IT'S NOT OUT, BUT THROUGH, THAT WE HEAL AND TRANSFORM

It’s an illusion to think you can just talk yourself out of negative feelings, or that there is some mental instrument or simple affirmation you can feed your brain that will automatically change your emotional responses. These mental tools can indeed change your mind, but emotions function through the law of thermodynamics: they flow, ripple, or roar like water, and must be accessed and released to heal. So, unless you are willing to have a lobotomy, it’s better to not depend on your brain to shift your emotions. When we try to talk ourselves out of feelings, they only go into repression, and will come out sideways, and often act out when we least want them to. Repression is the name of your shadow’s playhouse.

Once emotions are cleared, though, the mind comes into play and works beautifully to undergird your life with new ideas, positive beliefs, and any attitude adjustment needed to fit with your new clarity. But rarely does it work the other way around. Spiritual bypass is often the result of trying to control one’s feelings without ever having gotten all the way through them with compassion and understanding. Spiritual bypass is the act of rising above issues and feelings that have never integrated and healed.

There is no such thing as rising up and out of an emotion you’ve never let yourself feel. Once a feeling has gone into your body, or hit your psyche in any way at all, it won’t just go away; it has to be made conscious and expressed in order to release. For emotional healing to prevail, we must enter fully into whatever is left unprocessed, and ride it all the way through until the pent-up energy is drained off the issue. Then, it is finished, never to command your attention or psychic energy again.

Because your emotional body functions like water, whatever emotions build up in your body will gently stir you, or erupt like a torrential storm at sea when your feelings run high. If blocked, they store themselves in your cells, closing your heart, and giving you the false idea that it’s not safe or “spiritual” to feel negative feelings such as anger or deep grief.

Medical science is now showing us how crucial it is to our physical well-being to heal our emotional body. As stated in the Newsweek magazine edition dedicated to The New Science of Mind and Body (September, 2004), we’re told that “from anger to optimism, our emotions are physiological states. The brain, as the source of those states, offers a potential gateway to other tissues and organs -- the heart and blood vessels, the gut and even the immune system.”

Your emotional body, in order to heal, must use techniques that empty out the feelings with compassion and no judgment. Then, your emotional body will be calm and transparent to meet each present moment with the pristine clarity of the truth of every situation and every relationship you encounter, no longer contaminated with old, unprocessed feelings. A lake with no ripples will perfectly reflect the sky (or truth).


YOUR PSYCHE IS THE PLAYING FIELD

Our psyches become the battleground where the formidable conflicts between our spiritual souls and our ego-driven personalities play out. Our ancestors devised the institutions of human psychology and religion to address this burdensome misalignment and hopefully help us transcend it. Unfortunately, however, we’ve wound up experiencing very little soul-work in either human psychology or in our religious institutions. Though the word psyche means soul in Greek, psychology has forgotten its name means “the study of the soul.” And our religions often mention the soul, but give little instruction concerning its nature or how to live as soul-dominated creatures.

Psychospiritual inner work offers us a way through this ego-soul conflict. When you have a direct experience of seeing that you are a spiritual being learning to be human, it melts away shame and blame, and fills you with the life-giving qualities of compassion, acceptance, and forgiveness. As spiritual beings living in this world, we’re fully aware that our schooling here has indeed been quite an ordeal. Learning how to be human isn’t a task for the fainthearted. Doesn’t everyone just naturally make mistakes when practicing anything new? Shame and blaming others have turned out to be major blocks to our growth and transformation.

When we turn from the outer to the inner world of deep psychospiritual work and reflection, we do indeed deepen into the treasures of the human psyche, and discover there a whole new way of life. We see everything about our lives through a wider lens. We become more loving and broad-minded.

Never hold yourself away from any kind of inner work that is calling you. Your journey to wholeness is fraught with resistance and excuses to not work on yourself. But in the long run, no one ever evolves into one’s true and whole Self without deep inner exploration and a willingness to die to all that is finished or no longer works in our lives. And always, after every death, there is new life awaiting you.

Let me not beg for the stilling of pain,
but for the heart to conquer it.
- Rabindranath Tagore