Temporomandibular breakthroughs

Reminders are very important to me. I'm flooded often by the weather and I forget that weather passes. A love of mine reminds me, a piece of wisdom from Dialectical Behavioral Theory-- feelings have a beginning, a middle and an end. The story (Aristotelian) of a feeling needs to be left to its own telling-- I'm all too often like the CCC, trying to redirect the stream, dam it, ignore it, drown in it. 

The core of a practice of acceptance is to let the feeling-story have its beginning, middle and end. Sounds so simple! Ultimately, of course, it is-- of one piece, simple. 

I am taking hold of a practice connected with this, which is not only allowing the feeling story its life, but also telling other people the story. So much has been not just rearranged and denied in me as a result of not giving my experience room to tell itself, but also keeping it secret, private, hidden and untold. I've had a history of expressing myself and being smacked, ridiculed, shamed or ignored (perhaps the unkindest cut of all). 

Once, in 1990, I was falling in love with my acupuncturist, a Santa Fe story. But she was also helping me remember my body, in her professional practice, yet another reminder I often need (and of course, clearly setting the professional boundary that we were not going to get together). During one intense session, she started massaging the muscles around my temporomandibular joint and then began pushing my mandible out. An unbearable fiery pain and intensely sad ache consumed me. I immediately burst into sobs. She stopped and said, "You need to give yourself permission to speak freely, boldly, openly. This is a mess in here because you aren't speaking. You might be talking a lot, but you aren't speaking." 

I am getting on a gut level what she was trying to tell me, 23 years later.