Words: 2741
Today I got an assignment about an issue that touches us deeply and frequently in our day to day life. It is about dealing with emotions. The heart, the third eye and the crown chakra are attractive to us, because these energy centers connect us with the higher realms that are so natural to us. But the real inner breakthroughs must now occur on a lower level, in the area of the lower chakras, closer to earth. The area of the emotions is a vital area in our growth process towards freedom and wholeness. we are spiritual beings. We come from a plane of reality where the density and coarseness of earth reality was unknown to us.
To cope with this has been difficult. Throughout many lives we have tried to express our cosmic energy here on earth. And in this expression, in the channeling of our energy to earth, many deep traumas have been built up. The emotional body that you all have is rife with wounds and traumas. Of that I wish to speak today. Anyone who walks the path of inner growth knows the importance of emotions: that you should not repress them, that you have to come to terms with them in some way, that you must ultimately release them. But how it all really works is not always so clear.
I first want to make a distinction between emotions and feelings. I am not concerned here with specific terms or labels and you may call it by different names, but I want to make a distinction between emotions in the sense of energies that are essentially expressions of misunderstanding and feelings or energies that are a form of higher understanding. Feelings are our teachers, while emotions are our children. Emotions are energies that have a clear manifestation in the physical body. Emotions are reactions to things that we do not really understand. Consider what happens when we are overcome by a fit of rage.
For instance someone hurts our feelings unexpectedly and you feel yourself becoming angry. You can feel this very clearly in your body; in certain places you feel the energy go tense. This physical tension or tightening that follows the energetic shock shows there is something you do not understand. There is an energy coming toward you that you feel is unjustified. The feeling of being treated unjustly, in short the not-understanding, is vented through the emotion. The emotion is the expression of the not-understanding; it is an energetic explosion and a release.
When this happens, you are confronted with the following choice: what am I going to do with this emotion? Am I going to base my actual behaviour on it? Am I going to use this as fuel for my reactions to other people or do I let the emotion be and base my actions on something else? Before answering this question, I want to explain the nature of feelings. Emotions are essentially explosions of misunderstanding that you can clearly perceive in the body. Feelings, on the other hand, are of a different nature and are perceived differently as well. Feelings are more quiet than emotions.
They are the whispers of the soul that reach you through gentle nudges, an inner knowingness or a sudden intuitive action that later appears to have been very wise. Emotions always have something very intense and dramatic to them. Consider anxiety attacks, fear, rage or deep sadness. Emotions take hold of you completely and pull you away from your spiritual center. In the moment you are highly emotional, you are full of a kind of energy that pulls you away from your center, your inner clarity. In that sense, emotions are like clouds hovering before the sun. With this, I do not want to say anything against emotions.
Emotions should not be repressed; they are very valuable as a means to get to know yourself more intimately. But I do want to state what the nature of emotional energy is: it is an explosion of misunderstanding. Emotions essentially take you out of your center. Feelings, on the other hand, bring you deeper into yourself, into your center. Feelings are closely associated with what you call intuition. Feelings express a higher understanding, a kind of understanding that transcends both the emotions and the mind. There are many moments in which such an inner knowingness comes to you.
For instance, you may “know” something about someone without having really talked with him or her. You can sense something about the two of you that later on will play an important role in your relationship. Such things are not easy to grasp in words ‘ “simply a feeling” – and certainly not easily understood by the mind. (These are the moments in which your mind gets sceptical, telling you that you are making things up or are going crazy. Feelings originate from the dimension of your Higher or Greater Self. You need to be quiet inside to catch those whispers in your heart.
Emotions can disturb this inner silence and peace. Therefore it is vital to become emotionally calm and to heal and release repressed emotions. Only from your feeling which connects you to your soul can you make balanced decisions. By being quiet and peaceful, you can feel with all of your being what is right for you at a certain moment. Making decisions based on emotions is making decisions from a non-centered position. You need to release the emotions first and get in touch with your inner core where there is clarity. HOW CAN WE BEST DEAL WITH OUR EMOTION?
I said that “feelings are your teachers and emotions are your children. ” The parallels between “being emotional” and “being like a child” are striking. Your “inner child” is the seat of your emotions. Also there is a striking resemblance between the way you deal with your own emotions and the way you deal with real children. Children are honest and spontaneous in their emotions and they do not hide or repress them until adults encourage them to do so. The fact that children spontaneously express their emotions does not however mean that children experience their emotions in a balanced way.
Everyone knows that children can be carried away by their emotions (rage, fear or sadness) and are often unable to put a stop to them. In such a situation, the child can almost drown in their emotions and that makes them unbalanced, i. e. out-of-center. One of the reasons for this unbounded emotionality is that the child has only recently left a world in which there are hardly any boundaries. In the ethereal or astral dimensions, there were no such restrictions and limitations as there are in the physical realm, within the physical body. The child’s emotions are often “reactions of misunderstanding” to this physical reality.
Therefore when he or she grows up, the child needs help and support in dealing with their emotions. This is part of the process of “balanced incarnating” on earth. So how do you deal with emotions, whether in yourself or in your children? Emotions should not be judged or repressed. Emotions are a vital part of you as a human being and as such they need to be respected and accepted. You can look upon your emotions as your children who need your attention and respect and your guidance. An emotion can best be viewed as an energy that comes to you for healing.
Therefore it is important to not be completely swept away by the emotion, but to remain able to look at it from a neutral stance. It is important to stay conscious. One might put it like this; you should not repress an emotion, but you should not drown in it either. For when you drown in it, when you identify with it completely, the child in you becomes a tyrant that will lead you astray. The most important thing you can do with an emotion is to allow it in, to feel all aspects of it while not losing your consciousness. Take for instance anger. You can invite anger to be ully present, experiencing it in your body at several places, while you are at the same time neutrally observing it. Such a type of consciousness is healing. What happens in this instance is that you embrace the emotion, which is essentially a form of misunderstanding, with understanding. This is spiritual alchemy. Let me explain with the help of an example. Your child has bumped her knee on the table and it really hurts. She is upset, screaming with pain and she kicks the table because she is angry with it. She considers the table to be the source of her pain.
Emotional guidance at this moment means that the parent first helps the child name her experience. “You are angry, aren’t you ‘ you are in pain, right? ” Naming it is essential. You transfer the root of the problem from the table to the child herself. “It’s not in the table, it is you who are hurt, it is you who is angry. And yes, I understand your emotion! ” The parent embraces the emotion of the child with understanding, with love. The moment the child feels understood and recognized, her anger will gradually fade away. The physical pain may still be present.
But her resistance to the pain, the anger around it, can dissolve. The child reads compassion and understanding in your eyes, and this relaxes and soothes her emotions. The table, the cause of the emotions, is not relevant anymore. In embracing an emotion with understanding and compassion, you shift the focus of the child’s attention from outside to inside, and you teach the child to take responsibility for the emotion. You are showing her that her reaction to an outside trigger is not a given, but that it is a matter of choice. You can choose misunderstanding or understanding.
You can choose to fight or to accept. You can choose. Turning toward your emotions in such a loving manner is liberating. It does require a kind of self-discipline. Releasing outside reality as the “source of the evil” and taking full responsibility yourself means that you acknowledge that “you choose to react a certain way. ” You stop arguing about who is right and who is wrong, who is to blame for what and you simply release the whole chain of events that happened outside of your control. “I now experience this emotion in the full awareness that I choose to do so. ” That is taking responsibility.
That is courage! The self-discipline in this is that you give up on being righteous and on being the helpless victim. You give up on feeling angry, misunderstood and all the other expressions of victimhood that can feel quite good at some times. (Truly, you often cherish the emotions that bug you the most). Taking responsibility is an act of humbleness. It means being honest with yourself, even at your weakest moment. This is the true role of consciousness in self-healing. This is what spiritual alchemy means. Consciousness does not fight or reject anything; it encircles darkness with awareness.
It encircles the energies of misunderstanding with understanding and thus transforms ordinary metal into gold. Consciousness and love are essentially the same. Being conscious means letting something be and surrounding it with your love and compassion. Often you think that “consciousness alone” is not enough to overcome your emotional problems. You say: I know I have repressed emotions, I know the cause of it, I am aware but it does not go away. In that case, there is a subtle resistance within you to that emotion. You keep the emotion at a distance, from fear of being overwhelmed by it.
But you are never overwhelmed by an emotion when you consciously choose to allow it. As long as you keep the emotion at a distance, you are at war with it. You are fighting the emotion and it will turn against you in several ways. You cannot keep it outside in the end. It will manifest itself in your body as an ache or tension or as a feeling of depression. Feeling down or weary frequently is a clear sign that you are repressing certain emotions. There are several ways to connect with your emotions. It is vital to realize that the energy that got stuck in the emotion wants to move.
This energy wants to be released and therefore it knocks at your door as a physical complaint or as a feeling of stress or depression. For you it is a matter of really opening up and being prepared to feel the emotion. Emotions are part of your earthly reality ‘ but they should not get a hold over you. Emotions are like clouds for the sun. Therefore it is so important to be aware of your emotions and to deal with them consciously. From a clear and balanced emotional body, it is much easier to contact your soul or inner core through your intuition.
What is important in a child’s upbringing is that they learn to understand their emotions, to understand where they come from and to take responsibility for them. With your help, the child can learn to see their emotions as “explosions of misunderstanding. ” This understanding prevents your child from “drowning” in their emotions and going out of control. Understanding liberates and brings you back to your own center without repressing the emotions. The parent teaches their child to deal with emotions in this way by being the living example of it.
In short you can either be too strict or too lenient in dealing with your emotions (and, by analogy, with your children). I want to go a little more into the “lenient” way, for that seems to be more of an issue nowadays. Since the sixties there has been a collective realization that it will not do to suppress your emotions, for then you are stifling your spontaneity and creativity, indeed your very soul. Society will produce disciplined and obedient children who care more for rules than the whispers of the heart and that are a tragedy ‘ for society as well as the individual.
But what about that other extreme: what about justifying emotions in such a way that they take over and rule your life? You can very well observe inside you whether there are emotions that you cherish in such a way that you regard them as truth instead of what they really are: explosions of misunderstanding. These are emotions you have identified with. The paradox is that often enough, these are emotions that cause you much suffering. For instance: powerlessness (“I cannot help it”), control (“I’ll handle it”), anger (“it’s their fault”) or grief (“life is miserable”). Perhaps it is not really a middle road, but a different road.
It is all about spiritual mastership. In accepting all there is within you, you rise above it and become its master. Mastership is both strong and gentle. It is very allowing and yet it takes great discipline: the discipline of courage and honesty. Claim your mastership, become the master of the emotional bits and pieces that torment you, often behind your back. Get in touch with them, take responsibility. Don’t let yourself be driven by unconscious emotional hurts that sidetrack you and block your road to inner freedom. It is your consciousness that heals. No one else can restore the power over your own emotions for you.
There are no external instruments or means to take away those emotions. It is in becoming aware of them with strength, determination and compassion that they are released into the Light. Becoming whole and free on the emotional level is one of the most important aspects of growing spiritually. I want to finish by saying: do not make it more difficult than it is. The spiritual path is a simple path. It is about love for yourself and inner clarity. It does not require any specific knowledge or any specific rituals, rules or methods. All things you need for your spiritual growth are within you.