Embodied Resentment

December 1, 2009 by  

Graphic credit: ©2008-2009 ~smoweeks via DeviantArt

Graphic credit: ©2008-2009 ~smoweeks via DeviantArt

When I work with people to help them better respond to change, I find there’s zero tolerance or willingness to examine old, embodied resentments and the problems they cause. I’ve learned to distinguish these from the usual, garden-variety resentments, the lingering, angry thoughts and feelings about people or unwanted experiences that provoke, harm or result in suffering. Resentful thought forms that impede personal, professional and organizational growth and development, can be resolved when people are willing to separate and examine facts, thinking and feelings.

Embodied resentments are older, even ancient and always subconscious. They seem to come out of nowhere. You can just be driving along in the sunshine and listening to your favorite music and suddenly you realize that you’ve been fixated for an hour on some old grudge that you were sure you were finished with long ago. You find yourself in a moody funk darkened by obsessive negative thinking, anxiety and a sense of hopelessness. We all know what it feels like to be in the “grip” of the black heart and what it feels like to be around others in its grasp. Its not hard to envision the impact on organizational culture when embodied, contagious resentments surface and get fueled by the rumor and gossip mill.

The desire, of course, is to stop or at least alleviate the accompanying suffering. The challenge is knowing how to work with our own and others’ resentments that are deeply hidden from awareness. When the memories and beliefs are blocked from your mind yet embodied in your cells, how can you examine what you don’t know you know? We’re taught about the pitfalls of the default responses like resistance, denial, distraction, avoidance, numbing and pretense. Those pitfalls include prolonging and intensifying the suffering and contaminating others by projecting it onto, and acting it out against, people you live or work with.

A better response is a friendly curiosity about embodied resentment: where does it come from, when does it show up and what does it want of us? It may be showing up on an anniversary or holiday, or at a place we’ve been before, or in a challenging circumstance similar to a past one we’ve already experienced. Like a disturbing dream, disturbing resentment can be a pointer to something we need to learn to keep moving forward and evolving; or it can be a lead to help us solve a seemingly intractable problem or help us make a seemingly impossible personal or business decision.

It may seem like a stretch that the grip of the black heart and its attendant misery and suffering is a good thing. If so, it may be valuable to at least be willing to accept that its a helluva effective way to stop us and get our attention. What we do with it is our choice.

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Filed under: alignment, counter-direction, disruption, intuition, self-awareness
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