Tami Simon: Hello, friends. My name’s Tami Simon, and I’m the founder of Sounds True. I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge.
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In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Alexandra Roxo. Let me tell you a little bit about Alexandra. She’s a bestselling author, artist, teacher, and mentor focused on feminine embodiment, sacred sexuality, and spiritual transformation. She’s mentored thousands of women in embodying their full, magnificent self and seeing it as sacred and necessary medicine. Her path has taken her far and wide, making films, being featured in multiple TV appearances, including two seasons of Netflix’s hit show Too Hot to Handle. She’s also gone undercover in brothels in New York City to hear women’s stories. She’s worked in a truck stop strip club and more. With Sounds True, Alexandra Roxo wrote a book called F*ck Like a Goddess and now, a new book. It’s called Dare to Feel: The Transformational Path of the Heart. Alexandra, welcome.
Alexandra Roxo: Thank you so much for having me, Tami and the Sounds True community.
TS: Tell me a little bit about your journey and decision to write about feelings and daring to feel, moving from the topics related to embodiment and sacred sexuality here into the free flow of feelings.
AR: Well, I was thinking about this today, and it was something that was active in my own healing journey, which is looking at the healing and the awakening through the chakra system, if you’re familiar with the yogic chakras. Not everybody is. But for reference, my first book dealt with some of the, let’s say, problems or issues that can arise in the first, second, and third chakras.
And it wasn’t that I had set out to do that intentionally as my life’s work and my soul’s work and my own personal healing work. It just kind of happened like that. It’s like, “OK. I’ve got to do some karmic cleanup, some healing in my own world around security, money, home, roots, and my ancestors, and then kind of moving up into my sexuality, and then into my empowerment.”
And so those things felt really important. And my book, F*ck Like a Goddess, it felt like we have to deal with these wounds, these collective wounds around the body, around the sexuality, around our own roots and our relationship to who we are and how we feel safe in these bodies and in our worlds. And then it felt like, “Oh, now the work for me personally is in my heart.”
And that has felt like a natural flow. I didn’t plan it. My karma perhaps planned it, but maybe it’s just how it goes for a lot of people, that once you feel empowered again or once you feel like you’ve made certain steps in your own journey, then you kind of get to arrive to a new curriculum. And so this book has been about the heart. Though I do feel like a lot of emotions are sacral as well, but the emotions that I talk about in this book and the feelings and the sensations are relational. So they’re really about intimacy, how we relate to our families, to our friends, to lovers.
And so that felt like a really beautiful, deep thing for me to crunch into in the way that I teach. And so it’s transformational in the sense that the book takes you through a journey where, through my stories, you get to go on a ride into your own stories, into the places in you where you have felt things, where emotions have come between you and someone, or the lack thereof, or your avoidance or hiding from them, or you’re pretending, or all these themes that come forward in the book. And they’re all centered in the heart, how we relate heart-to-heart to each other. And so, for me, that’s been, in my life, what the next big, juicy bite into my own soul work has been.
TS: You talk about being a heart warrior. Tell me about the warriorship that has been required for you personally to fully inhabit, or the journey of fully inhabiting one’s heart for you.
AR: Yeah. And I do want to say that term “heart warrior,” I mean it metaphorically speaking. I don’t mean like an actual war. And I think that that term was inspired by people like Pema Chödrön and Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche and kind of tantric Buddhist teachings around the heart. When I think of that heart warriorship of living with a broken-open heart, I look to my own personal studies of those teachers.
It’s something that Pema Chödrön really beautifully teaches of how the path is living open, broken open, where we are feeling and we’re relating to life through this openness. And so that has inspired me. In a sense, it’s like it’s living unsafe and loving unsafe. I say that with air quotes in a way, because I also mean—I don’t mean physical safety. I mean an emotional safety or spiritual safety. When we’re open and our walls are down and our armor is down, emotionally and spiritually speaking, it feels and it can feel unsafe.
So in my own personal life, I came to some of my own edges in intimacy, be it with my family, friends, or a partner, which I talk about stories around all of that in the book, where I had to face my own edges in how my heart was opening or not and what feelings were there. Was there shame preventing me from opening and arriving into intimacy? Was there fear? Was there actually an avoidance of joy, or whatever it was, that in my own heart was a closure, was a pattern of hiding or a mask?
And because the book I write through a very artistic and spiritual lens, it’s not a psychologizing of the heart-opening experience, which that language is so common, I think, nowadays for a lot of us, “Oh, can I look at my intimacy through the lens of—.” And the brilliant work of so many people, the lens of attachment or IFS, the family systems parts work, all of that, which I love.
But this book, it demands of you to look through your stories and myths and the rich tapestry of your intimacy, and to feel like there’s nothing wrong with you. There’s nothing broken. There are things that you get to play with as your soul’s work here. And I like the word “healing,” and it’s not because there’s something wrong with us.
And so, for me, I had to do a lot of that heart healing. I had to do a lot of looking at my relationship to my parents and really having hard conversations, having moments of hard conversations with friends, looking at patterns in my intimacy in my romantic relationships, and looking at all of that as, “Is there space for more openness here? Is there something here that I can de-armor or meet at a deeper edge in myself?”
So that heart warrior work means something different, I think, for every person, but I do think we all have it. We all have the edges in our heart, the places where our little heart wings close, and we’re like, “Anything but that. Anything but that conversation, or anything but that memory.” Right? And then that, for us, is like, “Well, where can we actually meet that difficult place inside ourselves?” And so my stories are meant to help you meet your difficult places as well.
TS: OK. I’m going to ask you a kind of challenging question, and it’s because I am feeling it in the zeitgeist and particularly, I know, in our Sounds True community. Because we surveyed our membership community recently, and we said to them, “When it comes to challenges of the heart, what’s the hardest thing for you? Is it a sense of numbness? Is it a sense of helplessness? Is it heartbreak? Is it grief, rage?” It wasn’t any of those things.
What it was was overwhelm, people feeling overwhelmed. And I thought to myself, “Huh. Dare to feel, dare to feel more.” I wonder if some people are like, “Gosh, the problem is not that I need to feel more. I don’t know how to work with the overwhelming amount I’m already feeling.” So I wonder if you could just address that head-on right here at the beginning.
AR: Yeah. So this is a great question, because part of why we’re overwhelmed and feeling overwhelmed is because we are intaking so much more information that is beyond our emotional processing. So our energy is going towards trying to feel the problems of the whole world instead of turning towards our beloved people in our lives and feeling a little bit more there, and going a little bit more deep there, or saying to them, “Hey, I need you. I’m having a hard day.” Risking rejection with the people that we love.
So because we’re so open to all of the news of this whole world and we’re on our devices and we’re taking it in and taking it in and taking it in, of course we’re going to be overwhelmed. There have been studies that say that we are absolutely not biologically capable of taking all of that in. The problem is, because we’re getting flooded because of these problems that we cannot solve in our day-to-day, then we get so blown out that the intimacy that we actually crave and the love and the belonging that comes from the people that are already in our lives, then we can’t handle those moments.
And this is a problem, because the amount of connection that we can receive with the people we love by being vulnerable, by showing up, by texting, “Hey, Tami, is there any way you can hop on the phone with me? I’m having a rough day,” or “I could really use a friend.” We don’t have the capacity at times to really show up to those edges, because we’re so far out with everything that we have taken in. We’re trying to bite off these huge chunks in this world.
And I read something recently. It was like, “Instead of attempting to solve the problems of this world or to conceptualize or intellectualize or sit around and contemplate, what about if you just think about your neighborhood and the street you live on? What problems could you support solving there?” And I have a story about this in my book about a dear friend of mine who has devoted so much of her life to making her neighborhood incredible, applying for grants, getting artists of all nationality and from different backgrounds to come and beautify and do festivals, and she’s done potlucks with all these different types of bringing communities together.
And that, to me, is like, “Oh, interesting. What if we look to our families and our immediate relationships to be putting our time and energy and love there, to meet edges there? Would we feel as overwhelmed?” I personally think that the overwhelm is because of the amount of information we’re getting about the world, about politics, all of it. It is incredibly overwhelming. What happens when we turn to the relationships around us that are reciprocal, that we can be met in, instead of being tuned in to that wide expanse via all of the different news and social media, et cetera?
So I think that even though it can feel counterintuitive, like, “I need to shut down my feeling. I need to numb out,” it’s more about discernment, discerning what comes in and through you. And that is its own practice. I learned that from Lama Tsultrim in some of her retreats that I went on. There’s this red dakini, and she craves. She wants it all. She wants it all. She wants it all. And the practice is to sit and to discern what comes in and what stays out instead of being wide open, because that’s what creates overwhelm.
TS: Beautiful answer. And part of what I’m hearing, and I just want to make sure that I’m getting it as you’re meaning it, is that when we’re feeling overwhelmed, we can take the risk of reaching out for someone’s hand or voice or connection with another person or with people that live near us, and that that action, in and of itself, is tremendously healing and enables us to be present in a more genuine way.
AR: Yeah. And get the thing that we really crave usually, which is to feel seen, to feel heard, to feel like we belong. But sometimes we’re so blown out by all of the social media and the news and the this and the that and the modern to-do-list life that we lead, that we don’t even have it in us to reach out to the people we love. And so we stay in this kind of comfortably numb place.
And that, to me, that’s a spiritual illness in a way. If we’re just relating to each other from that comfortably numb place, that’s like, “Wait a minute. Where could I create more depth and intimacy? How could I create more intimacy in this moment with the people I love?” or “Am I OK with just being at this kind of, ‘I don’t have it in me’?” Right? There’s some moments where it’s totally fine with the people we love to just be a little checked out or a little discombobulated or on our phones, but that’s not a way to live a life. Right?
TS: I’m going to take a risk now, which is I had to go to the dentist today. That’s not the risk. The risk is that I’m going to share this story, because I think that’s part of what you’re pointing to when you talk about taking risks of the heart. And so, for me here, I’m going to share this little story. It was a small little thing that happened, blah, blah.
But the woman who was the assistant reached down and put her hand on my hand, which was in my lap, while this 30-minute little procedure was happening. And I felt her hand, and I was like, “Oh my God, this is so beautiful and gorgeous and helpful, and what a terrific assistant she is.” So I’m just pointing that out as just something within the course of her work that she did that made such a huge difference.
AR: That makes my belly feel warm, because it reminds me that there are humans out there that are not afraid to nurture and to love and to take a risk. Because that’s actually risky, because if you weren’t open to that kind of touch in that moment, you could have been like, “Hey, why are you doing that?” Right? Because that’s another modern kind of problem, is we’ve become so risk-averse and sometimes overly cautious about not wanting to say the wrong thing or do the wrong thing that we actually stop connecting.
So whoever that person is, Goddess bless you for not being afraid to risk, because it’s risky. It’s risky to put some skin in the game with strangers or with people we love. It’s even more risky with people we love to ask for something, to ask for a need to be met, or to do something kind of weird and playful with your beloved, and they might be like, “What are you doing?” or they might be like, their heart may just explode into a million stars because they’re so delighted that you’ve done that.
And that’s the thing. It’s like, “Are we still able to take those risks on behalf of humanity?” That’s a very human moment that happened at the dentist. But I think a lot of people are really averse to that, because it’s scary. It’s like we don’t know how someone’s going to react.
TS: Now, I’m going to ask you this question. It’s because I want to try to tease apart something that I think is a little paradoxical in what you’re describing, because we’re talking about risks of the heart. And you use this word, are we willing to be “unsafe”? And that that’s part of warriorship, is this willingness to be unsafe. And at the same time, I think so many people are seeking right now a sense of feeling safe in their nervous system. “I just want to feel safe. There’s so much uncertainty out there in the world. Things are so chaotic. I want to feel safe. And now Alexandra is recommending that I take risks and embrace unsafety.”
AR: Yeah. So here’s where we can kind of break it down. It’s like, you need to create a baseline of safety, and that’s part of the healing journey. So let’s say, I mean, I’m a person who grew up feeling chaos in my nervous system for different reasons, which I talk about in the book. So it’s taken me years to create a bit of a baseline within myself of feeling safe in my own body.
If I haven’t done any of that for myself, then yeah, I’m not going to be able to take that “unsafe risk” of opening my heart or putting my heart on the line for creating connection in my family or my community or in my relationship. And that’s where I do think that it starts with us. Right? We have to do our own solo journey work, our own contemplation, and that’s what we bring to then the relational space.
And so I imagine a lot of the Sounds True community has had some sort of personal reflection on your own journey. But if you’re new to it, you may go, “Yeah. Actually, I need to take a few years to just kind of dive into some of my own healing curriculum and material, and that’s important before I can then put my heart on the line by showing up to my neighborhood meeting and suggesting that we do a potluck,” or something like that.
So it is paradoxical. That being said, I’ve done so much nervous system work. I’ve done so much healing work, and I still have tons of moments of feeling completely unsafe. I was just in New York City doing my book launch event, and it’s loud and there’s a car coming out of nowhere, and I have my three-month-old daughter, and I’m thinking of her. And so I’m on high guard.
Those aren’t going to be the moments that I’m going to take other risks. Right? That’s going to be a moment where I’m creating a strong structure. I’m tuned in to my breath. I’m staying present in my body and physical experience. So that’s not going to be the point that I then open wider. Right? But then when I’m stabilized, I’m grounded, let’s say I’m back in my hotel room, I’m calm, I’ve breathed, dah, dah, dah, then I’m maybe having a conversation with someone I love and be able to say something like, “Ugh. You guys, I’ve got to be honest with you. I felt really scared tonight,” or whatever.
And that might feel risky to share. But now, I’m not saying that while I’m, let’s say, in the middle of a really chaotic moment. But I could also, and that’s where we are multidimensional beings. We have a spiritual self. We have a mental self. We have a physical body. So my physical body might feel unsafe, which holds my nervous system, but then emotionally, I might be feeling something different. And this is where it gets a bit more nuanced on the journey. Right?
We start to see ourselves as like, “Oh, I’m a spiritual being, and I have a mental experience, and I have an emotional experience, and I have this all happening at once.” And so it will feel paradoxical at times. It just will. I can be such a nervous—today, I was walking my daughter in a place where there’s alligators right over there, and I’m like, “Just breathe. Just breathe. Just breathe.” But then emotionally, I can take bigger risks, and artistically. But somebody else can take bigger risks, let’s say, physically.
This book is about the emotional risks and the spiritual risk, the ones we take on behalf of our deeper transformation. So those I do feel like, and those do also run parallel to our nervous system because our emotions are a part of it. So it is multilayered. And only you can decide, Tami, when is a moment in life where it’s like, “Yeah. I want to meet an edge right now. I want to meet a new edge in my intimacy. I want to be honest instead of holding it in. I want to be direct, because I’m always indirect.”
And so only you know whether it’s the right time for you to meet that edge. I always say look at your patterns. If you’re the person that is always doing A, B, C, what’s the opposite? Maybe that’s your edge. So yeah, it’s complex. It’s complex.
TS: Well, this is great, Alexandra, for Insights at the Edge. And I’m going to keep going here, because I like this multilayered approach and becoming subtle in how we’re talking about some of these things. And when it comes to the heart, I think sometimes people think of their heart in an emotional way, the emotions that are—they don’t necessarily make a distinction or understand, “Well, what’s the spiritual heart that is also tracking but is at a different dimension than the emotional heart?” And I’m wondering how you understand that.
AR: Well, I love how you just described it. You kind of almost answered it beautifully for me. But the emotions are connected to our physical body and our nervous system, and they can be a portal into that spiritual heart. And I think that there’s a lot of mystics who wrote beautifully about this, who wrote deep, emotional poetry, passionate poetry. Some spiritual paths say no to passion. “Bye-bye. We don’t want that. We want to calm the passion, and we want to calm the emotions.” Right? And then there are other spiritual paths that say, “No, let’s let the passion take us into our spiritual life.”
In a way, it could feel a bit more complex. I remember [the] great teacher Sally Kempton, who recently passed on, and I remember her—it might have been in a workshop with her, it might have been written in one of her books or her classes that I attended—but she said something like, “The tantric path is the one where we have the emotions and the sexuality, and this is all a part of our experience towards God or towards enlightenment or awakening.” And she said something like, and I’m not sure if this is verbatim, but that we needed to have meditated for quite a few years and learned to be in self-awareness before we touch those things and we use them as part of our path, because they can be tricky. It’s tricky to use your emotions as a vehicle for awakening, because what if you get caught there? What if you just spiral out into a funnel of grief? Right?
You have to have a certain amount of self-awareness and the ability to have a witness mindset at the same time. And this is where you have that sort of emotional-meets-spiritual experience, because you do need to have a moment where you’re witnessing, “Wow, I have fallen into the depths of shame. I’m [lying] on my bedroom floor crying right now. Wow, I’m very curious. I’m watching. I’m feeling.” And that’s not always possible to have that little bit of distance between us and our emotions. This takes a lot of practice.
So it’s like, that spiritual understanding is the ability to hold some sort of a witness mindset and state based on some sort of a contemplative practice, usually, that then allows us to actually stay with the feeling, because when we’re starting out on the path, we don’t have that. So we really probably shouldn’t really dive so deep into things, into our feelings, or into some of these human parts, which could kind of grab us.
There’s a reason that some spiritual paths are like, “Don’t do that.” Right? There’s too much energy there. Sexuality, emotions, you want to calm all of that. But on the path that you could call a more embodied path or a more tantric path, you’re using those emotions as a vehicle to entry into a greater understanding of your humanity, of your understanding of God, Goddess, Divine, or a Oneness, or whatever you want to call it. And it’s a practice.
Sometimes I’m just right back at square one, and I’m like, “I just totally got hijacked by my sadness, and I couldn’t keep some sort of a center there.” Right? So yeah, it’s another part of the path of the heart that is nuanced, because your just straight-up emotional human experience is meeting that greater spiritual experience.
If you can feel and experience your grief as a total portal into a spiritual state and total connect into all of humanity, it can be almost blissful, as weird as that may sound. And I know a lot of mystics and writers write about that, how an experience, say, like grief can be such an opening into and a connector to the Divine. But it’s not always like that. Right?
TS: Alexandra, can you share with me an example maybe from your own life where a difficult emotion was a portal, and put it under a magnifying glass, if you will? What happened such that it wasn’t just a circling around with the emotion and feeling terrible, but that something opened and it was a gateway to a bigger sense of being?
AR: Yeah. I mean, I think the biggest one that I’ve experienced that isn’t in the book, because it kind of came after, and there are some experiences in the book where I dealt with deep pain, sadness, loss, shame that were portals into a deeper spiritual understanding. However, the one that has got me in the last few years has been my relationship with my beloved, my love, my life partner, Eli, who we have a child together now.
And when we came together into our partnership, we really triggered each other. There was a lot that came up. And I say “trigger”; it’s kind of a colloquial term at this point. It means different things to different people. But we really created an opportunity for both of us to have a lot of shit, for lack of better words, from our past rise up, and some from our real early childhoods that I had never had rise up with anyone, which led me to believe that something in me felt safe enough to open and to feel some of the things from my early years that I had not felt, and boy, was that a whole experience.
Now, I have an incredible mentor, teacher, therapist, guide who I was working with at the time, who was helping me to see that I wasn’t drowning, because there were some moments where I felt so just terrible, terrible, just like, “What am I doing? How am I staying in this relationship when I feel this way?” And because I had a great guide, she was like, “What you’re feeling…” I’m going to say a funny kind of AA adage, even though I’ve never been in AA, but I’ve dated some AA people, which is, “If it’s hysterical, it’s historical.” Some of the AA and Al-Anon adages, they’re good. Yeah.
TS: No, it’s great. It’s very helpful. Right on. Right on.
AR: So I would say so many of my first ruptures in my relationship were hysterical. And so I knew they had to be historical. The amount of emotion that was arising in me was disproportionate to the rupture that was happening, and it made me feel like, “Wow, I must be really broken if this is happening. I must be really messed up. What’s wrong with me, that here we’re having this fight and I’m feeling so bad? I’m needing to close the door and go cry on the bathroom floor, and I want to run from this relationship,” because I had never been met with that much presence, love, kindness, all of these things. I had never been met with that. It was very discombobulating for my system.
And so I wanted to run quite a few times. And some of the emotions that came up when we did have fights were just like—there were these voices inside, “Get out of here. I knew this wasn’t going to work. I told you, Alexandra. That kind of love that you want doesn’t exist.” And so those were all the voices that were trying to “keep me safe,” because the more I opened to this person, the less safe I was emotionally.
And it was a real journey. It was almost like the first two years of our relationship, we had some of these big, big ruptures where I was like, “I don’t know if we’re going to make it through.” And I stayed with it. I stayed with it, and I’m so proud of myself that I did, because historically, I would have said, “This has gotten a little too hard, a little too crunchy, a little too heavy. I think it’s just not meant to be.” Because I had enough self-awareness to be like, “There’s something here. Stay with it,” because it was not abusive. Nothing was happening that was a real big red flag to leave the relationship, but because it was like, “This is actually for my growth.” A part of me was tracking, “This is for my healing and growth.”
And because I had a great guide. Super well-trained, amazing human who I say thank you to in the back of the book, who was—she was helping me. So there were a few times where I was just like, “Am I just dumb to stay in this suffering? I’m suffering.” She was like, “No, you’re bringing something out of your unconscious, and it’s really hard.” And it’s like that Carl Jung quote, “There is no coming to consciousness without pain,” which I hate that that’s the truth. I don’t know. Maybe it’s not true, but that’s how I’ve experienced some of these deeper things.
It’s like, the things that we’ve repressed so deeply in our soma, in our psyches, that are now a part of our unconscious, when we do the work to call them forward, whether through intimacy, through meditation, through ayahuasca, whatever it is, when it comes up, it’s a process. And some of the things I was touching around trusting love, trusting someone to be there for me, trusting someone to hold me emotionally, ooh, it was touching on some deep, deep places.
So, man, I almost didn’t make it through quite a few times. I was really wobbling in my boots, but we both did and we stayed with it, and we did some great healing work, made it to the other side, created a secure base in our relationship, which took a while, and then we made a family. And so we still have work to do, like I imagine every couple does, every good couple.
TS: Sure. Well, it’s a beautiful story, and I still want to try to, if you’re OK with this, get into the experience in the moment where you’re feeling a whole lot of—I mean, “discomfort” isn’t strong enough of a word.
AR: Yeah.
TS: I’m not quite sure what word to use.
AR: Deep, deep sorrow. Deep sorrow.
TS: Deep something-that-you-don’t-want-to-feel.
AR: Yeah.
TS: It could be sorrow. It could be rage. It could be all kinds of things.
AR: I’m saying, yeah, in my case, it was deep sorrow. Yeah, yeah.
TS: Yeah. OK. And in that moment, there’s maybe a little itty bit of awareness, but how do you make sure that that witness consciousness, as you described it, is there and that there’s that capacity versus just like, “I just feel this terrible thing”? How do you amp up that light in the moment, or is that really what you’re describing, such that it becomes a portal, an experiential portal in that moment?
The way you described the story with your beloved, the beautiful story, was that there was sort of an arc of time and you hung in there. You had someone helping you. You had an instinct that this was going somewhere. And that’s all really helpful, but I’m trying to get into that actual—
AR: Yeah. OK, OK.
TS: I’m on the bathroom floor, Alexandra.
AR: Yup. I mean, I remember being at my altar, because when I would sometimes just feel like the total everything’s crumbling around me, I would go sit at my altar. That’s kind of what I do, and just cry to God, and just be like, “Why is this happening?” And just the existential feeling’s always arising of like, “I knew it. I knew that no one could meet me, that no one could love me, that I would always be abandoned. I knew it.”
And that’s very much a parts work. That’s a younger part of me that has that voice that was coming online at the time to heal. And what I want to say is that we don’t always have the clarity, especially when a part is running the show in that moment. And so I hate to break it to people. You may have a few hours or a day where something is rising up to have a moment of healing, and that part takes over and you don’t feel clarity.
And maybe you open up a book and you read a poem by your favorite spiritual person or mystic or whatever, and you feel just a little light. Or maybe you have just enough in you to text a friend, “I’m drowning in it right now.” And they say, “I love you,” and that brings just enough of your true essence back online. But maybe not. Right?
So I like to think of it as, what are the guideposts that we put? I like to think of it as we’re in a dark cave, and we know we have to go to this dark cave in our lives sometimes. Right? The Descent of Inanna, let’s say, in the mythological sense. We have to go. What little things can we place in there to remind us of who we are when we’re in it, when we’re drowning in it? Is it sitting at the altar and lighting the candle? Is it, “Can I reach out to one person who’s going to remind me who I am, because right now, all I feel is abandoned, rejected, blah, blah, blah?” Right?
So for me, it’s knowing that. And do I always have the resource, or did I in those moments, to reach out to say that one or two people who I would allow to see me at that level of pain? No. Sometimes I didn’t. Sometimes I went to bed in just the gigantic crunch in that part inside that was just crying and crying, saying, “I knew no one would love me.”
But usually, there’s a moment where we can find just a little bit of ourself. Right? The problem is, we want to get rid of this so quickly that a lot of times, we’ll numb in a way. We’ll just get on with our life. We’ll go work out. We’ll dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. We have to function. So that then doesn’t actually get the space to heal. So when we’re ready for something to really have the space to heal, that’s when actually allowing the emotions to rise is important, in my personal understanding through all of my study.
I could, in any of those moments, just be like, “Alexandra, pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Let’s take a cold shower and get on with it.” Right? I did that for years. Does that help heal? No. Does it help us function well and perhaps regulate again? Yes. But there are these moments where we have to enter almost a ceremony with ourself, a feeling. And in those moments, in those deep ceremonies that we have, whether it’s a rupture with someone we love or a loss or something like that, what are the things in our personal practice that we’ve already established that we can turn towards? Right?
Is it sitting against a tree and breathing even when you feel that despair? Is it poetry? What is it that can just give you a little bit of a connect to yourself and a little bit of the courage to stay with it and stay curious. For me, to ask that little voice of that little girl, like, “I hear you. Wow. Wow.” Even if it’s just a little self-awareness that’s like, “Wow, I’m really in it.”
So that’s enough self-awareness, right, to be able to say to your partner, your therapist, your friend, yourself, “Wow, I’m really in it.” And that’s self-awareness. You’re witnessing yourself. Then you may go straight back to that voice that’s like, “Man, woe is me.” And you know that that’s actually not your voice, that that’s something else inside of you that is longing to be healed.
TS: In your own life, Alexandra, what has strengthened your witness consciousness?
AR: I think meditation for sure. Prayer for sure. Yeah. I think meditation and just any contemplative kind of study and work. Extreme vigilance that probably has arisen from trauma of just growing up in a household where I was really aware of the emotional experiences of people around me and really attuning to “Where are they at?” That helped me to become the healer, the coach, the teacher that I am, because I have a great capacity. It’s very much the Wounded Healer archetype, where part of your wound is the way that now you turn that into a gift.
So for me, I think I have that kind of hypervigilance turned into a gift of attunement with my own self-understanding. For other people and clients that I might see, they might not have that. So I can’t assume that, and I would say seated meditation, journaling, just self-awareness cultivation that can happen over time, which is—it’s not the sort of wild, embodied, emotional kind of practice. It’s a little bit more still practice. It’s a quieting practice. It’s regulating, which is equally important.
TS: In the beginning of Dare to Feel, you’re very clear that if you want to feel the ecstatic end of the spectrum of feelings, that you need to have this willingness to feel everything. And I wonder if you can address that person who says, “Look, let me just tell you the truth. I want to feel happy. That’s the truth. That’s the truth. That’s why I got interested in all this stuff. I mean, I know. Yeah. OK.”
AR: Right, right.
TS: “But that’s really what’s going on for me. I’m not interested in the full-spectrum approach. I just want to feel happy. Alexandra, are you just not the teacher for me, or are you saying something else here about how feeling deep ecstasy, happiness in an extreme way, the price we have to pay?”
AR: Yeah. Well, the good news is, is I think at the end of the day, when we let ourselves feel that we are actually happier people, because we’re spending so much less time trying to repress feelings, so we’re spending less time trying to hold off parts of our experience, which is really draining. So when we allow a natural feeling of sadness to wash through us like a wave, and we just feel it, we don’t brace around it, we don’t grip around it, and then it actually can move through us. We weren’t taught that as kids.
But I do think that’s a natural emotional experience and response. I have a baby, and she can feel a million things so quickly, and she doesn’t hang on. She’s sad and then she’s laughing. Right? It doesn’t seem like she’s gripping to try not to feel this and to feel more of this. So I think that we will feel happier, we will feel more joyful and blissful and regulated and strong when we also let a moment of sadness pass through us. Right? We get a text that’s upsetting or an email.
The problem is, I think, that we’re afraid that we’re going to get stuck there, because we haven’t developed the emotional resilience and intelligence to trust ourselves, to know just like if you have a cold, you know it’s going to go away. You’re not going to have a cold for the rest of your life. Right? Most common understanding.
So for some reason, we didn’t get the transmission, most of us, that, “Oh, shit. If I’m going to start feeling sad, what if it doesn’t go away?” That’s kind of a thing that—maybe it’s not a rational response that we have, but it’s somewhere in the back of our head, “I don’t want to feel that. I don’t want to get stuck there,” or when we’re sad, “When is this going to end?” Right? And that, I do think, is a cultural indoctrination of, “We got to get better fast. Pop an Advil. Get it over with. Keep calm and carry on.”
And so the depth of our experience and our ability to feel happy and good is correlative to the depth of our capacity to feel sad, and I’m not the first person to say that. I mean, I remember reading Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet when I was 20 years old, or 19, whenever someone gave it to me, and he says that the well of your grief creates a basin for your joy, something like that. I’m paraphrasing. And that is a mystical notion across time. Right?
And so when we try to stay in this really short and small kind of range of human experience, the amount of energy that we are expending to brace ourselves and be there and to numb out the other stuff, it ends up shooting us in the foot, because now we’ve wasted all this time just trying to stay happy. And it creates a mask and a persona of pretending, which I talk about in the book too. Most of us were indoctrinated into pretending, because it’s not easy to be like, “I’m unhappy. I’m sad. I don’t feel good today,” et cetera. Right? It’s not socially acceptable either, but it’s spiritually acceptable, and I would prefer that to become the norm for us at some point.
TS: When you describe your three-month-old—what’s your child’s name?
AR: Her name is Lua. Lua Rose.
TS: Lua?
AR: Lua means “moon” in Portuguese, and I’m half Brazilian.
TS: OK. Lua Rose.
AR: Yup.
TS: All right. And you describe how Lua Rose’s emotional states change. I think we’ve all seen that in infants.
AR: In children and babies. Yeah.
TS: Yeah. And then I can imagine someone reflecting on their own experience and saying, “I’ve been sad for a decade. I’ve been angry since the time I can remember.” These emotions don’t seem to be coming and going. They seem to have taken up residence. And so my question is, how do we, from your experience, become more like that type of fluid and emotionally fluent, let it flow through us?
AR: Yeah. And I’m not a clinician, and I’m not a doctor. And so, as I speak, please note that there are many exceptions and there are many experiences that I’m not speaking to directly in terms of—I mean, I grew up with someone that her experience, my mother, her experience of depression is not something that I could be glib about, “Oh, just feel your feelings.” Right? There’s a million people, if not more, who the experience of feeling sadness is a chronic state that has a lot more attached to it. And so I have compassion towards that and understanding around that.
And the practice of being in our bodies and feeling, it is a practice. It takes practice. So if you aren’t practicing feeling, crying, screaming, if when you stub your toe, you just go, “Mmm,” and you get on with it, then you’re missing a moment of practice. Right? That’s a very simplistic example. But imagine that you stub your toe and you allow yourself a human reaction, “Ow! Ooh!” Right? You’re practicing feeling.
If you’ve been numb for a long time and not allowed yourself, that might feel very strange. That might feel really embarrassing to practice that, or to let yourself cry in front of someone you love. So on a very simplistic level, am I actually feeling what’s happening in the moment, or do I have a habit of just being in this kind of, whatever the state is for somebody? Is it always grumpy? So noticing those types of things. Or is it always happy? “I’m always happy. Nothing will bother me.” Right? So that person maybe needs to practice around sadness.
I’ve had clients that I’m like, “You put on some sad music and go cry in the bathtub, and make a cry sound. If you haven’t cried in five years, go make a cry sound [CRYING SOUNDS] and see what happens after ten minutes of that.” And most of them start crying. I actually saw on this television show called Shrinking on Apple TV with Harrison Ford—he plays a therapist, and he did that with his client, and I thought, “Oh my gosh, the work I’m doing is so mainstream now,” that on this show, Harrison Ford’s character tells this girl, “Go every day, put on a sad song and cry,” because she couldn’t. She was hard. She was like a tough chick kind of vibe.
So on a simplistic level, you can practice feeling. You can practice feeling something different, and you can notice, “What is my constant habit around intimacy, around feeling? What is my habit? Could I do something new? Could I practice something new?” And that’s when we look at our life as practice, as practice of awakening, as practice towards that spiritual breadth of understanding that we all, I think, if we’re listening, we all want to be a part of. Right? We want to meet an edge.
So the angry person’s edge maybe is to laugh a bit more. Right? And maybe the sad person’s edge is to, I don’t know, dance a little bit every day and put on a happy song. And again, these practices may sound simplistic, but it is a metaphor for something greater. Right? And so we can change on the sort of physiological level, which does have then the impact in our emotional state, which then does create a shift in our projection of how we see the world.
And maybe it’s also not about just changing and just creating a state change, because that is almost, like I said several times, can be simplistic. And I’m not the first to say this. Instead of a state change, a trait change. How do we change the trait instead of just the quick state? And that requires deeper work. A lot of people don’t want to do that. A lot of people don’t want to sit and really examine, “Ooh, why do I always put on this happy face? When did that start in my life? Did someone tell me that? What’s underneath that? And can I be really curious about that and give it time?” Right?
So that is where transformational work, I do think, often takes time. And that that’s OK. That that’s totally OK. It’s about it being a practice, not just results oriented. Even though I know we all want results too, we can have both. I do think we can have both. The state change and the trait change.
TS: You mentioned, Alexandra, that Dare to Feel is really your tribute to the heart and the heart center from the chakra system, your own heart’s blossoming, flowering in your life energetically. And what I’m curious about when you think of the transformational path of the heart is what it’s like for you when I say something like “starting to see the world or experience the world through your heart,” what that’s like, that feeling, that experience.
AR: Yeah. The best example I can give is imagine you’re watching a sunrise and you’re with someone you love, and you are just so moved that tears just start dripping down your cheeks, and it’s just a moment of pure love, bliss, wonder. And that’s because your heart is so open, so available to life, so available to the painting on the sky, to how magnificent it is to be alive, to how amazing it is that you are healthy and that you’re sitting with someone you love.
So when you are on that transformational path of the heart, you’re seeing life through this felt sense. And that’s where your experience, you let it move you. You let it touch you. You let it in. And those moments that are so beautiful like that, you have the capacity to actually feel them, to actually feel your life, the beauty and the magic of that moment. Or the tragedy. And that’s when we know we’re on that transformational path of the heart, because we are letting life in to that place and state of feeling, where things are changing and shifting inside of us. And we let it, and we let that in.
And it’s not an intellectual thing. If you’re watching a child laughing and smiling or you’re watching that sunrise or whatever it is that moves you, it’s not intellectual. It’s not something you can analyze. It is a deep human experience that you’re feeling through your heart that you can if you want. And so that’s a choice. It’s like, if my heart is open and I’ve worked hard and you’ve worked hard to open it, then we get to feel our lives before we die, because we don’t know when we’re going to die, any of us.
So if we’re not feeling our lives, if we’re not in our lives, embodied, full, open, then what are we doing? And yes, it can be overwhelming at times. So we have to be discerning. And yes, it takes practice and it takes that heart warriorship. But if not now, when? And if not this, then what? Right? We have this one life. So to me, that is that path of the heart.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Alexandra Roxo. She’s the author of the new book Dare to Feel: The Transformational Path of the Heart. And if you’d like to watch Insights at the Edge on video and participate in the after-show Q&A session with our guests, come join us on Sounds True One, a new membership community featuring award-winning original shows, live classes, community learning, guided meditations, and more with the leading wisdom teachers of our time. Use promo code PODCAST to get your first month free. You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com. Sounds True: waking up the world.
