Katie Rose: The Raw of ROAR

The Raw ROAR

Having had some wonderful experiences in workshops and 121 sessions this month, I wanted to share some insights I’ve gained through witnessing the roar in action.

By roaring I mean the liberation of our truthful, primal, creative voice which is often suppressed and compressed into the neat and tidy, polite voice that says ‘please may I, perhaps, maybe, could I possibly, I was just wondering if...’

It is the rawness of our roar that contains the key to both its power and its vulnerability. So the key to reclaiming our roar requires the ability to get raw with ourselves, to be able to be present to the full technicolour glory of our existence. So where does our roar get lost and how can we recover it?

Conditioning

Compounded emotions of centuries of familial, social and cultural conditioning can come to greet us when we attempt to open our voices. The intent, the willingness is there - but like a goldfish we may end up just blowing empty speech bubbles instead of saying those all important words - ‘I’m leaving’ ‘This isn’t working’ “I love you’ ‘I’m sorry’

Patriarchal concepts have defined emotions as being a ‘woman’s thing’ - which has resulted in the torture of women who were considered hysterical and the massacre of men who were told ‘big boys don’t cry’ and sent off to kill each other. Traditional forms of education teach children to compete for knowledge of facts and figures but very little about healthy self-expression. Newtonian scientific thought defined the body of the earth as something to be conquered and dissected, priveleging rational proof over intuitive, ethical or emotional responses.

Religious dualistic thought further aligns the feminine with the body and the masculine with the mind, the sword of truth. Detachment, ascension and liberation from the messiness of life becomes the goal. Self observation can of course can yield invaluable insights and changes in awareness. However we cannot observe something effectively if we are busy pretending that it does not exist. We must first allow the intensity of our emotions to be present and acknowledge that we are inextricably implicated in the rawness of life.

It is no surprise then that our ability to communicate effectively can feel immensely stunted and that our media is full of horror stories of those who have felt driven to express themselves violently. The glamorisation of gratuitous behaviour in movies reflects a distorted longing for a depth and intensity of authentic emotional expression.

Denial

Keeping us on the run from rawness is denial - which is the attempted suppression of the intense emotions we experience on the life ride. ‘This isn’t me. I cannot possibly be feeling this. It’s irrational. What would my mother/father/partner/friend think? I just need a drink/ cigarette/ bowl of icecream/ spliff/ internet surf.’ Denial is the partner that gets us dancing to the tune of addictions - which are substituted behaviours we have developed to survive the force of our most intense traumas. As such they to be treated with compassion and then offered to the fire.

Denial fuses with our conditioning to form a decision, belief, or deal we have made with ourselves in order to survive. A woman whose father beat her decides, ‘It’s men, they’re just like that’ - and finds herself in an abusive marriage. We justify behaviours based on beliefs we have formed. A man stuffs down the anger he felt with his dominating mother, tells himself ‘all women are bitches’ and punishes his partners by cheating. We stay hooked up on the same old drama, because it has become inextricably tied to our sense of identity and reality - the woman whose partner continually lets her down says - ‘I told you so, men can’t be trusted.’

Claiming the Freedom to Roar

Roaring propels us off the sofa of denial. It connects us with the explosive force of our deepest felt emotions. And that need not be externally noisy. That one tear that rolls down the cheek, that one pained smile, that one quiet admission - ‘yes she beats me every night’ - is the opening of the door to living beyond denial.

It’s raw to roar, no doubt about it. Living without our belief systems can feel very exposing - ‘Who am I if I don’t believe that all men are losers - I might have to become someone who loves men.’ ‘Who am I if I no longer believe that I am small and useless - I might have to take action and fulfil my dreams.’ ‘Who am I if I don’t talk down to women because I believe they are stupid? - I might have to give up being right about everything.’

The rewards of raw is that we get present and we get to speak authentically instead of from a conditioned script. We get to choose who we want to interact with instead of letting our programming determine our dancing partners. We get to be real and vulnerable and be someone who gives others permission to do the same. We get naked in the fire of our creativity and passion for life and are able to sing our song, paint our pictures, write our books and dance our dance. We allow ourselves to play, to explore, to make mistakes and to roar with laughter. We become connected to the raw source of power that throbs in every single cell of our body and we recover our vivaciousness, vitality and verve. We begin to welcome and make peace with the rawness of life. We ROAR!!!

Wishing you the joyous freedom to ROAR