Feel It All? ALL?? no thx

rage is my friend. rage is my friend. (this is what I keep telling myself) plus, my new album is out!

Before I wax on about rage and feeling it all, did you know I have a brand new album out? I did a kickstarter in 2022 to make this, and because of the gracious support of all the backers who participated, this album was birthed. It was quite a process. And here it is. :) I’m so so so proud of it, and thankful to have made it. To my happy shock, Be Still even made it on Spotify’s New Music Friday playlist when it came out. Would love to hear what you think, so drop me a line here if you feel so led!

(photo by Matthew Priestley)

I looked around nervously at the old wooden frame of the main gathering space at the Omega Institute. Sixty or seventy people sat in folding chairs or on blankets on the ground or, like me, on the floor around the perimeter, notebooks on bent legs and backs against the wall. That upstate NY summer was lush, green, humid, the night air thick with cricket song. Ram Dass taught at this place once. One of the smiling staff members had whispered it to me in the lunch line like a secret. This particular day, I was there listening to Nicole Sachs break open a practice she called ‘JournalSpeak.’

There’s a lot more to it (check it out at that link above) but what’s essential to know in this moment is that you’re to write stream of consciousness for twenty minutes at minimum, allowing yourself to tap into and freely express even your most forbidden or frightening thoughts or feelings.

Mmmmm. Extreme vulnerability, my favorite. My inner child folded herself up and stuffed herself into a tiny hall closet. Unfortunately for her, I know where most of her cubbyholes are at this point, so she was eventually cajoled into trying this thing out.

Twenty five minutes later, eyes stung red and raw from crying, I came up for air. If you’d have asked me at the time how I was feeling, I’ve probably have said—horrified, but also, relieved though?

Rage is a feeling I hate having. Like all feelings, it’s difficult to put into words (songwriting would have been over a long time ago if it could be perfectly done) — but I can only describe it as white-hot, searing, and terrifyingly silent. Sometimes it’s sneakily hidden itself into a grief closet, and suddenly upon going through the old clothes in there, you come upon it stuffed into an old coat pocket and you know, with horror, that it needs to be un-trapped.

I feel it the moment before I scream at the top of my lungs, when everything that is wrong inside me and outside me sucks in like the origins of life at the Big Bang and gets ready to unfurl itself at a million miles per hour in the sound of my silence-murdering shriek. We’ve probably all heard the bromide at this point that ‘the body keeps the score.’ I’ve experienced it enough times to know that it’s true for me — the emotions I repress or disown always come back to overwhelm me eventually.

This overwhelm when a feeling like rage circles back around can feel unutterably terrible, but it’s a severe mercy to express rage (or any other difficult emotion) because of the room that it creates in my emotional range when I do release it. It gives me more capacity to enjoy and express things like the bubbling over of effervescent joy I feel when my one year old son laughs at some stupid head motion I’m doing over and over, or the tiny rush of love that comes over me when I spot my partner laughing hysterically with a friend across the room. I hate feeling rage. But if I refuse to, I can’t feel the rest of it very well either. And I’m gonna feel it anyway. So I might as well shriek, I figure.

As I shared in my interview with Ruthie Lindsey last week…

There seem to be certain feelings I always struggle not to repress or disown. So, feeling it all is a challenge. I think I’m learning, though, that it’s really not possible to feel it all *at once*, which is what I think I’m always afraid of when I hear those words. Like, feel it all? ALL? Ashton, am I being punk’d? Because that sounds legit horrifying. More often it seems like I can handle feeling a few big feelings simultaneously. Then I find myself moving one step at a time through resistance or numbness or checking out, rinsing and repeating, slowly adding more depth of flavor to the soup that is my life. It’s finally occurring to me at 42 that there’s no capital m Moment coming where I finally self-actualize, when all my piles are all picked up internally and externally. I am human, and I am always going to be going through something. So if that’s true, I might as well feel it all, I guess. :) Seems like whenever I refuse to feel the bitter and hard things, I stop being able to fully taste the sugar in a watermelon, and I mean that literally. Being fully present to the cool splash of sweetness in the watermelon I’m eating, the beautifully strange dripping soft grittiness of it, requires me to be able to be present to whatever else I’m going through, too. At some point I have to ask myself, what kind of range of emotions do I want to be able to traverse with resilience? Well, I can’t get that kind of resilience without learning to tolerate feeling.'

The importance of learning to tolerate a wide range of emotions, especially the more challenging ones like rage or embarrassment or self-hatred, isn’t really a ‘feel-good’ concept. I think people hear the phrase ‘feel it all’ and might associate it solely with mermaid-haired white women wearing flowy linen garments, dancing strangely around bonfires. To me, ‘feel it all’ is guts and blood, labor and sweat—it spans the territory between the bright-eyed innocence of joy to the smoldering ruins of self-loathing and beyond.

This album is my most heartfelt and vigorous attempt at accepting and expressing that ‘the kingdom of God is within me’; that self-compassion and self-acceptance, rather than self-loathing, is the most sensible and truthful path I could ever take. The shards of myself that seem the most damaged and frustrating to me are crucial pieces of the puzzle. If I want to sink my teeth right down into the marrow-bones of life, I can’t get there any other way than being myself: so I am learning I need to accept and feel it all. All the imperfect emotions, the raw feelings, the dissonances, the resonances, the suffering and the joy. Maybe not all at once and violently like a thunderclap, but slowly and steadily, like molasses dripping shining ribbons into the cookie dough to make it deeper, richer, and more full of flavor. I want to feel it all, taste it all, see it all.

“In my back pocket is a love note with every word you wish you’d said.” - Andrea Gibson wrote this in a letter to their wife not long before their death from cancer in 2025 (watch the video too!) It hit me wildly, passionately, strangely. I felt I could have knelt in the street in awe. They were addressing Meg specifically but I heard my higher power in their words. Why would I talk to myself so scathingly, regret who I am and who I’ve been, when my Source has that love note in their back pocket? My freakiest and darkest and bitterest feelings can’t frighten whatever made me.

On Feel It All, I’ve done my very best to set all this learning and feeling in a lush and elegant sonic world that reflects its themes and emotions. Jeremi Clive, my producer and frequent co-writer, gave a massive amount of magic and mastery to the songs. The result, I hope, is a full soaking of rain for people whose inner gardens need a little water. You can hear it here.

xo,

Audrey