When I started my teaching profession as a preservice teacher in 2013 I didn’t know how I would cope through my moon cycles once I started teaching full time. I mean, teachers barely get time for quick pee breaks. So I decided to get a Nexplanon birth control implanted in my arm. I went without my moon cycles for the entirety of my teaching career and decided to get it removed in 2020. It was physically and spiritually excruciating to become reacquainted with my moon cycles. But in this year and a half of remembering my moon cycle flow, I have learned that my moon time is such a powerful time for intentional introspection and healing. My womb brings up random unprocessed emotions to be felt, honored, released, healed, and integrated. So this past moon cycle a lot of sadness and sorrow came up because my Roses babies were on my heart. Rage was on my heart. My babies’ rage was on my heart. I hella wept for them.
I struggled so much in the classroom because I had no idea I was an empath. This year out of the classroom has revealed to me that I am a spiritual, emotional, and physical empath. These are my superpowers and my divine gifts that I never knew how to use or regulate. This means I can literally feel people’s emotional, spiritual, and at times their bodily sensations within my own body. This has been a thing since I was a child and since I had no idea that what I might be feeling may actually belong to someone else, I always thought and assumed those feelings were mine. This shit is exhausting and overwhelming on the regular now imagine how taxing it was when I was engaging with 20-30 babies a day. And especially babies that had gone through or were in the midst of extreme trauma. The reason I was chronically exhausted and fatigued when I was a full time teacher was because my body was feeling and experiencing the sorrow, fear, anxiety, depression, hunger, and neglect that my babies were experiencing on the regular.
I remember enjoying math when I was a kid because it was linear and logical and it gave my brain a distraction from the emotions it didn’t know how to process or cope with. And so I enjoyed the distraction that math also offered my students. I saw so many of them enjoy the moments of success they could feel through math. However, when math got more challenging that’s when I’d see a lot more of their trauma responses erupt. They’d start to feel unsuccessful, like a failure, then they’d go down this shame spiral. And shame is one of the hardest sensations to sit with and physically tolerate - so this would then turn into eruptions of anger and deep rage. I’d notice some students pick fights with others - this was a way to distract from the uncomfortable emotions and sensations coming up in their bodies.
Emotions are energy in motion and that uncomfortable energy needs to be transferred somewhere else or to someone else. Unfortunately, this energy transfer would need to happen so quickly it often erupted into physical violence and my other babies were the targets for these violent eruptions. Truth is, most schools, classrooms, and teachers just don’t have the physical, emotional, or energetic capacity to radically meet the needs of our most vulnerable students. I wish we could teach our students that violence isn’t inherently bad - that that animalistic urge/instinct to fuck shit up isn’t bad - it’s fucking human. When we’ve been deeply hurt of course we’re going to want to retaliate and fuck shit up. But I wish we could teach our babies that letting that energy - that rage - onto other living beings will not make anyone feel better. I wish that every classroom could have about 3 (maybe even 4 or 5) sound-proof rage rooms. How fucking amazing would it be to allow our babies - even ourselves! - to physically and somatically release their rage - break some shit, slash, punch, and kick some shit the instant that rage arises?! Here’s a rage room aftermath challenge: What art can you create with all the broken shit you fucked up? A literal artistic repurposing of your rage/pain.
And if our babies had access to this practice of supervised and guided emotional release and regulation that early on and consistently throughout their youth?! Damn. I mean so many of us are carrying decades of repressed rage. I really see so much potential for healing with rage rooms in classrooms. Schools need to make space for rage as the sacred teacher that it truly is.
Rage is fire and that energy needs to burn. After the heat, comes the rain. Tears then cool off the last few burning embers. And then we need to be held either physically, emotionally, or spiritually. Children need to know and FEEL they are loved, cared for, safe, seen, held, and not alone in their most difficult, uncomfortable, and vulnerable emotions.
I feel like rage rooms would be a more practical and useful priority to meet the needs of our babies than meeting any academic standards or curriculum benchmarks. Rage rooms would offer teachings and learnings that would serve and last a lifetime. We can’t learn and internalize academic shit if we have trauma physically stuck in our bodies anyways. I really wish we could just let our babies and our teachers live. Just live. Fuck colonial school systems and all their expectations. Expectations are the antithesis to healing.
Who cares if you learn or master a certain standard by a certain grade or benchmark? We are all on our own personal timelines. I mean aren’t most of us - right now exactly where we’re at - trying to unlearn comparison - trying to unlearn that we have to be a certain way or accomplish certain things by a certain age or life stage? So why do we impose those same societal expectations on our babies?