Recently I asked one of my clients, "To what degree would you say that are you able to just sit with your emotions?" He stared at me for a moment and then replied, "You mean without processing them, like without thinking them through, labeling them, trying to put words to them?" And I said, yes. "You mean without trying to understand them, where they're coming from?" Yes. "You mean without trying to understand what's causing them and then try to change the situation?" Yes. "You mean, just sit with them and feel them?" Yes. "Why would I want to do that!?" I burst out laughing because his response was so delightfully honest, so endearing, and such a clear example of where most of us humans are, particularly in this culture, with regards to our emotions.
It got me to thinking about our species and how, over time, our relationship with our emotions has evolved. And it seems to me that the way we relate to our emotions as individuals runs parallel to our evolution with them as a species. At one time, we must have simply acted on our emotions. If we were really angry at someone, we killed them. Then Descartes came along with, "I think therefore I am," suggesting that our rational minds were in charge and we could override our primitive emotions with mental willpower. It was a step in the right direction. Collectively, and as individuals, we need self-control. We cannot simply act on our feelings without negative consequences. But here's where we, to some degree, got stuck. In trying to control and manage our animal-like, out-of-control feelings, we learned to suppress them. We now know that this takes a toll on our bodies and creates what we call stress. At some point, the past thirty years maybe, we realized that we might be healthier if we learned how to express our feelings so that we could get them out of our bodies. This often means talking about our feelings, which is sometimes helpful, and certainly healthier than stuffing them. At one point in my own development, I needed a way to physically express my anger. With the help of specialists in this area, I learned that I could scream in a pillow and hit the bed with a plastic baseball bat, without scaring myself or somebody else, and feel much better. And most importantly, I learned that I could observe and simultaneously feel energy flowing through my body, without it (the energy) having to mean anything. And while I seldom need to now, I still have a plastic baseball bat under my bed in the spare bedroom, just in case. Once we make friends with our primal emotions, we can start relating to them differently. Beyond suppressing them with our intellects, or whatever other way we tend to do that, and beyond expressing them, is a little known third way. When you can quiet the thinking part of your brain that wants to judge and interfere, when you can allow yourself to palpably feel whatever you're feeling, you can then, with the alchemical power of your awareness, learn how to release, transform, and convert any negative emotion into peace. But you can't skip your way to the peace without feeling the scary, unevolved feelings first. When we try to skip to the peace, because we believe our feelings are unevolved or unspiritual, we call this spiritual bypassing. In my line of work, I have the opportunity to meet many kinds of healers and spiritual seekers. I am often surprised at how many have not (and are perhaps not ready to), acknowledged the darker, less evolved aspects of their humanness. Debbie Ford's book, The Dark Side Of the Light Chasers, does a great job of describing this. When our identity is tied up in being spiritual people, we tend to unconsciously judge, block, or resist those feelings or impulses that don't match our ideas of who we think we are and who we should be. But this darker energy festers in us, making us less effective, sometimes ill, and in extreme cases leads to the kind of thing we've seen with clergy addicted to porn and sexually deviant behavior. Any primal emotion, brought to the light of your awareness, will convert, if you can sit with it long enough to feel it and let it be - without judgement, without analysis, without resistance. But you are the only one who can know where you are in your relationship with your emotions and if you're ready for this process. If you tend to act on your feelings, hurting others or yourself, you might want to take time to understand and think about what's going on and where your feelings are coming from. If you tend to intellectualize your feelings, if you understand them, but find that understanding them hasn't really changed anything, or sense that despite your understanding, it's taking a toll on your body, you might want to explore healthy ways to express them. If you're expressing them and find that the same feelings keep cycling through over and over, if you continue to get triggered by the same things, you might be ready to learn how to release them at the source. I'm describing this in a very linear fashion, but most of us probably do some combination of the above, depending on the topic, the situation, the feeling, and our personal tendencies. Wherever you are in the process, I want to suggest that learning to work with your negative emotions has the potential to be a spiritual practice. Ironic isn't it? We tend to collectively think that our emotions make us look unevolved or unspiritual, but in my experience acknowledging, allowing, accepting, and even embracing my emotions, as innate to my humanness, is one of the most spiritual things I can do. When I can learn to simply be present with myself and what I'm feeling, without judging and without indulging, I am strengthening my spiritual muscle. I am strengthening who I really am. And who am I? You can take a hint from your early grammar lessons. I am is the first-person singular of the verb to be - not the verb to think, or to feel, but to be. My emotions aren't who I am. My intellect isn't who I am. I am that on which all of my thinking and feeling appears. I am the one who watches, who makes a space for, who allows - the one who is simply present. So the more you practice be-ing, especially in the presence of challenging emotions, the more you are be-ing yourself. And the more you practice being yourself, the easier it becomes. Much love to you and yours this holiday season. It has been, and continues to be, my honor and privilege to have you as friends, colleagues, clients, and readers.
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If you really want to know the answer to the question, Who am I?, you might try the following meditation.
Start with taking time to feel your feet - barefoot on the ground if possible. Notice the different parts of your feet on the ground. Feel your butt on the ground or in your chair. Notice the air going in and out of your nose. Notice the muscles you're using to breathe in and out. Say the words In and Out, silently to yourself as you breathe in and out, or picture them as you breathe in and out. Once your mind is fairly quiet, see if you can continue to breathe and feel your your feet and feel your Self in your body. Or perhaps be open to some sense of something Eckart Tolle calls the inner body. Don't try to figure it out. You likely won't be able to understand this with your thinking brain. Just be available to the idea of the feeling of it as you breathe. Once you settle into that quiet-mind zone, ask yourself, Who am I? And wait. Breathe. Wait some more. Just wait and breathe and feel your feet, as best you can. Feel free to re-ask this question as often as it feels right. Just be careful that it's not with an energy of trying to get the answer. Asking and waiting in quiet space is enough. Simply notice what happens inside. I cannot tell you how long this will take, how many times you'll have to do this process, but if you really want to know the answer to this question, it will come. And it will more than likely come in the form of a feeling or a certain felt-experience of knowing. It can't be forced, it doesn't come cheap, and there are no shortcuts. However, the peace and knowing that comes can be life-changing. If you'd like some help with it, please let me know. Several weeks ago, I developed a floater in my left eye. I didn't think too much about it, but then I noticed a flash of light in the outer corner of my field of vision when I moved my eyes a certain way. An internet search scared me to death, as they often do, and I made a hasty appointment with an ophthalmologist, who squeezed me in as an emergency after hearing my symptoms, which of course compounded my fears. It turns out that I have a common condition as people age. It's not serious. And so I drove home from my appointment, so relieved and grateful that I swore to myself I'd never take my vision for granted, ever again. I'd be grateful every day. Well it lasted about a day and a half.
There are happiness gurus and law of attraction types, who say that you should make a practice of gratitude. And while I can attest to its effectiveness in shifting one's mood or perspective, sort of like positive thinking, there's something about this approach that feels a little outer-focused and ego-directed, and for me, temporary. It suggests that as long as I'm using my will and mental discipline to control, monitor, and direct my thoughts, I'm gonna feel OK. This strategy is popular in the psychology field and many popular therapy techniques are based on this premise. I however, think it's crap. As long as you are counting on your little personal will and ego-driven, control-seeking thinking brain to make yourself feel happy, grateful, or OK, to override your physiology, to improve your emotional state, there will come a time when the circumstances of your life exceed your egoic mind's capacity to control your bodymind's emotional response. The thinking brain is limited in that way. That is why the combat veteran cannot positive-self-talk his way out of hitting the ground when he hears a car backfire. So what does this have to do with gratitude and why is Shelly turning a perfectly lovely holiday intention into a problem?, you might ask. It's because I want so much more for us than what our minds can conjure, because we are so much more than our minds and what our minds can know. Beyond my gratitude for the many blessings that my mind can rattle off, like a gratitude laundry list, lies the state of deep appreciation, wholeness, and all-is-wellness, that lies beneath, above, through, and on which all of my gratituding appears. It is this state that is always available to us. It's who we really are. And from that place, conditions don't have to be right in order for me to feel good, and I don't have to work at it if they're not. I'm like George Bailey in It's A Wonderful Life, Isn't it wonderful? I'm going to jail! That is my wish for me and my wish for you. Beyond I am grateful for___, beyond I am grateful, is I am. And friends, it just doesn't get any better, greater, or more abundant than that. Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours! Shelly For the past week and a half, I've been feeling kind of blah. The retreat that I had planned last weekend didn't happen, my work has been a little slow, and try as I might, I haven't been able to release some feelings of stuckness and a general sense of not exactly awful, but not exactly happy either. And of course, I've also tried to figure it out, talk about it, do something to make myself feel better, all the while knowing that my resistance to and judgment about how I've been feeling has only been making it worse.
I've also noticed the return of an old, familiar discomfort which tends to start below my ribs and travel to my stomach. And while I haven't had the traditional medical tests to "prove" what it is, I've suspected it's my gallbladder or some unhappy organ in its vicinity. The thought that a physical illness might be causing my blahness has brought some relief and a little self-compassion, but then immediately on its heels have come the fears. I don't want to have my gallbladder removed! What if it's something worse? What if there's something horribly wrong? Then the strategies follow. Who should I go to see for this? What about acupuncture? Last night I was particularly worried, but since it was Friday, there was little I could do right then except take the Chinese herbs that I'd just "refilled," go easy on the fat in my diet, and snuggle up with a heating pad, which was a perfect weekend plan since we were due for a cold rainy day today. Days like this give me permission to hold up inside and let myself feel whatever I feel. So despite wishing I felt emotionally and physically better, well enough to go to Chi Gong class, go for a walk, or work with one of the horses before the rain came, I let myself feel unwell and a little depressed, resistant, and worried about it. And I tried to stop judging myself for the way things were, the way I felt. So, eager to indulge in my guilt-free, self-care plan for the day, I finished up my chores and while waiting for the horses' food to finish soaking, I sat down for a quick ten-minute meditation. Once my mind was quiet, I turned my attention, lightly and compassionately, in the direction of my gallbladder. And I waited. And then subtly, at first as a vague feeling and then as words, I heard it say, I'm sad. I'm sad. I'm sad. And I did my best just to listen and wait. It was so tempting to jump in and ask why, but as I waited and breathed the answer came. It had something to do with horses, with my relationship with horses, with my own horses in particular, and I felt so sad. So I waited, with the sadness, which then moved to my throat as a literal lump in my throat. And as I felt it and breathed and waited with it I then heard, How dare you! How dare you say that it's wrong! How dare you make it wrong! You asshole! You can't do that to me! How dare you! A younger version of me, which was apparently hiding in my gallbladder, was still furious with my Dad, who dismissed my love and passion for horses as a childish whim and regularly referred to it as that ridiculous horse nonsense. My poor Dad had no reference for anything other than making money and earning respect at the country club. (Little girls who made magic, not only didn't make sense, but seemed to threaten him in some way). In any case, there it was. And with it, my throat lost its lump, my gallbladder felt free and happy, and I felt light and open and ready to do something fun - for the first time in over a week! My breakfast didn't make my stomach hurt and lying in the bed with the heating pad held little charm. The exciting thing about this friends, for me, is not so much that I "cured" my gallbladder - maybe I did and maybe I didn't - but that I feel good. I mean, really good. And to know that I can be, in what seems to be a fixless, week-and-a-half-long physical, emotional funk, and shift it in less than five minutes, is pretty damn exciting. But even more exciting is the power that I feel, the empowerment that I feel - not the kind of power that comes from my personal will, or from a magic cure or pill, but from a source of which I am intrinsically linked. Above all, I wish that same power, that sense of real power, for you and for all of us. And that is why I share my story on this rainy Saturday - because I love you, because I love me, the hurt parts of me, and the hurt parts of you. We are all just doing our best and thanks to all that is good and true in this world, we have gallbladders that hurt, who are willing to help us heal and be whole, if only we are willing to listen. Shelly Recommended reading: Love Your Disease: It's Keeping You Healthy, by John Harrison, M.D. See also https://m3health.com/ - a website based on the book. is your actual life. And it's good. And beautiful. And nothing is lacking. Philosophical hogwash, you say. Doesn't she know that I have problems? That I'm sick or broke or broken hearted? That I have pressure and responsibilities? That I'm wounded or depressed or barely able to get out of bed? And I say yes, I understand. I understand the nature of problems - situations that must be dealt with. I have those myself. But how many of those can actually be fixed or resolved this red-hot minute? Really ask yourself, In this moment, do I have a satisfactory solution to this problem? It's kind of a trick question, because if you did, if your solution was really one that you felt good about, you'd either be happily doing it or have a plan to do it, in which case you'd feel peaceful and enjoying this present moment of not-doing-it-yet.
I think you will notice that when a situation truly calls for your immediate response, you're able to rise to the challenge. When faced with issues of life and death, the human animal becomes fiercely present and open to inner resources they didn't know they had. People living in war zones are present. They have to be. Most of us are not living in war zones, and yet our biology is often behaving as if we are, because our minds are running the stories of our problems, driven by fear and other feelings, which are driven by deeper, often unconscious feelings of a perceived threat of abandonment, or lack of control and/or safety - as if our very survival is at stake. Late last fall, I had a hard time eating. Everything seemed to make my stomach hurt. I considered a trip to the doctor, but decided instead to listen to my body and just eat what I felt like it wanted. We were heading toward the holidays and I was plagued with the knowledge that my niece was terminally ill, as was my horse. While I don't remember having clear negative stories in my head, my bodymind felt out of control - because it was. I couldn't know what would happen, to who and when, as I headed out of town. This not-knowing, these out of control, up-in-the-air situations, seemed to by-pass my conscious awareness and head straight for my stomach. By the time I arrived back home from my holiday travel, my stomach was fine. I was eating normally - just in time for a big Christmas dinner. But I couldn't help but notice what my body had done. Yes, the situations were understandably challenging and unarguably true, but my stories about them, and their manifestation in my stomach, were strictly Shelly-created. It turns out that my niece's funeral the following March and my horse's passing a few weeks later were not the dark-cloud days that my bodymind had conjured up and rehearsed. Instead they were two of the most profoundly beautiful and potently spiritual days of my life. I remember the bright, rich quality of each day and how the colors around me seemed more vivid. I remember a sense being completely still inside, yet highly alert and aware at the same time. And I remember feeling acutely alive - that kind of alive that only happens when everything else falls away, time stands still, and now is all there is. Now is all that matters. And I'm noticing more and more, that I don't have to wait for moments like these before I can be fiercely present, because Presence is waiting - with me, inside of me, all around me, all the time. All it takes is a subtle glance in its direction, and all of a sudden it's like I've stepped away from a really compelling movie in a dark movie theatre and out into the bright light of day with a sense of, Oh right. This is what's real. Or as if someone just cranked up the big cosmic dimmer switch. The birds start singing louder, my dog seems even cuter, and a flood of blessings washes over me - not because I look for them, but because they're already there. This subtle shift beyond the stories about my life, places me firmly in my life, as life. And in such moments, that red-hot minute . . . it's perfect. When the compulsive striving away from the Now ceases, the joy of Being flows into everything you do. The moment your attention turns to the Now, you feel a presence, a stillness, a peace,… You have found a life underneath your life situation. Elkhart Tolle Do What You Do While You're Doing It and Don't Do What You're Not Doing While You're Not Doing It9/14/2019 I've heard this said a number of times on Sedona Method support calls. It's a bit of a mind-bender, but I have only to look at my horses or the wildlife around me to get it.
Animals are fully present and engaged in the Now, even while in the throes of their doingness. While eating grass, they're not thinking about their next trip to the creek or where they will stand if a storm comes. It's one thing for us humans to sit in meditation and quiet our minds, but how easy it is, while driving the car, cleaning house, or simply engaging in our early morning rituals, to leave the present moment and follow our minds into the imagined future. The advantage that animals have is that they are never not grounded. So following their example I try to remind my clients and myself to, Feel your feet. While driving the car, washing the dishes, or mowing the grass, I try to simply notice my feet - really notice the different parts of my feet on both feet. And I notice my breathing. I don't try to change it or fix it or take deep breaths, I simply try to notice the muscles I'm using when I inhale and exhale. It gives my mind something constructive to do and creates a bridge between my mind and body, which grounds me in the present moment. You might also try feeling your hands - when you wash the dishes, drive your car, or pull weeds. Standing in line at the post office, grocery store, or sitting at a red light is a perfect opportunity to breathe and locate your Self in your body. The mind tries to trick us into thinking that we must spend a lot of time listening to its theories, what-ifs, and strategies about the imagined future. And it hooks us into believing that we are actually very close to some sort of resolution that will ultimately help us feel peaceful, safe, and happy. But the time we spend listening to the mind's plans for future happiness, does not feel good. The planning mind typically creates a mild dis-ease or tension in our bodies, that we usually don't notice since it feels so normal. Take it from the animals, unless the predator in the bushes is actually running toward you, there's nothing you need to do, nothing you need to make happen right this second. When it's time to drink, you'll know. When it's time to move to higher ground, you'll know. Until then, your best protection, your greatest happiness and sense of wellbeing, lies in being fully available and present to your own inner guidance. And that can only happen when you're fully in the Now. I like the following suggestion from an excerpt of one of David Whyte's poems called: What To Remember When Waking In the first hardly noticed moment in which you wake, coming back to this life from the other more secret, moveable and frighteningly honest world where everything began, there is a small opening into the new day which closes the moment you begin your plans. What you can plan is too small for you to live. What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough for the vitality hidden in your sleep. To be human is to become visible while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others. To remember the other world in this world is to live your true inheritance. The thinking brain . . . I call it the thinking devil. It dangles a carrot in front of us saying, "Come over here and sit in the corner. I'll bet if you sit and think about this long enough, chew on this hard enough, you'll arrive at an answer that's satisfying." But it's a trick. It never happens.
There's only one way to tame the thinking devil and it doesn't come from trying to control him. He actually loves that. It gives him something to push against. The best way to deal with the thinking devil is to learn how to watch him and see him for who he is. Watching the thinking brain strengthens your awareness of the truth of who you are and who you are not. You are not the thinking brain. You are the one who can watch it. In time and with practice, you might get so good at this that you will catch yourself laughing at his/her antics - the way you would laugh at the "acting out" of an unruly child. Even better, you might begin to feel compassion for his/her desperate attempts to be important and valuable to you. Once you are able to watch your thoughts, you can respond to them saying, "I love you. Is there more?" Then let your thoughts respond with whatever comes. Respond to what comes next with, "I love you. Is there more?" And so on. In time your overactive thinking brain will run out of ideas and give up - at least for a little while. In the process, you will have strengthened your identity as the watcher - and a compassionate, non-reactive one at that! This is a great way, by the way, to respond to worry thoughts. Instead of trying to control or tame your worry thoughts, allow them to come up and respond to them with the I-love-you-is-there-more technique. Have fun with this and as always, please let me know if you need any help. Space. The final frontier. No, I’m not talking about the Starship Enterprise. I’m talking about the space that lives inside each and every one of us. It's the space that holds all that we desire and the answers to all of our questions like, Who am I? What is the meaning of life and what is my relationship to it? and What happens when we die? It’s a place that's ever-present, yet one we seldom visit. As a counselor and personal growth facilitator for almost three decades, I have had the privilege to sit with Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, Agnostics, Atheists, and people who say that they are spiritual but not religious. Some come with a diagnosis, given to them by a medical professional or a counselor who files insurance. Some do not. The stories they bring with them range from mildly stressful, dysfunctional childhoods, to accounts of some of the most horrendous things that human beings do to one another. And yet, despite the disparity in their beliefs, diagnoses, or life experiences, they all want the same thing - to feel better. By the time they get to me they've generally started to realize that what they're looking for doesn't live outside of them. They've exhausted their search for it in food, relationships, sex, alcohol, or drugs. They have done their best to use their good, logical minds to try to figure out what needs to happen. They've prayed, used affirmations, positive thinking, willpower, and mind-over-matter strategies to make changes in their perspective or behavior. They've consulted books by experts, self-healing practices, personal growth workshops, yogis, gurus, and clergy. Doing something normally makes us humans feel better. There is a sense of safety in thinking that we know or are at least on our way to knowing. And this is understandable. The problem is that as soon as we latch onto any of these practices and/or teachings as the truth, we become identified with them. What I believe, becomes linked with and ultimately confused with, Who I am. And anything the human mind identifies with as me, has to protect and defend it and feels very threatened by anything that seems contradictory. And while it seems that our beliefs provide a certain sense of safety, in my experience, this sense of safety is an illusion. Life seems to have a way of shattering our illusions. For example, as soon as the devout believer in life after death is faced with a terminal diagnosis, they are terrified. And all of the doubt and questions and fear that’s been covered over with comforting, staunchly-held beliefs are brought to the surface. This is not a criticism. It's understandable, and seems to be part of the human condition, because most of us humans are addicted, regardless of the differences in our beliefs, to thinking. I consider an addiction to be anything we can’t stop - at least not for very long. It seems to have a force of its own and tends to run our behavior and our lives behind the scenes. And, while it offers the promise to make us feel better, and does so temporarily, it ultimately makes things worse. I don’t know about your mind, but mine, when allowed to run amok, doesn’t normally have great things to say about me or much else. If I watch closely enough, I can notice how it makes me feel bad, which gives me more to think about and more to figure out, which tends to fuel more thinking and the illusion that, "If I think about this long enough, I'll figure it out and then I'll feel better." There is a way to be free of the compulsive, addictive nature of the thinking brain. Beyond thinking and beyond the suppressed emotions that are often driving our thinking, is the space on which it all appears. The very nature of this space is peace, compassion, safety, and well-being. You can’t access it by thinking about it. And you can’t skip over the feelings that might come up once the thinking brain is quiet. The feelings must be met with the same quiet observance with which you meet and thereby quiet the thoughts. It’s not a journey for sissies. But it’s well worth the exploration. Please don't take my word for it. Just try it out for yourself. But I can tell you, in my own personal experience, as well as witnessing, being with, and guiding this process with clients, maybe over a thousand times, this seems clear: no religion, spiritual belief, or lack thereof has any better access to this space than any other. There is no emotional state, long-standing or temporary, that cannot be converted within and by the space. And, there is no amount of trauma in the bodymind too horrible, no nervous system too traumatized, that can’t be restored to balance, healing, and wholeness by the alchemical nature of this space. Please understand that I am not suggesting an end to religion, belief, diagnosis, or the thinking brain. I’m just suggesting an exploration of what lies beyond. And I guess I’d like to close with a poem I wrote several years ago called, Who You Are. Who You Are You have all that you need. You have all that you need within you to feel what you want to feel. You do not need a partner who loves you to feel unconditional love. You do not need a good job or money to feel secure. You do not need a symptom-free diagnosis-free body to feel well. Dig deep! The kingdom of heaven is within you! But first you must navigate the pearly gates - only the gates aren't so pearly. They have names like resistance and fear and are meant to distract you and block you from the kingdom and the truth of who you are. They masquerade as busyness and doing Facebooking and emailing obsessing and worrying blaming and opinionating picking a fight with your partner making somebody wrong defending your position watching television, reading a book, eating, exercising, drinking alcohol, any addiction at all, anything you can't stop. But the sneakiest, most insidious habit of all? Trying to figure it out. Oh, it seems innocent enough. You have a good mind. Surely if you think hard enough you can figure it out, whatever your it seems to be. So you're seduced into spinning round and round in your head convinced that a satisfying answer a solution is just around the corner, but it never is. The satisfaction never comes. There's just more spinning and the endless hook of trying. (Mental masturbation I call it). If you have the courage and I know that you do to stop spinning for a moment then take a deep breath and wait - in the scary groundless nothing-to-hang-onto wide-open space of not knowing. Just wait. Breathe. Be still with yourself hold your own hand and comfort yourself in the wide-open space of not knowing. Be patient. With practice I think you will find as I have that there is peace there is freedom there is comfort and wellbeing in the still quiet land of not knowing. And, there is love . . . Love that's so pure and so bright that you know in your unknowing that this is why you've been running this is what you've been scared of because this love is so big and so vast so all consuming so unfathomably deep. This must be God, you say and then you realize, Oh shit. It's me. Copyright 2012. All rights reserved. Shelly M. Smith. Related Post: The Key To Heaven If it were not for resistance we would all go free very quickly.
Lester Levenson, whose "awakening" and subsequent teachings inspired The Sedona Method and The Release Technique, said this about our emotions. He knew that the nature of energy is movement, which meant that energy, all energy, whether in the form of emotions, beliefs, or thought patterns, wants to move. It wants to transform. It wants to go home. The only thing that's stopping energy from flowing through and out of us, is us - our resistance to it. When we can learn how to get out of the way, our emotions will do what emotions are meant to do. They're like thunderstorms. They're meant to roll in and then just roll right on out. Now before you start giving yourself a hard time for having resistance in the first place, understand that it's mostly unconscious. Therefore, you can't correct it by thinking about it or with willpower. Secondly, please know that, in its own way, your resistance is probably trying to help you. It's trying to keep you safe. It most likely got set in motion when you were very young and perceived that having feelings or expressing feelings meant disapproval, the threat of abandonment, rejection, punishment, or any such thing that would be terrifying to your young child's system. The way to work with resistance is the same way you would work with any other feeling. (We often don't think of resistance as a feeling, but it is). With practice, you can get a felt sense of it - a sense of the energetic tone or quality of it. And when you can get a sense of it, you can acknowledge it, welcome it, and breathe with it, until it softens and releases. And you'll find that the feeling you're resisting will release right along with it. If you'd like some help with this, please let me know. In the meantime, just do your best to bring your non-judging awareness to whatever's happening inside. You're the only one who can. I saw myself on a white horse, in full battle armor, lance in hand, walking on a long dusty road, presumably between battles. We were both tired. It seemed to be our lot in life - going from one battle to the next. We didn't know anything else. We didn't question it. And then, without warning, without any thought or analysis, we stopped. I dropped my lance, turned my horse around, and headed home. I was done. Many of you who have worked with me have experienced images or visions that emerged spontaneously, as symbolic out-picturings of the energy that's being released. Several years ago, during one of my own releasing sessions, I had this one and haven't been the same since. Before I met this warrior within, met him where he lived, as energy stored in the bodymind, I couldn't have known how much I was seeing and operating in the world through his eyes. Chronic tension, scanning my outer life for potential problems, and bracing against my own feelings were so familiar, such an integral part of my inner experience, that I didn't realize how much he was running things and at what cost, until I felt the difference. Resistance is a tricky thing. Whether we're resisting our own internal experience, our own feelings, or something or someone outside of us, resistance is so second nature that it's mostly unconscious. We believe on some level that our bracing warrior stance is protecting us from feelings we don't want to feel, experiences we don't want to have, and truths we don't want to face. It helps us maintain an illusion of strength and of feeling safe and in control and separate. It can masquerade as "just the way I am" or as self-righteous, defense-worthy spiritual truths. Our current political climate, to me, is a powerful example. The popular slogan "Resist," which I assume is in response to our current political leadership, is not one that I'll ever get on board with and here's why: resistance to the other, any other, only makes things worse. It creates tension in your own bodymind, making you less effective and less open to creative solutions and possibilities. It also gives the "other" more to push against, thereby amplifying your respective you're-the-enemy-and-I-must-fight-you positions. Whether we're talking about politics or your relationship with yourself and your own feelings, resistance just creates more resistance. Pushing-against just creates more push-back. Does this mean you shouldn't have or feel your feelings? No. Feel your feelings. Acknowledge and welcome your feelings. Allow them to flow through your body. And when you learn how to acknowledge and welcome the resistance to your feelings that's also inevitably present, your feelings will release, along with the resistance. Does this also mean you shouldn't take action? Does this mean you'll be complacent? Of course not. Releasing resistance doesn't make you passive or complacent. Write letters to your representatives, sign petitions, vote, and take any other action that you feel led to take. But if you can, whenever you can, release the resistance first. Take it from an old warrior who has seen way too many battles. Fighting doesn't change a fucking thing. It doesn't change the other. It only makes you tired. The only fight worth fighting, the only battle you can ultimately win, is the one inside yourself - the one between you and your feelings, you and your beliefs about who you are, who the other is, and the way it should be. And one day, if you're really lucky, you'll get tired enough to stop, see the feelings and beliefs - the fight, for what it is, and you'll take a breath, turn your horse, and head toward home. From one tired warrior to another with love, Shelly “I will never attend an anti-war rally; if you have a peace rally, invite me.” Mother Theresa
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