Sometimes I worry about what would happen if I’m suddenly radiating love, if I’m joyful and filled with delight. If I am free.
For what is the aftermath of joy? Doesn’t everything have to be up and down, up and down? The balancing, the teeter-totter, the beam upon the fulcrum. If there is joy, there will be an equal and opposite sorrow. Freedom followed by more chains.
I may have an opportunity for joy. If the emotional release work I just came across, The Emotion Code, is successful, I might find myself suddenly without the anchor of ancient grief, old tears, disappointments and angers. These things that have been ballast in the bottom of my belly for my entire life, it seems.
And then what? Then what?
Does the pendulum swing back? Do I quickly accrue more wounds in the normal course of life, start a new collection of ballast rocks to anchor me into the sadness, the drudgery, the gray continuum of plodding along through life?
What’s the point of releasing and releasing when I always seem to end up in the doldrums as my perpetual default mode?
*****
I didn’t become aware of The Emotion Code until a week ago. During a reading with Dr. Peebles, in the course of answering my perennial “hip pain question,” he flat-out told me that I needed to address trapped or stuck emotions in order to alleviate the pain.
He also noted, “From our perspective, 99 percent of what occurs with the physical body, with all humans, that you would call pain or suffering, is first and foremost emotional.”
Now that was something that I didn’t want to hear. I doubt if there is a single reader of our Golden Age of Gaia blog who has neglected to do some in-depth emotional healing work, and I’m no exception.
Although many professional healers say it’s like peeling an onion and there’s always more layers, after decades of intermittently addressing the causes of my emotional pain, I was quite done with it all, thank you. I’m not interested in getting to the center of the onion.
But I can only assume that body, colluding with soul, had other plans. Let’s give her a couple years’ worth of pain so she has to keep digging and digging to find out why it’s there and only then allow her to eradicate it.
Sometimes I think body and soul are quite cruel to the fragile human bubble which they cohabit.
*****
After that seriously distressing session with Dr. Peebles, I pushed it all aside. Don’t want to do it, not interested, I’m through with trying to root out these antique, rusty emotions with their sinister hooks and sneaky tentacles that creep into every corner of my being.
Done, done, done.
But oddly enough…by the next day I was emailing my Reiki teacher, Carolyn, asking for and receiving recommendations for tapping or breath work or emotional release work.
I briefly investigated TFT (Thought Field Therapy) and the method it spawned, EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques), both of which utilize tapping.
The one that glowed like a little beacon, though, was not a tapping therapy but something completely different called The Emotion Code.
*****
Dr. Bradley Nelson notes in his book, The Emotion Code:
People often put up with their pain, and end up simply “living with it,” especially when they cannot find a solution or a reason for it. Pain is the body’s way of telling you that there is a problem, and you need to pay attention.
I’ve observed through many years of clinical practice that people who are suffering from physical pain nearly always find relief, often instantly, when the trapped emotions underlying their pain are released [emphasis added]. In fact, about 90 percent of the time physical pain can be thought of as a message from the subconscious mind that trapped emotions are present and need to be dealt with.
Echoes of Dr. Peebles’ words that the root cause of physical pain is 99 percent emotional in nature. Dr. Nelson cites “about 90 percent,” not 99 percent.
In its clumsy mathematical fashion, my mind calculates. Does that mean I have an approximate 94.5 percent chance of ousting my “hip pain” by releasing trapped emotions?
I’m willing to do this work, sail into this uncharted territory. I’m willing to take the chance that it won’t work and the equally daunting chance that it will work. Be careful what you ask for, because you might get it.
Pain-free is the brass ring. Possible? Probable? Don’t know yet. But I’m more than willing to believe it’s possible and to reach for that ring.
*****
I briefly ponder my concern about the pendulum simply swinging back and forth between joy and despair and other opposite emotions, never settling primarily on the side of joy, which is, by far, my preference.
Happily, Dr. Peebles notes in the same reading,
Whether or not you are eating cotton candy or you’re getting splashed in the face by mud, the soul is having an experience. The soul is pleased with the splashing of the mud and the cotton candy. The soul doesn’t mind what it is.
But you as a human being have been taught that cotton candy is better than mud in the face. And so it’s all right to live a life, to create a life in which you are having more cotton candy than mud…It doesn’t matter to the soul. The soul would like to have the experiences.
So if you prefer to have more cotton candy than mud, the soul says, “Wonderful!”
I’ll happily accept more metaphorical cotton candy than mud in my life. If it’s good enough for my soul, it’s good enough for me.
Dr. Peebles through Natalie Gianelli, nataliegianelli.com