You Aren’t a Bad Person, You Are Just Full

The capacity to be kind is the capacity to be present, the capacity to love is the amount of space you have in your nervous system.

Foster peace, and you will foster love.

I know that sometimes when you try to listen to someone’s suffering you cannot take it in, it’s like water sloughing off your surface, unable to penetrate. The words feel flat, meaningless, you can’t connect them to the human heart underneath who is in pain. I know you can’t say the right things because of this, or allow someone to feel truly held, that when you take them in your arms your own need to be held dominates, which is often suppressed, and so you hold your body with stiff tension, close but somehow still far.

This lack of empathy makes you feel broken somehow, like you aren’t capable of love. You may seek out addictions, distractions, to be able to cope, to numb yourself not only to the terrors you’re facing in your daily life, but to the shame and guilt around feeling so stunted, bad at connecting, and in your deregulated state you are unable to be responsible for those you love. You are just too full up, too disconnected. This is how too-fullness manifests, the mire of your problems and stresses keeps your attention focused on yourself, your eyes become difficult to lift towards another because like a gravity the chaos inside your heart is dominating, consciously or not, your gaze. The human organism cannot lose its capacity to love, only bury it. The question isn’t “am I capable of love?” but “how much stuff do I have going on?”.

Listening requires stillness and calm, a sort of spacious emptiness that can allow the words and feelings of another to be breathed in, aerated, touched by the felt sense. If your space is full of worries, stresses, undealt with traumas, the words of another will bounce around on the surface. They cannot reach your centre if you have no space for them, and the centre is where all meaning lies.

This is what it means “to be in your heart”, “to be in your centre”, it means you have put down all distractions and met the accrued tension in your system, and felt it, allowed it to release, or even just to start releasing. It means you have made a clearing, let go of the constant stimulation as a coping mechanism, the striving to be elsewhere, elsething, and met yourself, so now you can meet others, and now you can meet life, the trees, the breeze, and feel how close you are to it all. Start with you. This is the least selfish thing you can do.

Start with a breath. I will, too.