In my last blog “A glitch in the Matrix”, I shared about a very powerful trigger I’d had, which helped me unravel a deep-seated belief about my relationship with men. As the threads of this pattern revealed themselves, I made a fresh and empowering choice – to see and be seen by men.
Choices are incredibly powerful when they come from the depths of our Being and not from our intellect. They reflect that raw Soul yearning for something more in our life….something that our heart desires, but to which our limiting patterns have created an invisible barrier.
In making that choice, I let the genie out of the bottle. I’ve seen men in a whole new light, and they’ve also started to notice me. After 2½ years of being single, with not a date in sight, I’ve been on two dates in the past few weeks.
The second of those dates was about 10 days ago. We went to Wategos beach, and sat on a beach towel drinking hibiscus tea, watching the sun set. As spectacular as the sunset was, the conversation was equally as deep and intriguing.
As with any great conversation, it ebbed and flowed. I asked about him, he asked about me. Then he enquired as to how my week had been.
I’ve been more emotional than usual this past week, as Sunday was the anniversary of Mum’s passing. I had just started to tell him how much I miss her, and the way she’d stay up late at night and talk to me when I was driving, just to make sure I didn’t fall asleep at the wheel. I felt her love so much in these little things she did for me.
Tears began welling in my eyes as I spoke about her, and I felt the exquisite sweetness of both her love for me, intermingled with the sorrow that she’s no longer there at the end of the phone for our late night chats.
The tears in my eyes didn’t go unnoticed, and my date responded in a very authentic way. He reached an arm around me and pulled me towards him.
“How long has it been since you’ve had a hug?” he asked…..and I thought about that, and answered, “A very long time”. It’s been at least 2½ years since a man has given me a real hug, something other than a hello hug in greeting. It felt lovely to be held.
But something wasn’t quite right.
Don’t get me wrong – to be held in the arms of a loving man is something close to heaven. But in this instance, I knew that this hug was intended to stop me from crying. For some reason he was uncomfortable with my emotions, and wanted to take me away from them and into happiness again.
“It’s important we just look forwards in life,” he said. “Looking back just creates unhappiness.”
Hmmmmm…..is that true? Are we really here to look forwards, and not backwards?
It’s true that when we look forwards to a future that’s never happened, it can be anything we want. When we look backwards, that’s when we find memories that may be yet unresolved within us, and emotions bubble to the surface like the mud pools of Rotorua.
But at the same time, we don’t want to be so locked in the past that we can’t escape it and truly be in the present.
As an advanced Soul, what’s the best relationship for us to have with our emotions? What most serves us on our spiritual path?
Let me backtrack for a moment to a Sound Healing retreat I attended a couple of weeks ago. I had just been on the massage table receiving the most divine sound healing. I dived deep into the void, and disappeared into nothingness. It was like taking the deepest breath of peace.
But as I emerged into present time, my mind reflected on some of the conflict that’s been going on with my brother and sister as we bring Mum’s affairs to an end….and this emotion bubbled up in me.
I realised how much I yearned for us to be in a state of unity with each other.
We’re all hurting in our own ways, yet I saw and felt how wonderful it would be to work in a way that is supportive and not divisive, so that we may together heal from the grief of losing someone we love.
When we touch these deep insights and feelings, they are precious. I started following that thread of feeling, knowing it was important. However, the student who was working on me saw that I was emotional and told me to start breathing in and out consciously. She brought my attention away from the journey I was on, and back to her presence. As I followed her instructions and changed my breathing, I lost the thread I was following, and that opportunity to deep dive was gone.
When we touch on a deep emotion, it’s a precious moment – a moment to feel, to reflect, to understand. Very often, these moments represent an altered state of consciousness. We’ve suddenly encountered the tip of an iceberg that, if we swim down and explore it, can lead us to a powerful truth about ourselves. And when we see that truth, we can then allow a new insight or new choice to emerge.
This is how transformation occurs.
And whenever we are working with another person who is going through an emotional release, one of the golden rules is to “hold space” for them, so that we open our heart with understanding, yet at the same time we allow them to go where they need to go, without distracting them and pulling them back to the present.
So what about people who constantly live in the past, and their woes and upsets from past hurts?
This is like a plane circling around and around in the one spot. This doesn’t achieve transformation. Instead, it keeps us trapped in a past view of life, unable to move forwards.
So it IS important that we can discern between “healthy” and “unhealthy” emotional releases. The healthy ones invite insight and transformation. They allow us to grow and evolve, to be fluid in our perceptions of the world.
The unhealthy ones keep us in a victim perspective, locked into a singular view of our life, unable to escape.
So how does this look when it’s healthy?
It’s quite simple. We live in the present moment, this vital centre of our life’s map. We are mindful as we go about our daily tasks and interact with others. Yet sometimes things will happen in the present which trigger emotions in us. And when that happens, we are invited to experience those emotions fully.
It’s like bungee jumping. We are dropping down a chasm, all the way to the bottom to explore what’s there…..and when we are finished exploring, that bungee rope pulls us back out again to the surface, and we carry with us all the memories and insights from our deep dive, so that we know and understand ourselves more fully, and can make new choices for our life.
But not many people are comfortable doing this deep dive. I watch the people around me – some (like the ones I’ve shared about) use distracting techniques to avoid the feelings. They are uncomfortable with their own emotions, so they do everything they can to fix or avoid other people’s emotions. Other people disappear into their head to analyse what they are experiencing, until they have become completely un-present. Some are so afraid of losing themselves in their emotional depths that they resist the plunge entirely.
When I was on the sound healing course, an interesting concept arose. I’d never heard this word before, but it made perfect sense. We talked about “spiritual bypassing”, which is when we use our spiritual wisdom to avoid our emotions….especially the darker emotions, the ones we consider “less spiritual”, such as our jealousy, our anger, our bitterness.
So we’re not here to be an eagle flying over our emotions either, analysing them from a higher spiritual perspective so that we can “understand” why each person acted the way they did in a particular interaction. This may come in time….but only after we feel our emotions.
As A Course in Miracles states, “You must look upon your illusions and not keep them hidden, for they do not rest on their own foundation”.
To me, this is an invitation to bring all of our hurts, pains, wounds and their associated “negative” emotions to the surface. We must acknowledge and feel them in order to truly see the illusion within them.
So first, we must accept them as real and respond accordingly, before we can ever see that they are not real.
When we are living in a state of flow within ourselves, our emotions will sometimes be triggered.
This happens no matter how advanced we are on our spiritual path. We are all here to learn and grow. And when they are triggered, we are simply invited to feel them fully in this moment. We dive into the murky depths of those blackest of thoughts, but only for a short time. We always need to come up for air, and that air is our Light. And even as we dive deeply into those dark emotions, we can still be mindful.
We can be both the experiencer and the observer. And the observer is the part of us that knows when “enough is enough”. And when we’ve fully felt our feelings, the observer in us is the part that will invite us to take a step back, to invite a higher perspective, to ask for help from Spirit. It’s the part that will guide us to unravel our pattern, to see the wisdom that is locked beneath our emotions.
There’s only one way to our Light, and that’s on the path that leads through the darkness. When we avoid, postpone, distract, bypass…we never truly find our Light. But it’s waiting for us, on the other side of our emotional depths.
It’s time to leap!
