emotions

THE EDGE OF EMOTION

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THE EDGE OF EMOTION 

Risking feeling

Feeling feels risky.  So much so that we often stay on the edge of it.  Feeling emotion means something is going to change, which is destabilizing to our sense of the known.  It is a mini death and rebirth, and most of us don’t like the death part very much.  Death of an idea, dream, or way of being.  Oftentimes we think we are feeling emotion, but we are just on the surface of what is really going on.  To authentically feel, rather than regurgitating triggered surface emotions, is the difference between acceptance of what is and resistance to it.  Acceptance is hard for most, so rather than feeling we stay in the spin of frustration, irritation or mental activity, which keeps us from having to actually feel even though we think that we are.  

Why is it that we avoid feeling like it’s the plague?  It boils down to the fact that in general most of us don’t like to feel heartbreak, and heartbreak is what authentic feeling feels like.  It’s tender, raw, and vulnerable.  The heartbreak we feel is in association with something occurring that we wished was different.  Perhaps it was a way we were treated that we didn’t like, a need or desire that wasn’t met, or some situation that went down in a way we wished it wouldn’t have.  The tendency for most people is to start to think about the situation or event rather than feel what they feel about it.  They rationalize, they judge or condemn, they feel irritated or maybe aloof and disconnected, they can’t seem to let it go no matter what amount spiritual self-talk they do around it.  There is a tendency to feel at a loss or confused about “what to do” and many attempts to figure it out.  The intense mental thought of needing to figure out what to do or say is a high indication that there is resistance to what is, and deeper more real feelings to be felt.

There is a phrase I heard in chiropractic college that went “you have to feel it to heal it”.  What it boils down to is that healing is accepting what is.  When we accept what is, change then effortlessly flows from acceptance.  There is no more needing to figure anything out or mental looping about it.  We simply know what to do if anything needs to be done.  Sometimes there is nothing to do and that can be super challenging for our minds, particularly when we really want something to be different, hence our prolonged resistance to actual feeling.  However as soon as we do feel the heartbreak of the dream, the idea, the hope, or the thing, acceptance ensues and it becomes easy to let be what is.  This leaves us with inner peace and spaciousness of mind.  We become receptive rather than insistent.  In our receptivity the path of what’s next is revealed to us.   

FREEDOM THROUGH EMOTION 

Action from love

Sometimes the difference between thinking our emotions versus feeling our emotions can be tricky for us to discern.  A good indicator to use for yourself is that if you don’t feel freer than you aren’t actually feeling, but rather you are caught in a story about feeling.  Another way to discern this is the amount of time you are “feeling”.  Emotions, when felt, have a very short time span.  Typically a few seconds to a few minutes at most.  If you are going on hours, days or weeks of “feeling” something then you are often in the story of it rather than the feeling of it.  Now after you feel something deeply there can be residual feelings, but your general disposition is lighter and more free even if some residual effects are still present.  Also after feeling there you are softer and in a slower pace of being.  

Emotions are simply energy.  When we feel the energy of emotion we liberate fuel.  Fuel for acceptance and change.  That acceptance or change can be of ourselves, or it can be in relation to the outer appearance of our lives.  Change occurring through acceptance, or said another way, change occurring through love, is different than the way we typically try to make things happen.  While there is still intention, vision or goals, there is also more of a listening to the unfolding and participating with it rather than an attempt to push or force to make happen.  While this might seem more apparent for our outer world, it goes for our inner world as well.  Say for example you have a tendency to think you are not valuable or have nothing of value to give.  You could try a million self-help methods to change these thoughts about yourself, go to every class and workshop, and on and on, really throwing everything at it.  Yet when you start with acceptance, coming from love in your attempt to change these thoughts, you don’t insist that they need to be different.  It’s a bit of a paradox, but as soon as we stop insisting something be a certain way or be different than it is, it relaxes and often reorganizes itself.

All the things we desperately think need to be different about ourselves or the world find resolution through acceptance.  The mind can’t grok this and yet it is so.  Acceptance doesn’t mean inaction, rather it means action from love.  To be clear action from love doesn’t mean that our perspective, idea or way of approaching something wins over because we think it’s more altruistic, evolved or better than the alternative perspectives.  This is called righteousness of which our world is rampant with.  Action from love is listening to the inner impulse to move in a particular way or direction, taking action in that direction, and then listening.  Seeing what you feel now and now and now, and following.  When you allow your emotions you see that they guide you moment by moment.  This doesn’t mean that all of your ideals will be met or creations created, but it does mean that you will always be coming from your alignment, from who you are, from what you desire to be, now and now and now.  This is to fulfill your destiny.  It is to be your mission.  It equates to success at all levels of your being.  

Dr. Amanda Love, Chiropractor, Network Spinal Analysis & Somato-Respiratory Integration, Boulder, Colorado

Field of the Heart

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Field of the Heart

Going beyond the physical, emotional & personal

17361305 - cloud heartWhen most people think about the heart they tend to think solely of the space inside of their chest where their physical heart resides.  Some people that are more aware of the subtle energetics may even refer to the space around their chest as their heart, including the heart chakra in their definition. While these are aspects or components of the heart, they are not the heart in its entirety.  

There is also frequently an association made between the heart and one’s ability to feel emotions, so many refer to or think of the heart as the emotional center.  While its true that an opening of or into the heart can allow us to experience more feelings and emotions, the heart is not the seat of the emotional body.  The emotional body is more connected into this physical form through our belly rather than what we tend to call the heart.  

I find that the heart really is not emotional, physical, or even personal in nature.  That doesn’t mean that the heart does not impact or influence the emotional, physical and personal aspects of us, but the heart is not contained or defined by them.  The heart is also not just our heart chakra, meaning a subtle energetic structure.  The heart instead is a unified field of all pervasive awareness.  Unified in knowing that it is just one.  It is not just in one part or one location; it is in all locations and all parts.  It goes beyond ideas of you and me and knows inherently the nature of inseparability and oneness.  

Often times when we touch or open up into this heart field our mind will jump in and try to figure it out by labeling or creating ideas about it.  Yet when we can simply allow the mind to rest and be still then we don’t create ripples within that pristine field of love and it remains undisturbed.  When undisturbed we experience the purity of this field of love without insisting on trying to dumb it down into a concept and make it something that our minds can understand.  This also allows us to be pure transmitters of the information and energy that this field contains.  

Experiencing yourself as Source 

The “New Normal”

Light burst with starsWhen our awareness expands to include the heart field, magic and mystery arrive as our lived experience.  We begin to know yet don’t know how we know what we know.  We write, speak and move and the impulse for all of our thoughts, words and movements is not our mind or thoughts.  There is a guiding source that writes, speaks and moves these bodies and all things that have appearance or form without the filtering of mind.  This source is pure intelligence, it is the true self or the true you.  Ask yourself, “where does all information, love and movement arise?”  This will draw your awareness inwards, in to yourself, so that you can directly experience yourself as the source rather than as the forms and appearances.  

You may be curious as to why you don’t always or perhaps ever experience life in this way, meaning as source rather than appearances of source.  It is because you, like most all of us, were taught to focus on appearances and not on essence.  With the repetition of focus on appearances you fused your awareness with the appearance of you and are now lost in the projection of yourself rather than being rested in your actual self.  When you touch in, taste or rest into the field of heart you make contact with yourself again.  For many this experience feels so foreign to them that they doubt, question, analyze and try to make rational their own selves to the appearance of themselves. They feel like something is happening to them, like they are being moved by something other than them, when in truth they are simply allowing themselves to be moved by their true self rather than by programmed and learned responses.  For others that perhaps have less conditioning or are less fused with the appearance of themselves, when they touch in, taste or rest into the field of the heart they remember and feel a sense of being home.  It is an instant recognition and remembrance.  They do not doubt or question themselves as much and there is more trust, allowing and knowing of the goodness that they are.  When we don’t know our inherent goodness and that love is our natural state, then we will fear or push it away when it arrives.  Pushing away can occur through rationalization, deflection, emotional hijacking, stories about heightened sensations and the like.  

Many people are talking about the “new normal”  these days, what that is, what our world looks like with various measures of physical (appearance) distancing and self/other protection.  I like to dream that the new normal is where more and more people are rested in the field of the heart, know themselves as the source of love and are less fused with the physical appearance of themselves.  Imagine how powerful and resourceful we are when all are rested in the complete unification and inseparability that actually is.  When we stop waging war on and fighting oneness.  It’s true, we are all in this together, including every single appearance and aspect of creation that’s been created.  We can’t exclude or try to eliminate some aspects and expect to experience harmony.  We couldn’t be separate even if we tried really, really hard and we have been trying really, really hard for billions of years unsuccessfully so.  Separation is and has always been an illusion of appearances.  You have never been an appearance.  You have always been the source of all appearances.  That source is the field of the heart.  You are the source of love.  May that knowing become your new normal.  

Dr. Amanda Hessel, Chiropractor, Network Spinal Analysis & Somato-Respiratory Integration, Boulder, Colorado

Transform, transform, transform

Dr. Amanda Love 1 Comment

Transform, transform, transform 

Moving beyond is not bypassing

Asian business person flying through ring of fireThere is an idea in the personal growth community that we must feel, feel, feel.  In fact it seems that we are just supposed to keep feeling our feelings for an indefinite amount of time and if we move past feeling than we must be bypassing something, in denial, or not really healing.  

Now I want to back up a second here.  Feeling emotions is a super important step in the healing process, which most people avoid like the plaque.  Many people are scared of their emotions or don’t really know how to access their emotional body, while others are lost or merged with their emotions and even identify themselves as their emotions.  I want to emphasize that while feeling your emotions is absolutely necessary in the healing journey it is not the final destination.  And while a percentage of people are feeling emotions as they arise they are not actually feeling the deep pain underneath their emotions which is often connected to of how their life is not working in some way.  

Some people have a relationship to their emotions that they are like this never ending pit from which they will never escape or move through while simultaneously believing that to actually move through would mean they are avoiding something.  Let me tell you this, to never move through or beyond your emotions is to avoid life, not the other way around.  If you stay stuck in emotions and never move through them you don’t get to live because you are so busy feeling your feelings (or if that’s not enough your projection of what you think other people are feeling), and complaining to yourself that you are so overwhelmed.  

So I want to give you permission right now to move through feeling.  To be ok with allowing emotion to pass through you rather than you staying stuck inside of it.  The main reason we get stuck inside of our feelings is because we haven’t accepted them as they are (this goes for body sensations as well).  We may be aware of them, we may even have acknowledged them, but we haven’t fully accepted them and so we stay in resistance (which is the experience of stuckness) all the while wondering if our emotions (or sensations) will ever shift so that we can feel better.  This leaves us victim to and at the whim of our feeling states which isn’t a very powerful (or fun) place to hang out   

The other side of feelings

Your powerful self

So what is on the other side of emotions you ask?  A whole lot of powerful, creative play!  To really harness the energy of your emotions you must take action in a new way.  The purpose of emotions is to create momentum for you to engage in a new pattern or way of being in your life.  Frequently I see people feel some aspect of their emotions, but then do, think or be nothing different in their life.  This is what I call “emoting” or feeling emotion without taking new action.  Yes emoting can feel good, and energy moves when you feel an emotion, but you must simultaneously use that freed up energy purposefully to do something different in your life.  

So what does this look like?  First to give you a location on the “healing” map this is the stage of early transformation.  When you use emotion to take action you are beginning to transform.  Transform means that you are transforming some aspect of yourself.  Maybe you are reclaiming your inner freedom, or your joy, or vitality or physical health.  No matter what aspect of yourself that you are transforming it all follows that same path.  First you have to be fed up enough with the old way of doing yourself and see straight on that how you have been doing life has not been and is not working.  It must be different.  No longer can you go on trying to make it work this way.  Its not working.  When you get to this point of “its not working” you have typically felt tons of emotions, uncovered many layers of yourself, and have had many insights and revelations about how you have been protecting and defending yourself from pain.  You also are beginning to see how you have managed and controlled your life to avoid feeling pain and discomfort which has prevented you from moving into what you desire (which is that aspect of self you reclaim through transformation).  Get this, the avoidance of really deeply feeling your pain and how you are currently navigating your life in ways that are not working, is the biggest hinderance you have to transformation.  Now that may seem contradictory to what I said on the previous page but its not.  People are mostly looped in what I call “superficial emotions” which means emotions that still on top of deep pain.  Once you feel the deep pain and discomfort that you have been avoiding there will be no other choice but to do you differently.  

Once you have been able to access the deeper pain it doesn’t become all fairies and butterflies.  You must now use your will to do you differently.  You have to set down new patterns, create new habits, and think different thoughts daily that are aligned with what you want and that aspect of yourself that you are reclaiming.   You need a lot of reminders to yourself throughout this process because those old patterns are easy to resurface.  If your desire is simply to feel happy, you must consistently, several times a day, think happy thoughts and feel happy.  Its not just going to organically happen.  You must do it.  Nothing and no one can do this for you.  This is your will and your life.  From this place you start to realize that you are in charge.  You are the creator.  You are the decider in your life.  Always have been, always will be.  Welcome to your power.  

Dr. Amanda Hessel, Chiropractor, Network Spinal Analysis & Somato-Respiratory Integration, Boulder, Colorado