The Emotional Body

I've been thinking about Joe Paterno a lot lately.  I haven't followed football in a while (Though I do love the Pack) and I really don't know much about the man or his career.  But I do know this: He died today at the age of 85 from lung cancer.

Before I go any further, let me say I want to send love and light and peace to his family.  It's hard to lose someone you love.   I also want to send blessings to Joe on his travels back to the other side of the veil.

Now I want to really touch on why I've been thinking of Joe Paterno.  In 2002, a graduate student told Mr. Paterno that he had seen Mr. Sandusky, an employee of Mr. Paterno, assulting a boy in the locker room.  A lot of news has touched on this subject, and people are still trying to figure out what happened.  One thing is certain, though - Joe knew what was going on, and he didn't communicate it very well.  He didn't call the police.  He reported it to his superiors, and nothing was ever done about it.  So, effectively, Joe swallowed this incident and lived in silence.

I'm not writing to criticize Joe.  I'm not really wanting to touch on the tragedy of the abuse or the scandal that followed.  What I do want to examine is this:  Joe, a man who saw something he never really communicated, lives for at least 8 more years with that knowledge.  The story comes out, he is fired from his job, he is diagnosed with lung cancer and dies.

From the shamanic perspective, if there is something that happens with the lungs or throat, it should be asked "What is not being said?"  I am a strong, strong believer that there are emotional roots to illness, and I wonder if Mr. Paterno's sudden decline into lung cancer has relation to some of the things he stuffed up in his life.

Now, I can't really say that I know anything about Joe Paterno.  Maybe his family has a pre-disposition for cancer.  Maybe he was a smoker.  Maybe... maybe... maybe... there are a lot of maybes, and I want to be very clear and say I do not mean to presume to know what Joe and his family have been through. But what I am going to take from this, what I do know (as mentioned above), is that emotion that is held on to, attached to, stuffed and never processed causes real physical pain.

I'm dealing with it in my own life.  Growing up with an alcoholic parent, I learned to stuff my feelings and never express them lest they be attacked or invalidated.  It was easier not to communicate than risk communicating and have what I was feeling completely ignored, or even worse to be punished for my words.  I was a fighter, for sure, and yelled and screamed, but I remember that there came a point where I realized that, if I just shut up and stopped talking, eventually, the yelling and anger and conflict would go away. So I stuffed everything, and didn't communicate, and learned not to "show my hand".  I kept my mouth shut.

Now, years of blocked emotion are working up to the surface.  Even now, as I write these statements, I feel tightening in my neck and jaw.  I didn't know then that those feelings could cause such physical pain, but now I know and am dealing with many, many years of not speaking, not using my voice, not saying what I needed. It's quite the process, and there are many layers, and for me I am grateful for what I have learned about my emotions and my body.

But I think of Joe Paterno, and wonder - did he have the same difficulty that I do, just in a different way.  I think of him, and remember the emotional roots to my own physical pain, and wonder.  In a way I'm grateful to him for teaching me a little more about the emotional body and the physical connections - from my own personal perspective I see him as an example of this.


My intention - after all, this is the "Manifestation Station" - is to take what I'm learning about my emotional body and clear all the crap.  To give myself love and balance, to parent all of my inner children and inner selves, and continue on growing and loving in this amazing, marvelous, beautiful world.  I think of the lotus flower - beautiful and bright, an amazing flower growing in mud and muck and dirt.  You'd think that would be enough - that it would be amazing all on it's own. We often assume mud and muck and dirt are negative - but when you think about all the life contained there, I think the lotus is even more amazing - to transform one type of brilliant, luminous life into something completely different and just as luminous - wow, that's really amazing.

In the end, I guess it goes back to the wave.  Or even the water.  Often, when thinking of emotion I think of water. This is consistent with the Dagara way of thinking; water can handle the depths of emotion.  When thinking of water, and emotion, and attachment/non-attachment, I also think of the Tao.  Especially this:

'The highest form of goodness is like water
water knows how to benefit all things without striving with them'

This quote from the Tao reminds me to live in the ebb and flow of it all.  To ride that universal wave.