Emotions and Feelings (Part Three)
In short, emotions express life force and feelings express pain. Emotions rise up from deep in your Being. Emotions and feelings are both energies. Emotions are energies of Creation, energies of the Essence that is you expressing though your earthen self, this body. Feelings arise from the psyche and are thoughts held in and expressed by the body, mostly in terms of pain and fear.
When emotions are locked down, they block life force from expression. When feelings are locked down, they block thoughts, beliefs, fears from experience and expression.
Emotions are meant to be lived, expressed, experienced as the Essence fulfilling itself through this earthen embodiment. Feelings need to be witnessed, breathed and felt in order to recognize the thoughts and beliefs behind them, in order to release them.
If you hold onto, lock in, feelings, you lock pain and fear into the body. If you hold onto, lock in, emotions, you lock life force into the body. Either way, you create tremendous tension. The body and the psyche will seek to release what is held and will grow as inventive as need be to do so.
To release emotion and its trapped life force, you must first release feelings. Pain and fear will always de-press life force, because life force cannot be controlled when free, and the function of pain and fear is control. Life force takes risks. Life force knows it cannot be destroyed and that what created it is renewing it in each moment.
The ego, which creates pain and fear, neither knows nor believes this, and the body is certainly aware of its temporary nature. Thus, fear of annihilation brings constricting control. Yet there is no real control in this. You choice is to live free and die, or to live unfree and die. No energy in all of Creation remains static and unchanged; all things grow, evolve and change. Death is only one form of change, the ever-shifting energy process of Creation.
If there is one truth about God/Goddess/Creation/Sprit…whatever name you choose…it is that “it” is in constant motion of growth, of extension, of exploration of the possibilities of Being. How could you be built with curiosity as your most foundational tool and this not reside in similar stature in the One who Creates.
Releasing feelings is perhaps easier than releasing emotion, because feelings are your own creation, and so you feel the limit of them. You fear your pain and fear because you are identified with it; you believe it to be yourself and to be protecting yourself, even when you think you do not want it. Fear to let it go exists because your pain and fear are so familiar to you and are born of beliefs instilled in you before you remember — as well as not infrequently being latent from other” lifetime” experiences; memories off the tree of life you all share, whether you are aware of them, feel them as your own, or are affected by the vast human memory of experience that is both encoded with your DNA and lives within the energy field of all humans on earth as a whole.
You might think that if you each carry feelings from the whole of humanity, then how can you be free of them? It is not a once and for all thing, this being free. It is a way of Being in the moment, moment-by-moment. Learning to free yourself of your own personal pain and fear gives you the tools and ability to process and release any pain and fear that comes to you or through you on a moment to moment basis. And it will keep coming. This too is the nature of life within humanity still.
By learning to release your own pain, you can end your own conflict. As you move through life moment to moment, clearing and processing in the moment, you offer a model. As well, you no longer contribute to pain and fear in the human energy field. And so you no longer hook into it. You will experience it, but no longer as something that gets stuck in you, no longer as something that affects or controls you, rather as a passing choppy current on the waters of your life.
How do you release feelings?
It is simple, yet challenging. Because you have held feelings at bay for so long, you have an antipathy to feeling, experiencing, knowing them. And you have developed the belief that doing so may kill you. This is a lot to face to get to the process of release. Yet any of you can do it.
First, sit quietly; learn to witness your thoughts without engagement, letting them pass like a leaf on a river – you on the bank watching, separate. Then, feel your breathing, be aware of where and how it sticks, holds. Be aware of your body. Feel your body. Become aware of where and how you hold tension. Try to harbor no judgment of yourself. You are alright, just fine, and good just as you are…with all the tension and holding of breath and muscle.
If you do not believe you are holding tension, know you are mistaken. It takes real courage to move deeply into your essence. Your self will defend mightily to convince you that all is well, you are in control, you already “have” all this. Extremely unlikely. To grow, one must be willing to release all self-belief, both positive and negative, and just Be. This is a state without control, without future, without past. None of you will fully achieve it. The body holds so much that is of time; so long as it lives you have chosen to reside within, experience and contribute to a creation that incorporates time. Memory is a function of time. This is why we say that processing feeling will never end so long as you have body and even for some time after if processing is left undone…this is one source of many wandering disembodied souls.
Accepting that you have the judgments you have of yourself, ask yourself to relax around them. Ask yourself how much you can let go of the tension you feel in your body. Do this in a specific way. Feel your face…your forehead, your eyes, your eyebrows, your ears, the line between your ears and your jaw, your jaw as it slides down you face, your cheeks, your lips, your teeth, your tongue, your throat, your voice box, you upper chest, your lower chest and ribs, your solar plexus, your belly, your shoulders, your shoulder blades, the line down the side of your neck to your arms, your upper arms, your forearms, your hands, your fingers. Be very particular.
You do not have to do your entire body with each sitting. These sittings will only last 10 – 20 minutes. If you do more than this, you will sabotage yourself, as you will move too much energy too fast, and you will kick in the body-psyches automatic defense system, which will generate shut down against your will. You can do these sits twice a day if you wish, but do not do more than 10 – 20 minutes with each sit. Focus on a few places that rise to your attention with tension. Ask yourself if you can soften a little at these places. Do not ask yourself to let go of everything.
The human body has to carry tension to reside within time and space; gravity is real and the body moves because is resists magnetic forces such as gravity. Gravity and magnetism are like the wires for the puppet. Without them, the puppet cannot move. Your body requires some tension in order to hold itself in movement. You will learn over time what this healthy level of tension feels like; it is a true relaxation to the human body.
You will feel your body take two of three spontaneous deep, releasing breaths, and you will feel a sense of energetic opening, a smile is likely to appear naturally on your face, a small sense of joy. Rest for a moment in this.
Most likely, on most days, next your mind will kick in again. Your thoughts will rise up, or memories take over. Now, rather than engaging in the story the thoughts or memories are telling, as a witness feel for the feelings behind the thoughts or memories. Perhaps you are making a list of to do’s. Are you feeling anxious…you might say to get up and on with your day…look deeper…what do you prove to yourself by your lists, your to do’s, your running around, your accomplishing? What do you protect? What defend? Your mind will give you all the “good” reasons for your running. They exist, but they are not the question now. Put them aside. What do you seek to prove to yourself…what do you seek not to feel…what do you fear if you do not do?
Behind the physical fears, beneath even the physical survival fears are much bigger fears, fears with much greater power over you. The ultimate fear is of being unworthy, of being bad, of not being good enough…of not being lovable. If you do enough, you believe, you will prove you are worthy, are lovable…and so you won’t be alone.
Allow these deepest fears, which is also great pain, to rise up in your awareness and body, breathe with it. Feel it in your body and keep breathing it, with each breath pull it into the breath and breathe it like a tide you are riding. You are not “trying” to move it out of your body. You do not need, and it is not a good idea, to do any special breaths to “make” the feeling go. Your goal is to Be with the feeling as you breath, and you do this by feeling the feelings in your body while you breath fully and deeply, allowing the feelings space within your breath. As you do this, you will feel the feelings move. Do not judge, do not jubilate, do not try. Just witness with kind attention the tide of breath and feeling as it moves through your body and energizes in movement. This brings release. Allow yourself to stay with it as long as you are able, and allow it to dissipate as is natural.
You will not get through all of any feeling in one sitting…allow the letting go when “done enough for now” to happen. Rest again in just breathing and feel the difference in your body and energy.
There are times when you will get up from this practice feeling light and happy; there are times when feelings will rise that you have not felt for many a year, and you will rise feeling dense and weighted. Both are well.
Feelings that have been long held must still be released, and that release can be incomplete on one session. It can be a shock to the psyche to have such buried feelings rise and be felt. It can leave an imprint.
As you move into and through your day, be present with that imprint, the shadow, the felt-sense of residue. It is the shape of an emptiness in your energy field and body, a space long held by pain and fear. As you accept yourself with it, accept yourself in having carried such feelings for so long, accept your own process of release, and keep feeling and breathing throughout your day, you will achieve more movement, more release and more freedom.
Coming back to this meditation day by day can be challenging as painful feelings rise to be released. With ongoing practice, your own being will come to trust you more fully, and so feelings will rise to release…and the release process will grow easier and less distressing.
Most of all, be a kind and loving witness to yourself, whatever comes up, whatever you feel. Offering yourself unconditional acceptance is the single most important offering you can make. It does not mean you do not wish growth and healing for yourself. It means you accept who you have been, all that has taken place in your life, how you have responded, reacted, dealt with, taken in, and held onto your life experience; it means you are willing to start from precisely where and who you are without hiding. Self-judgment is hiding in denial. To judge yourself is to deny yourself, for it is to separate yourself from you, as though there is a virtuous you who would never have made the mistake of the judged you, and then there is the judged you whom you refuse to accept as you. There is only one you and you are a whole. Accept all of you; only then can you heal, transform and evolve. Only in the greatest vulnerability, moment-to-moment can you experience emotion, being and becoming the Essence that you bring to this earthen life, only then are you incarnate in this creation. And this is the goal.
Emotion is life force flowing. It is the essence of Creation in you, as you, unique and of the One through the body-mind, incarnate into this creation. You are seeded essence into form in this creation. You are born of earth, part and parcel of Her Being and Body. This is the whole point of this Creation and participation in it. This is a joy and the Life. You are meant to be in communion with this earth and the whole of Creation through this earthen art form. The spark of the One enlivens this creation as the seed which enlivens the egg to gestate new life in a woman’s womb. This physical process in species is but a mirror of the creation of physicality through Creation to physical form.
To experience emotion is to feel and allow and respond to the tug of joy, of desire for that which brings you alive, awake, to a sense of inspiration and joy. It is risky. There is not control here. You must always be surfing the edge of the wave. The moment you step back into safety you are away from the surging joy. Inherent in emotion, in life force experience, is balance on the wave, openness to the next moment with no life vest. Whatever might come, you will breathe it, be with it, and let it move through you, your breathing body into life…whether by breath, by laughter, by tears, by art, by voice…you will be profoundly alive, as you are meant to be, a creation of the Creator in this earthen embodiment of exploration and experimentation.
Our Friends: Sacred Counsel 