(Continued from Part 2)
Dealing with Emotions
Jeshua channeled by Pamela Kribbe, 2005
https://www.jeshua.net/healing/healing6.htm
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 fully 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.
This also applies to the relationship with your own emotions, your own inner child. Allowing your emotions in, naming them and making an effort to understand them, means that you truly respect and cherish your inner child. Making the shift from “outer” to “inner,” taking responsibility for the emotion, helps to create an inner child that does not want to hurt anyone else, that does not feel victimized. Strong emotions – whether anger, grief or fear – always have the component of powerlessness, i.e. the sense that you are the victim of something outside of you. What you do when you focus not on the circumstances outside of you but instead on your reaction and your pain is that you “dismiss” the outside world as the cause of your emotions. You do not care that much about what gave rise to the emotion. You completely turn inward and you say to yourself: okay, this has been my reaction and I understand why. I understand why I feel the way that I do and I am going to support myself in this.
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 self-discipline that is asked of you. At the same time, this kind of turning inward requires the highest compassion. The emotion you are honestly prepared to face as your own creation is also looked upon with gentle understanding. “You chose anger this time, didn’t you?” Compassion tells you: “Okay, I can see why and I forgive you. Perhaps when you feel my love and support more clearly you will not feel inclined to take that response next time.”
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.
The thing is that you need to allow the emotions to fully enter your consciousness. If you do not know exactly what emotions are there, you can very well start by feeling the tensions in your body. This is a gateway to the emotions. In your body it is all stored. For instance, if you feel pain or tension in the area of your stomach, you can go there with your awareness and ask what is the matter. Let the cells of your body speak to you. Or imagine that right there, a child is present. Ask the child to show you what emotion is predominant in him or her.
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.
In your society, there is much confusion about emotions. This is evident, among other things, from the amount of debate and confusion there is about how to raise your children. Children clearly are much more emotionally spontaneous than you are as adults. This creates difficulties. What if some of your moral boundaries are crossed? What if the situation gets out of hand and chaos arises? Does one have to discipline children or let them express themselves freely? Do their emotions have to be controlled or not?
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.
All the questions you have about dealing with your children also apply to yourself. How do you cope with your own emotions? Are you hard on yourself? When you feel angry or sad for some time, do you discipline yourself by saying: “Come on, get yourself together and move on”? Do you suppress the emotion? Do you feel that disciplining yourself is good and necessary? Who taught you this? Was it a parent?
Or do you go to the other side? Do you wallow in your emotion, not wanting to let go of it. This also is frequently the case. You may have felt for a long time that you were a victim of some situation outside of you, for example your upbringing, your partner or your work environment. At a certain moment, it may have been very liberating to get in touch with the anger inside you about the negative things that influenced you. Anger can enable you to break free from these influences and go your own way. However you may get so enamored with your anger that you do not want to give it up anymore. Instead of becoming a doorway, it becomes a way of living. A form of victimhood then arises which is anything but healing. It holds you back from truly standing in your own power.
It is very important to take responsibility for your own emotions and not to make absolute truths of them. When you give them the status of truths, instead of looking upon them as “explosions of misunderstanding,” you will base your actions on them and that will lead to uncentered decisions.
The same happens with children who are allowed too much emotional freedom. They run wild and become uncontrollable; they become little tyrants and that is not right. Emotional chaos is just as unpleasant for the child as it is for the parent.
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 is 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”). These are all emotions that are painful but yet, on another level, they give you something special to hold on to.
Take powerlessness or the “victim feeling.” There can be advantages to this emotional pattern. It may give you a sense of safety. It releases you from certain obligations or responsibilities. “I can’t help it, can I?” It is a dark corner you’re sitting in but it seems a safe one. The danger of identifying or “merging” with such an emotional pattern for a long time is that you lose touch with your own true freedom, your innermost divine core.
Things may have entered your life path that have justifiably provoked emotions of anger and resentment within you. This may have happened in your youth, later on or even in past lives. It is very important that you get in touch with these emotions consciously and that you become aware of the anger, sadness or any other intensely charged energy within you. But at a certain point, you need to take responsibility for your emotions, for they constitute your reactions to an outside event.
Being centered, being in a state of clarity and spiritual balance, means that you take full responsibility for all the emotions that are in you. You can then recognize the emotion of, for instance, anger within you and say at the same time: this was my reaction to certain events. I surround this reaction with understanding, but at the same time I intend to release it.
Life is ultimately not about being right; it is about being free and whole. It is very liberating to release old emotional responses that have grown into a lifestyle.
One might say that it is all about the subtle middle road between suppressing emotions and drowning in them. On both sides, you have been raised with opinions and ideals that are not in accordance with the nature of spiritual alchemy. The essence of spiritual growth is that you do not suppress anything, but at the same time you take full responsibility for it. I feel this, I choose this reaction, so I can heal it. Claiming your mastership – that is what my message is about truly.
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.
At a quiet moment, go to the feeling side of you. Let this feeling side of you tell you what needs to be clarified and cleansed within you. Trust your intuition. Work on it. Believe in yourself. You are the master of your life, the master of your unique path to love and freedom.
© Pamela Kribbe 2005
www.jeshua.net