become more intimate with it, and asking what it wanted to express, they were able to see it in a new light and come into a deeper relationship with it that allowed the fear to reveal itself in a different form. This process of inviting an emotion or sensation in and treating it with curiosity doesn’t mean becoming the emotion. It means recognizing that the ground of your being can receive it and make space for it. It means being the container that can hold the totality of your experience.
As they spoke, I took them in and thought, I see a calm confidence in you. “You feel more self-possessed,” I said. By this I meant that they seemed connected to themselves in a way that felt both settled and strong. They said they could feel it too and that a shift had been percolating in them, a steady groundedness emerging from this practice of moving toward and being present to their sensory experience.
At the end of the session, I asked if they wanted to anchor anything from our time together. They said they imagined themselves as a tree, an image from a session several months earlier. Back then, the tree had felt sickly in places, with roots that weren’t receiving nourishment. Now the tree had deep, stable roots, able to hold itself up with grounded strength. This is my new definition of self-possession.
