"Until we can forgive ourselves and
Love ourselves we cannot Truly Love and forgive any other human beings - including
our parents who were only doing the best they knew how. They, too,
were powerless to do anything any different - they were just reacting to
their wounds.
It is necessary to own and honor the child
who we were in order to Love the person we are. And the only way to
do that is to own that child's experiences, honor that child's feelings, and
release the emotional grief energy that we are still carrying around."
***
"We cannot learn to Love without honoring our Rage!
We cannot allow ourselves to be Truly Intimate
with ourselves or anyone else without owning our Grief.
We cannot clearly reconnect with the Light
unless we are willing to own and honor our experience of the Darkness.
We cannot fully feel the Joy unless we are
willing to feel the Sadness.
We need to do our emotional healing, to heal
our wounded souls, in order to reconnect with our Souls on the highest vibrational
levels. In order to reconnect with the God-Force that is Love and Light,
Joy and Truth."
Emotions are energy. Actual physical energy that is
manifested in our bodies. Emotions are not thoughts - they do not exist
in our mind. Our mental attitudes, definitions, and expectations can
create emotional reactions, can cause us to get stuck in emotional states
- but thoughts are not emotions. The intellectual and emotional are
two distinctly separate though intimately interconnected parts of our being.
In order to find some balance, peace, and sanity in recovery it is vitally
important to start separating the emotional from the intellectual and to
start setting boundaries with, and between, the emotional and mental parts
of our self.
Many of us learned to live in our heads. To analyze, intellectualize,
and rationalize as a defense against feeling our feelings. Some of
us went to the other extreme and lived life based on our emotional reactions
without any intellectual balance. Some of us would swing from one
extreme to the other. Living life in the extremes or swinging between
the extremes is dysfunctional - it does not work to create a balanced, healthy,
happy life.
If you learned to live life in your head it is vitally necessary
to start becoming more aware of your body and what is happening in your body
emotionally. Where is there tension, tightness? Where is the
energy manifesting in my body? I learned that when there is energy
congregating in my upper chest it was sadness. If it was around my
heart chakra it was hurt. Anger and fear manifest in my stomach.
Until I started to become aware of, and identify, the emotional energy in
my body it was impossible for me to be emotionally honest with myself.
It was impossible for me to start owning, honoring, and releasing the emotional
energy in a healthy way until I became aware that it was there.
I had to become aware that there were such things as emotions that
lived in my body and then I had to start learning how to recognize and sort
them out. I had to become aware of all the ways that I was trained to
distance myself from my feelings. I am going to mention a few of them
here to help any of you reading this in your process of becoming emotionally
honest.
Speaking in the third person. One of the defenses
many of us have against feeling our feelings is to speak of ourselves in the
third person. "You just kind of feel hurt when that happens" is not
a personal statement and does not carry the power of speaking in the first
person. "I felt hurt when that happened" is personal, is owning the
feeling. Listen to yourself and to others and become aware of how often
you hear others and yourself refer to self in the third person.
Avoiding using primary feeling words. There are only
a handful of primary feelings that all humans feel. There is some dispute
about just how many there are primary but for our purpose here I am going
to use seven. Those are: angry, sad, hurt, afraid, lonely, ashamed,
and happy. It is important to start using the primary names
of these feelings in order to own them and to stop distancing ourselves from
the feelings. To say "I am anxious" or "concerned" or "apprehensive"
is not the same as saying "I am afraid." Fear is at the root of all
those other expressions but we don't have to be so aware of our fear if
we use a word that distances us from fear. Expressions like "confused,"
"irritated," "upset," "tense," "disturbed," "melancholy," "blue," "good,"
or "bad" are not primary feeling words.
Emotions are energy that is meant to flow: E - motion = energy
in motion. Until we own it, feel it and release it, it cannot flow.
By blocking and repressing our emotions we are damming up our internal energy
and that will eventually result in some physical or mental manifestation such
as cancer or alzheimers disease or whatever.
Until we can start being emotionally honest with ourselves it is
impossible to be truly honest on any level with anybody. Until we start
becoming emotionally honest with ourselves it is impossible to know
who we Truly are. Our emotions tell us who we are and without emotional
honesty it is impossible to be True to our self because we don't know ourselves.
Of course there is a very good reason we have had to be emotionally
dishonest. It is because we are carrying around unresolved grief -
suppressed pain, terror, shame, and rage energy from our childhoods.
Until we deal with our unresolved grief and start releasing the suppressed,
pressurized emotional energy from our past it is impossible to be comfortable
in our own skins, in the moment, in an emotionally honest, age-appropriate
way. Until we become willing to take the journey to the emotional
frontier within us we cannot Truly know who we are, we cannot Truly
start to forgive and Love ourselves.