Divesting from Punishment
Returning home from my sunrise desert hike this morning with Bodhi the dog, my body-mind was calm, happy, energized. Bodhi was bounding around being silly and playful: the openness of delight and gratitude was felt in my chest as I laughed and goofed around with him. Suddenly, a haboob as if from nowhere comes blowing in, engulfing my calm, happy beingness in this wondrous nowness with screeching words of stinging punishment in my ear: Who do you think you are?! You are doomed, cursed! You’re going to fuck it all up and die alone! You have no business being so happy and peaceful, look at you, you're a disgrace! Shame on you!!
My old friend, the inner punisher. I know you so well, and yet, it’s been a while. I guess because you don’t live here anymore.
I knew the inner punisher was planning a visit because my body warned me in advance with some strategically placed inflammation. Our loyal and resilient animal-bodies have this precognitive gift, if only we knew how to pay attention to their signs instead of suppressing them with chemicals (which only make them louder/more acute.)
So, my inner punisher, I was ready for you. I should have known you’d blow in in your usual way, when I’m open and happy. Come on in, I’ll put the kettle on, tell me what’s up.
From my experience doing the work I do with humans, it seems we all have an inner punisher to varying degrees of intensity, manifesting in all sorts of ways from the mundane to the downright scary and messed up.
My inner punisher showed up early on in life. Punishment was the dominant energy in the way I was parented, from as young as I can remember. Knowing what I know now, this was also a cultural and generational thing, so it was just an uninvestigated, unconscious handing down of the same old punishment energy - the other side of which is a protective element, which sadly ended up causing more harm than good.
As a child, punishment would blow in like a stinging haboob whenever I was feeling happy, free and wild in my body and being - particularly if I displayed any semblance of enjoyment in and of myself. Eventually this inner punisher-protector inevitably became internalized into obsessive compulsive behavior from about the age of seven. I invented a strange little repetitive ritual of internally punishing myself whenever I had happy or positive thoughts about myself, to sort of push them down and punish myself ‘in advance’, before my mother did. I’d shut myself away in a room and repeat my punishing little ritual over and over again until it was exactly perfect - because if it wasn’t perfect it hadn’t ‘worked’.
(Disclaimer: my mother is no longer a punisher, having seen and acknowledged the harm done.)
No one really knew much about Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) back in the 80s. Everyone wondered what I was doing shut away in a room in silence for so long, and why I just couldn’t be ‘normal’. In the secret shame of my weirdness, I thought I was singularly crazy and broken, which just fed the inner punisher. This continued until my early twenties when from a spontaneous + ongoing process of inner inquiry, the OCD slowly ceased.
But because this inner inquiry was still just a mental process and hadn't become a fully embodied integrated thing, the inner punisher was still very much in the driver’s seat so the OCD simply shapeshifted into the numbing arms of alcohol and drug abuse (which, being England, was considered pretty ‘normal’ behavior, so I had the added bonus of feeling like I finally belonged.)
It wasn’t until I took myself away to this desert, surrendered to its wild medicine, released all the numbing agents from my life and let myself come fully face to face with the inner punisher through my body and its painful autoimmune expressions that I came to understand and relate to this punisher as not me and not mine, as something that had been internalized into colonizing my being. Meanwhile, I recognized my body’s autoimmune symptoms as an intelligent response to something that was not me and not mine that had taken up residence within.
Nowadays, when the inner punisher shows up like it did earlier, the disidentification from it creates the capacity to relate to it through the body as another being. Usually, I’m guided to an activated inner child part that requires the felt-sense of safety in the now, through the body, so that she can feel whatever she’s feeling and release it.
Relating to the inner punisher in this way each time it shows up has incrementally started to give it its own evolutionary trajectory as it gradually wakes up from its contracted state and starts to open into a different experience of itself from the alchemy of being felt and witnessed.
Why am I telling you all this?
Because our planet, the living being that is Gaia, is currently in the throes of rebirthing herself and us out of the collective field of punishment energy.
The collective field of punishment energy? Huh?
Briefly, it’s been a dominant aspect of the collective human unconscious for millennia. Nowadays, it’s most clearly apprehended in our legal & judiciary systems, in the very existence of a prison system (as opposed to say a rehabilitation and trauma-healing system), in war + genocide, in industrial agriculture and in the medical industrial complex that pathologizes the body-mind’s symptomatic expressions instead of listening to and working with them. And most alarmingly these days, in the silencing, censorship and “canceling” of the biodiversity of dissent, disagreement and difference, which is simply a not-so-well-camouflaged stowaway of the state of consciousness that carried out witch burnings.
Keep Your Cool by Marco Melgrati
As ever, we cannot effect effective change ‘out there’ until we turn towards how this energy is present within us, and plays out in our own lives, and our relationships - both with ourselves and with others.
This process of evolution is happening, with or without our involvement. If we can collaborate with it, say yes to it and not resist it by being willing to turn within and look, we will not only accelerate the process but make it less bumpy.
Shame/shaming is punishment’s weapon of choice. So a good place to start is paying attention to when shame comes up - or the need to project shame on others. When we notice this, let’s remember that shame - which doesn’t exist in Nature - also does not ever arise from our authentic, innate energies, from our true Self or soul. We might have shame living in us, but it is never Self-generating. It’s not us and not ours.
From here, go ahead and give yourself permission to disidentify from it.
Just this will liberate vast resources of creative energy that’s been bound up in chains. And in the process, you’ll unhook from and stop feeding the collective field of punishment energy.
Deepen further into this work with me 1:1. I’m now also including the Human Design system in my client work so we can really zoom in on the aspects of yourself that have been colonized by punishment + shame, and begin the unfurling of liberation from there.