Black Box of Emotion

I laid there curled up in a ball crying.

I was fifteen minutes into a holotropic breathwork session. A practice of continuous mouth breathing for 45 minutes.

Breathing in this way hyper-oxygenates the body, shifting the blood flow in the brain away from our prefrontal cortex, our thinking brain, to our amygdala, the place we store memories and emotions. The practice creates an altered state of consciousness that allows incomplete memories and emotions to surface.

They’re incomplete because they were beyond our nervous systems window of tolerance at the time of the experience. Unbeknown to me, failing to process these memories and emotions leads the body to perceive them as the present, creating kinks in our nervous system.

The breathwork session serves as a way to create a safe environment for the body to complete the cycle.

I entered the session in blissful ignorance. By most definitions I’ve lived a privileged life without too much trauma. Both parents are still alive, I’ve always had food on the table and experienced minimal bullying.

As I started breathing: in, out, in, out, in out, I was curious to see what emerged.

After five minutes of laying there I felt a tingle shooting up my arms. After ten minutes the urge to shake them overcame me. After fifteen I felt a space open up in my chest. A void that expanded with each breath.

With nervous excitement I kept breathing, unsure what was going to rise into this space.

In, out, in, out, in out.

A feeling shot up from deep inside me. I was taken completely by surprise but I recognised it instantly. The feeling of pure, vulnerable love. It had been four years since it last warmed my body without fear.

My breath began to feel like a shovel. Digging deep inside me looking for the source of this feeling.

In, out, in, out, in out.

Each inhalation I felt myself dig deeper. Each exhalation it felt like the hole I was digging began falling back in on itself.

My body felt desperate to reconnect with this feeling. Begging me to dig deeper and release this emotion from deep inside me.

In, out, in, out, in out.

But as I dug deeper this feeling of love was accompanied by waves of grief.

I soon found myself curled up crying. Waves of emotions overcoming me like waves on a beach. Each set stronger than the last as I dug deeper and deeper inside me.

In, out, in, out, in out.

I soon found myself sobbing “I’m sorry” between each breath.

Sorry for burying this emotion deep inside me. Sorry for creating the situation that led to its burial.

In, out, in, out, in out.

When I finally reached the bottom of the grave, a tidal wave of grief consumed every fibre of my body. I cried out, consumed by pain.

Overwhelmed, a flood gate of tears opened.

In the midst of this emotional overwhelm I flashed back to May of 2018 to a time when I was fully consumed by blissful love. I remember it was the night before my girlfriend of the time went to Europe and we were inseparable. Even to walk to the kitchen I had my arms wrapped around her waist from behind, stepping in unison.

It was a pure love without taint.

As quickly as I was reminded of this pure love, I fast forwarded to the day of the burial. December of 2018. I was in San Francisco on a two week university trip. I awoke Sunday morning and Facetimed my girlfriend. The minute she picked up I could tell something was wrong. After much coaxing it slipped out. She had slept with someone else the night before.

My heart immediately shattered into hundreds of pieces.

Consumed by grief, my rational mind kicked into overdrive. I didn’t want to break up. I loved her more than anything. Shamefully, I too had a moment of weakness the night before, kissing another girl.

My rational mind fresh with this ammunition immediately spun a narrative in an attempt to minimise my grief and self-loathing:

With this reframing I not only prevented myself from feeling any grief, but any self-loathing I had towards myself for what I’d done.

My mind became a dictator over my emotions.

Any feeling of heartbreak was quickly dismissed. Not one tear was shed. It felt as though my mind sticky-tapped the shattered pieces back together and said “look, there’s nothing wrong”.

Upon returning to Sydney, I recall being so consumed by grief while watching a concert at the Opera House I couldn’t concentrate on the show. To overcome it, I literally visualised putting the emotion into a black box and burying it deep inside me.

Little did I know that by doing so I wasn’t only burying the grief. I was burying the part of me that was able to feel the pure love that accompanied this grief.

Now here I was four years later and the grief that I neglected to feel was erupting.

Forty-five minutes later after many tears, screaming into a pillow and punching a beanbag, the breathwork session came to a close. The cycle completed.

My body felt like it had just played a game of footy. Battered and bruised.

However, within the vulnerability I possessed a new sense of peace. A peace grounded in the opening of the black box. With its opening it made clear the muffle that has been over my heart all these years.

In my post-session journal I wrote the following:

The experience has since filled me with regret for the impact it had on my most recent relationship. How it led me to reject the love of a perfect woman. I couldn’t have designed a better partner in a lab. Beautiful, intelligent, full of banter and a great source of my joy. She even loved AFL and cricket, two of my favourite sports. Despite this I was unable to find peace within the relationship. Breaking both of our hearts in the process.

The regret is complimented by sadness when reflecting on the loving memories with my family over the past few years. Kicking the footy with my siblings, hugging my parents goodnight, family meals. I now realise in those moments I didn’t fully FEEL the love that accompanied the experience. That I was numb to the emotion. In its absence, I see how I experienced a shallow facade of the emotion. How my brain played puppet master, telling me “feel happy now because this is a loving moment”.

Since the opening of the blackbox I’ve found all kinds of random negative emotions shooting up through me spontaneously throughout the day. On a recent hike, one moment I was walking along in joy, the next overwhelmed by sadness. However, rather than suppressing it, I’ve embraced it. Because as Bessel van der Folk says in ‘Body Keeps the Score’: “the greatest sources of our suffering are the lies we tell ourselves”.

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