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The Metaphysics of Emotions - emotional energy is real
I teach people to develop an observer / witness perspective that is pro-active and intervening, that actually becomes our Recovery Control Center / our Conscious Recovering Adult Observer perspective - so that we change how we are relating to our own internal process instead of just reacting to old tapes and old wounds.
In October 2008 as I am working on my November Joy2MeU Update in which I promised my yahoo mailing list that I would talk about my experience of participating in a Landmark Forum Education weekend, I realized that in conjunction with that I would need to finish an article I started last year about the Law of Attraction. In early 1991 I wrote an article on New Age Misinterpretations of Metaphysical Truth and when The Secret came out I felt a need to expand on what I had touched upon in the Misinterpretations article because I have seen so many people hurt because of the ways in which spiritual teachers, new age gurus, and new thought churches were/are teaching the Law of Attraction.
That there are so many resources these days that are teaching people that they need to learn to love themselves and stop allowing the past to dictate how they are living life today is a wonderful sign of the new Age of Healing & Joy that has dawned in human consciousness on the planet that I talked about in my book. That is the very good news.
"We have now entered a very special time in human history. An Age of Healing and Joy has dawned in human consciousness on this planet. We now have tools, knowledge, and most importantly, clearer access to healing energy and Spiritual guidance than has ever before been available in recorded human history on this planet."
Quote Frm Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls
The not so good news is that far too many of those teachers and organizations are teaching a lot of Truth mixed with some misinterpretations and false beliefs.
"The teachings of all the Master Teachers, of all the world's religions, contain some Truth along with a lot of distortions and lies. Discerning Truth is often like recovering treasure Frm shipwrecks that have been sitting on the ocean floor for hundreds of years - the grains of Truth, the nuggets of gold, have become encrusted with garbage over the years."
"There is Truth all around us. We can find messages everywhere once we start picking the baby out of the bathwater - once we begin to be willing and open to feeling and trusting the emotional energy communications of Truth Frm our Souls. The teachings of all of the Master Teachers, of all religions, philosophies, mythologies, fairy tales, even comic books, have Truth in them.
Quotes Frm Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls
Too many of the people who are teaching really wonderful concepts and Truths, are in my opinion still reacting out of their own personal codependency.
They have served Divine purpose by passing on some nuggets of Truth, some deeper understanding of different pieces of the puzzle. People as diverse as William Shakespeare and Albert Einstein: Carl Jung and Martin Luther King; Carlos Castanado and Joseph Campbell; Thomas Jefferson and Margaret Mead; were mystical messengers, way showers, who contributed to changing the planetary conditions in some way, enlarging the paradigm in relationship to some aspect of consciousness. . . .
. . . . . There are many mystical messengers among us today. They include people like: Richard Bach and Bob Dylan; John Bradshaw and Melody Beattie; Oprah Winfrey and Marianne Williamson; Neale Donald Walsch and James Redfield; etc. This does not mean that these people are totally clear channels for Truth - or that on a personal level they are in recovery. One of the most important paradigm enlarging books of the 1970 and 80s was written by a person who was, and is (last I heard), a practicing alcoholic.
The thing that all of us old souls have in common, that all mystical messengers have in common, is that we grew up in dysfunctional families in dysfunctional cultures. We are all codependent. Unfortunately, Frm my perspective, many of the mystical messengers present now have not done their emotional healing to the depth that allows them to change their core subconscious programing - and because of this they are still allowing codependency to twist and distort the messages of Truth they are carrying." - Codependency Recovery: Wounded Souls Dancing in the Light Book 2: A Dysfunctional Relationship with Life Chapter 12: Codependency in New Age Movement
In the article I referred to in the first paragraph that I am writing this article as a companion to - The Law of Attraction - Misunderstood & Misinterpreted - I talk about some of the reasons I believe these mystical messengers / spiritual teachers are giving out messages that are affected by codependency. Those include black and white thinking and shame about being human, but the discounting of emotions is the one that this article is addressing.
Emotions are real. Emotions are energy that is manifested into the body in a dimension, on a level, that cannot be seen or measured in any concrete way.
Traditional Western medical science has discounted emotions because it can't be measured or detected as tangible, physical substance.
There are certainly neurobiological aspects to any behavioral manifestation, but it is not possible for a scientific perspective which requires empirical proof to truly ascertain the cause of any condition - because emotional and spiritual components of a human's being can not be quantified. In other words, brain chemistry is definitely out of balance in relationship to any physical disorder or mental condition - including OCD, Bi-Polar Disorder, Depression, etc. That imbalance in brain chemistry definitely has an impact on emotions - but it is not possible to say absolutely which is the cause and which is the effect. The chicken and egg conundrum. In other words, did the emotional trauma and the fear and shame based relationship to life cause the chemical imbalance in the brain - or did the chemical imbalance come first. Traditional Western medicine is not holistic - it does not treat the whole being, it treats symptoms. Medication is necessary for some people. It is an invaluable temporary help for others. It is not the whole answer. The great majority of doctors are limited by their training, the intellectual paradigm which determines their perspective, to believing that they do know the answers." - Obsession / Obsessive Thinking Part 1
In the quote above I use the word empirical - a word that I mention in my article on the Law of Attraction that led me to the word metempirical - beyond experience, beyond evidence and observation. It is actually very easy to observe when someone is having feelings - but there isn't any measurable, discernible substance to those emotions, thus they have been discounted in Western Civilization. In the quote Frm my book within the following quote, I mention that this is a swing to the other extreme Frm earlier periods of Civilized history.
"This inability to discern between different levels of realty is part (along with the planetary conditions which will be addressed shortly) of the reason that many religious teachings are twisted, distorted, grotesquely warped misinterpretations of what were originally symbolic, metaphoric, allegorical attempts to explain the unexplainable.
Western Civilization (in reaction to earlier ages when it was out of balance to the other extreme of allowing superstition to rule) does not acknowledge that multiple levels of reality exist and as a result, has been way out of balance towards the left brain way of thinking - rational, logical, concrete, what you see is all there is. Since what is seen is a three dimensional illusion, anything that does not fit neatly into that three dimensional world has been labeled as not being real. Logically then, according to Western thought, the supernatural does not exist - it is only imagination and superstition - therefore anyone who believes in the supernatural is crazy.
Because emotional energy could not be seen or measured or weighed, and was not sanctioned by the AMA, emotions were discounted and devalued."
Quote Frm Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls
The emotional component of the internal human dynamic has been ignored - or seen as an extension of the mental. It is vital to start separating, and discerning a boundary between, the emotional and the mental levels of our being in order to heal our emotional wounds.
Just as the inability to discern between levels of reality caused humans to become enmeshed in their view of the macrocosm - and create a concept of god with human qualities - so too has this lack of discernment caused humans to discount the emotional component of the human experience. Psychology is a term that discounts emotions. It is not only traditional science that discounts emotions, but many New Age healers and practitioners also tend to discount emotional energy or to label certain emotions as negative. . . .
. . . . . Anyone who gives you a message that carries with it shame about being human, about feeling afraid or angry or whatever, needs to awaken to a larger perspective - needs to expand their intellectual paradigm and raise their consciousness to a higher level that is more aligned with Love. It doesn't matter how famous they are. It is possible that their work has had a huge impact on your growth. Be grateful for that, but give yourself permission to have the discernment to recognize when something they are saying doesn't resonate with Love." - Attack on America: A Spiritual Healing Perspective & Call for Higher Consciousness Chapter 6: ego strength and self worth
In that quote Frm my book - as I also mentioned in my Law of Attraction article - I used the word supernatural. If I were writing that paragraph today I would use the word metaphysical.
I mention in this last quote that Western Civilization is not holistic in it's approach to mental health - it discounts the emotional and spiritual components as I mentioned in the earlier quote.
"Our mental health system not only does not promote healing - it actually blocks the process. The mental health system in this country is designed to get your behavior and emotions under control so that you can fit back into the dysfunctional system.
Drugs that are designed to disconnect you Frm your feelings block the healing process. Mental health professionals who need to have you see them regularly in order to be financially supported, need to have you be dependent upon them, need to keep you a patient in order to survive."
Quote Frm Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls
Any counselor, therapist, psychologist - and especially psychiatrist - that is adhering to training that takes the traditional perspective of emotions will most likely not have done their own emotional healing, and because of that will not be comfortable with any "patient" being very emotional.
"It is also a vital part of the process to learn discernment. To learn to ask for help and guidance From people who are trustworthy, that means people who will not betray, abandon, shame, and abuse you. That means friends who will not abuse and betray you. That means counselors and therapists who will not judge and shame you and project their issues onto you.
(I believe that the cases of "false memories" that are getting a lot of publicity these days are in reality cases of emotional incest - which is rampant in our society and can be devastating to a person's relationship with his/her own sexuality - that are being misunderstood and misdiagnosed as sexual abuse by therapists who have not done their own emotional healing and project their own issues of emotional incest and/or sexual abuse onto their patients).
Someone who has not done her/his own emotionally healing grief work cannot guide you through yours. Or as John Bradshaw put it in his excellent PBS series on reclaiming the inner child, "No one can lead you somewhere that they haven't been.""
Quote From Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls
In his PBS series on healing the inner child, John Bradshaw talked about how important it is to choose counselors and therapists who have done their own emotional healing. He stated that he had been in recovery for 10 years and counseling for that period of time before he started doing the emotional healing. Prior to starting that process if someone he was working with started to get emotional, he would immediately take steps to pull them out of the emotions back onto an intellectual level.
One of the most important things to check out when you are interviewing a new counselor/therapist - is whether they have done any emotional healing. If they have not done any grief and anger work - actual emotional release work involving the deep grieving of sobs and snot running out the nose, and anger work, beating on cushions while they shout out their rage - then they will not want you to get emotional. Doing the deep emotional work can be terrifying - and unless the person who is facilitating your work has been through it themselves, they will be scared by your emotions. They will try to get you back into an intellectual framework - and many of them will tell you that you need to go on medication." - Choosing a therapist or counselor with discernment
What is so sad to me - and sometimes makes me angry so that I rant and rave - is that it is not just traditional mental health professionals that discount emotions, but also New Age and alternative healers and spiritual teachers. New Age is in many ways a synthesis of Western and Eastern beliefs and practices. What too many of the people involved in New Age don't understand is this: the reality that both traditions discount emotions is a symptom of a larger dysfunction caused by the planetary conditions that dictated the course of human evolution on this planet.
Eastern beliefs though more holistic in general and accepting of the metaphysical energies that are the focus of acupuncture (to name one example, Feng Shui, Chi, etc. ), have also discounted emotions - as something that one should rise above. In order to become "enlightened" it was thought that one must rise above being human and feeling messy human emotions.
Both Western and Eastern beliefs are out of balance and codependent in my belief.
"All civilizations are dysfunctional to varying degrees, as are subcultures within those civilizations. They just have different flavors of dysfunction, of imbalance.
As an example: In much of Asia the individual is discounted for the good of the whole - whether that be family or corporation or country. The individual takes his or her self-definition Frm the larger system. That is just as out of balance and dysfunctional as the Western Civilization manifestation of glorifying the individual to the detriment of the whole. It is just a different variety of dysfunction.
The goal of this dance of Recovery is integration and balance. That means celebrating being a tree while also glorying in being a part of the forest. Recovery is a process of becoming conscious of our individual wholeness and our ONENESS with all."
Quote Frm Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls
"The dysfunction in Western Civilization has evolved to be more focused toward a left brain, masculine type of view of reality - concrete, rational, subdue the planet and multiply. Eastern Civilization has tended toward more feminine, abstract, contemplative - detachment Frm the concrete, a perspective with more detachment Frm the Illusion. But Eastern Civilization, though based upon a more intuitive perspective, did not, for the most part, manifest that in the treatment of women." - Attack on America: A Spiritual Healing Perspective & Call for Higher Consciousness Chapter 4
Eastern Civilization also did not manifest any balance emotionally. Whereas Western Civilization has tended towards allowing righteous male anger and aggression to drive civilization's evolution, Eastern culture has in general tended more towards denial of all emotions - a stoic role model for appropriate emotional behavior." Codependency Recovery: Wounded Souls Dancing in the Light Book 2: A Dysfunctional Relationship with Life Chapter 11: Codependent Counselors / Therapists / Healers
When I am working with people, teaching them my approach to inner healing, I always asked if they have been involved in Eastern meditation practices. The reason that I ask that is to be able to tell them that when I talk about how important the observer perspective is to codependency recovery I am not talking about the passive observer that is taught in meditation practices. The type of observer perspective I teach people is pro-active and intervening - not just passively observing thoughts and feelings but actually taking action to change the internal programming that we do have the power to change.
When I speak of a detached observer perspective, I am not talking about the kind of observation that is taught in some spiritual meditation practices. Many people use that type of observation as a way to avoid feeling the feelings. That type of detachment Frm emotions is what some people experience on anti-depressants. Some people use chanting and meditation as anti-depressants. Chanting and meditation can be invaluable tools but applied in an imbalanced manner can, like positive affirmations, be used as tools to deny feelings.
Just observing the feelings does not heal them; does not fundamentally change our relationship patterns; does not make our fear of intimacy go away. We need to feel, experience, and release the emotional energy in order to heal the wounds and take power away Frm them." - Co-Creation: Owning your Power to Manifest Love
"When we are reacting out of our childhood emotional wounds, then what we are feeling may have very little to do with the situation we are in or with the people with whom we are dealing in the moment.
In order to start be-ing in the moment in a healthy, age-appropriate way it is necessary to heal our "inner child." The inner child we need to heal is actually our "inner children" who have been running our lives because we have been unconsciously reacting to life out of the emotional wounds and attitudes, the old tapes, of our childhoods. . . .
Until we heal our wounds, until we become honest and clear in our emotional process, we are not able to be discerning. We are not capable of responding to life in the now - we are only able to react out of old grief, out of old tapes."
Quote Frm Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls
We need to develop a detached, objective observer perspective in order to become more aware of our own internal cause and effect - so that we can change the ego programming and transform how we relate to our own emotions by recognizing them as energy that needs to flow.
(Being able to observe ourselves is a very important tool in the process but like any other tool - acceptance, forgiveness, honesty, etc. - can be taken out of balance and applied dysfunctionally.)
I dated a woman for a while who had been practicing for many years - it was very interesting for me to observe (I was at a point in my process where I was working on letting go of rescuing and needing to change the other person - so I was just observing) how she ignored conflict. We never did any processing of difficulties which arose because she would act as if it never happened. Avoiding conflict also denies intimacy - we cannot be emotionally intimate with someone we can't be angry at. Conflict is an inherent part of relationships and is to be worked through to grow - it is the garden out of which deeper intimacy grows." - Buddha, Buddhism, and Japanese cultural dysfunction
Many people use meditation as a form of antidepressant to stay disassociated Frm their feelings. There are also many people who use wonderful tools like positive affirmations and positive visualization to discount and deny emotions. Meditation and chanting, affirmations and visualization, music and dancing, movement and exercise, etc., are tools that can be very helpful in maintaining some balance on our recovery journey / spiritual path - but can also be used in ways that deny feelings. Positive affirmations and visualization are vital in changing our perspective of life away Frm the negative programming of childhood into alignment with Metaphysical Law / the Law of Attraction - but it is vital to honor our emotions and emotional process if we truly want to start having some freedom Frm the past.
I am in this article going to using some quotes and excerpts Frm some of my writing to try to communicate about the metaphysics of emotional energy as I understand it. I am not going to do a lot of additional writing about it at this time, just a few comments to introduce or sum up the quotes I will be using. As I made a point of stating in my article on the Law of Attraction, it is not necessary to understand all of this, what is important is to be open to larger concepts that can help us find a more enjoyable, balanced, and functional way to relate to this human adventure we are experiencing - a way of living that helps us to be more Loving to our selves and others, that helps us to manifest more Love into human consciousness on the planet.
Opening up your imagination to remembering that this human experience includes dimensions and levels that are not concrete and rational Frm a three-dimensional perspective will help you to change your relationship with your own emotions. Emotions are energy. They exist on a level of reality that needs to be honored and respected if we are going to heal our relationship with ourselves. Discounting emotions is dysfunctional if our goal is to see ourselves and our relationships clearly enough to heal and tune into Love and Joy." - Attack on America - Chapter 8 At War Within
In December of 1999 I published an article entitled My Spiritual Belief System and the New Millennium. That article is now completely available only in a subscription area of my site but the following quote can be found on the part of the page that is still available.
Integrating this belief system into my emotional relationship with life has helped me: to learn to be more Loving to my self and others; to experience life as a journey of growth even when it feels like punishment; to relax, let go of fear, and enJoy life for more moments of the day than I ever believed possible. This belief paradigm is my Truth, and it supports the fundamental principle that I have committed my life to teaching and remembering: Love is the Ultimate Truth." - My Spiritual Belief System and the New Millennium
In the Law of Attraction article a quote is included Frm the Author's Foreword of my book that sums up part of the reason I am writing this article. I will include a paragraph of it here just to reiterate that purpose.
"I share this message with you, the reader of this book, in the hopes that it will help you to remember the Truth of who you are, and why you are here. This information is not meant to be absolute or the final word - it is meant as an alternative perspective for you to consider. A Cosmic Perspective that just might help to make life an easier, more enjoyable experience for you."
Quote Frm Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls
Metaphysical = beyond the physical
I am going to start off with the following excerpt from one of the first articles in my inner child healing section. It lists some of the reasons that it is so important to feel the feelings.
Feeling the Feelings - grief / emotional energy release
"Attempting to suppress emotions is dysfunctional; it does not work. Emotions are energy: E-motion = energy in motion. It is supposed to be in motion, it was meant to flow.
Emotions have a purpose, a very good reason to be - even those emotions that feel uncomfortable. Fear is a warning, anger is for protection, tears are for cleansing and releasing. These are not negative emotional responses! We were taught to react negatively to them. It is our reaction that is dysfunctional and negative, not the emotion." "The way to stop reacting out of our inner children is to release the stored emotional energy from our childhoods by doing the grief work that will heal our wounds. The only effective, long term way to clear our emotional process - to clear the inner channel to Truth which exists in all of us - is to grieve the wounds which we suffered as children. The most important single tool, the tool which is vital to changing behavior patterns and attitudes in this healing transformation, is the grief process. The process of grieving.
We are all carrying around repressed pain, terror, shame, and rage energy from our childhoods, whether it was twenty years ago or fifty years ago. We have this grief energy within us even if we came from a relatively healthy family, because this society is emotionally dishonest and dysfunctional."
Emotions have a purpose, a very good reason to be - even those emotions that feel uncomfortable. Fear is a warning, anger is for protection, tears are for cleansing and releasing. These are not negative emotional responses! We were taught to react negatively to them. It is our reaction that is dysfunctional and negative, not the emotion." "The way to stop reacting out of our inner children is to release the stored emotional energy from our childhoods by doing the grief work that will heal our wounds. The only effective, long term way to clear our emotional process - to clear the inner channel to Truth which exists in all of us - is to grieve the wounds which we suffered as children. The most important single tool, the tool which is vital to changing behavior patterns and attitudes in this healing transformation, is the grief process. The process of grieving.
We are all carrying around repressed pain, terror, shame, and rage energy from our childhoods, whether it was twenty years ago or fifty years ago. We have this grief energy within us even if we came from a relatively healthy family, because this society is emotionally dishonest and dysfunctional."
Quote from Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls
Emotions are energy that is manifested in our bodies. They exist below the neck. They are not thoughts (although attitudes set up our emotional reactions.) In order to do the emotional healing it is vital to start paying attention to where energy is manifesting in our bodies. Where is there tension, tightness? Could that "indigestion" really be some feelings? Are those "butterflies" in my stomach telling me something emotionally?
When I am working with someone and they start having some feelings coming up, the first thing I have to tell them is to keep breathing. Most of us have learned a variety of ways to control our emotions and one of them is to stop breathing and close our throats. That is because grief in the form of sadness accumulates in our upper chest and breathing into it helps some of it to escape - so we learned to stop breathing at those moments when we start getting emotional, when our voice starts breaking.
Western civilization has for many years been way out of balance towards the left brain way of thinking - concrete, rational, what you see is all there is (this was in reaction to earlier times of being out of balance the other way, towards superstition and ignorance.) Because emotional energy can not be seen or measured or weighed ("The x-ray shows you've got 5 pounds of grief in there.") emotions were discounted and devalued. This has started to change somewhat in recent years but most of us grew up in a society that taught us that being too emotional was a bad thing that we should avoid. (Certain cultures / subcultures give more permission for emotions but those are usually out of balance to the other extreme of allowing the emotions to rule - the goal is balance: between mental and emotional, between intuitive and rational.)
Emotions are a vital part of our being for several reasons.
1. Because it is energy and energy cannot just disappear. The emotional energy generated by the circumstances of our childhood and early life does not go away just because we were forced to deny it. It is still trapped in our body - in a pressurized, explosive state, as a result of being suppressed. If we don't learn how to release it in a healthy way it will explode outward or implode back in on us. Eventually it will transform into some other form - such as cancer.
2. As long as we have pockets of pressurized emotional energy that we have to avoid dealing with - those emotional wounds will run our lives. We use food, cigarettes, alcohol and drugs, work, religion, exercise, meditation, television, etc., to help us keep suppressing that energy. To help us keep ourselves focused on something else, anything else, besides the emotional wounds that terrify us. The emotional wounds are what cause obsession and compulsion, are what the "critical parent" voice works so hard to keep us from dealing with.
3. Our emotions tell us who we are - our Soul communicates with us through emotional energy vibrations. Truth is an emotional energy vibrational communication from our Soul on the Spiritual Plane to our being/spirit/soul on this physical plane - it is something that we feel in our heart/our gut, something that resonates within us.
Our problem has been that because of our unhealed childhood wounds it has been very difficult to tell the difference between an intuitive emotional Truth and the emotional truth that comes from our childhood wounds. When one of our buttons is pushed and we react out of the insecure, scared little kid inside of us (or the angry/rage filled kid, or the powerless/helpless kid, etc.) then we are reacting to what our emotional truth was when we were 5 or 9 or 14 - not to what is happening now. Since we have been doing that all of our lives, we learned not to trust our emotional reactions (and got the message not to trust them in a variety of ways when we were kids.)
4. We are attracted to people that feel familiar on an energetic level - which means (until we start clearing our emotional process) people that emotionally / vibrationally feel like our parents did when we were very little kids. At a certain point in my process I realized that if I met a woman who felt like my soul mate, that the chances were pretty huge that she was one more unavailable woman that fit my pattern of being attracted to someone who would reinforce the message that I wasn't good enough, that I was unlovable. Until we start releasing the hurt, sadness, rage, shame, terror - the emotional grief energy - from our childhoods we will keep having dysfunctional relationships.
. . . . . . The more we are able to feel and release the feelings / emotional energy, the more clearly we can tune into the emotional energy that is Truth - and Love, Light, Joy, Beauty - coming from The Source Energy." - Feeling the Feelings - grief / emotional energy release
Here is a quote from Codependency Recovery: Wounded Souls Dancing in the Light Book 2: A Dysfunctional Relationship with Life Chapter 12: Codependency in New Age Movement. Within it is a quote from my book that shows how strongly I believe it is necessary to own our feelings - as well as a reference to the emotions as energy that exist on the etheric plane in the emotional body.
"New Age and alternative healers, Spiritual Teachers, self help gurus, etc., who have not done their emotional healing and enlarged their subconscious intellectual paradigm enough to consciously stop empowering polarity and shame emotionally as well as intellectually, are set up to be trapped in their codependency just as traditional mental health practitioners are limited by the emotionally dishonest beliefs of dysfunctional civilization." . . . . . . . not only does traditional science, medicine, and psychology discount emotions - treat them as a chemical reaction or an extension of thought, but many of the so called New Age teachers do the same. Emotions are, on one level, chemical reactions - just as on another level, our emotional reactions are very much influenced by our mental attitudes. But emotions are also energy that exists in a very real way on the etheric plane in the emotional body. To discount the level in which emotions are energy is very dysfunctional in my belief. To discount the emotional energy that was generated in our childhood, and still exists in our being, is to discount our own experiences and being - to say nothing of being very dangerous to our physical and mental health.Reiki, energy healing, crystals, body work, breath work, dance/movement, art therapy, meditation, yoga, etc., are all wonderful tools that can be very helpful in the healing process - but unless we consciously own our feelings, our grief and rage and terror from childhood, we are not owning our self and our experiences in this lifetime.
It is very attractive for people to believe that they can evolve spiritually without doing their grief work. Emotions are messy, especially the old repressed ones that can feel so overwhelming. It is natural and normal for human beings to want to do things the easier, softer way. So, many people want to hear someone tell them that it is possible to become enlightened without healing emotionally. Many of those so called experts will even teach that if one is feeling the emotions then one is doing something wrong.
I believe that such teachings are inaccurate. I believe that our emotions are an important and vital part of our being that needs to be own and honored. I believe that fear is a teacher that helps us move toward Love, that helps us to learn how to love ourselves. I do not believe that, in and of itself, it is wrong or bad or the opposite of love. Our relationship with it can cause it to be very dysfunctional - which is why we need to own it so we can change our relationship with it. The reality of being human is that this experience is really scary sometime. I am saying that is OK - that it is not shameful or unevolved to feel fear." - New Age Misinterpretations of Metaphysical Truth
"Far too many spiritual practices are used to deny feelings instead of owning and releasing them. Far too many New Age practitioners and teachers give people the false message that 'negative' emotions can be transformed energetically without ever really owning and feeling them.We learned how to relate to self, to life, and to other people in early childhood from people who were wounded in their childhood. To think that we can learn to Truly Love our self without ever owning our childhood experience is pretty silly in my opinion. It was incredibly painful for us to come into human body in the Spiritually hostile, emotionally dishonest and abusive, shame based, patriarchal environment of modern civilization. It had a very traumatic effect on our perspective of, and relationship with, our self. We need to consciously heal that relationship with self in order to Truly own our connection to Self - to the Spirit, to The Source." - Codependency Recovery: Wounded Souls Dancing in the Light Book 2: A Dysfunctional Relationship with Life Chapter 12: Codependency in New Age Movement
There are many energetic modalities that are wonderful tools in the healing process - but they are tools, they are not the total solution. If we do not own the emotions and do the grief and rage work, we are not honoring and respecting the emotional part of our being.
The emotional work is messy. It is terrifying. Many people will do whatever they can to avoid it. That is normal and human - it is not bad or shameful. But it is dysfunctional - it doesn't work
"We can intellectually throw out false beliefs. We can intellectually remember and embrace the Truth of ONENESS and Light and Love. But we cannot integrate Spiritual Truths into our day-to-day human existence, in a way which allows us to substantially change the dysfunctional behavior patterns that we had to adopt to survive, until we deal with our emotional wounds. Until we deal with the subconscious emotional programming from our childhoods.
We cannot learn to Love without honoring our Rage!
We cannot allow ourselves to be Truly Intimate with ourselves or anyone else without owning our Grief.
We cannot clearly reconnect with the Light unless we are willing to own and honor our experience of the Darkness.
We cannot fully feel the Joy unless we are willing to feel the Sadness.
We need to do our emotional healing, to heal our wounded souls, in order to reconnect with our Souls on the highest vibrational levels. In order to reconnect with the God-Force that is Love and Light, Joy and Truth."Quote from Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls
Intellectually learning what healthy behavior is, or just remembering Spiritual Truth, does not heal our fear of intimacy - or the core place within us where we feel shame about our being. We need to own our emotional wounds to own our self. Reiki or crystals or any of the wonderful tools available to us can be aids in the process - but they cannot replace going through the process.
We cannot learn to Truly accept and Love the person we are - Truly own our True Magnificent Spiritual essence - without being willing to heal our human emotional wounds, without owning our personal grief from this lifetime.
" It is necessary to own and honor the child who we were in order to Love the person we are. And the only way to do that is to own that child's experiences, honor that child's feelings, and release the emotional grief energy that we are still carrying around."Quote from Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls- Attack on America - A Spiritual Healing Perspective Chapter 6
On my biography page I share a bit about the origins of my book - and the reality that it wasn't the first writing I did about the Dance of Wounded Souls. The first writing I did was in 1988 when I started writing a Magical, Mystical Spiritual Fable that was the Universe's way of helping to start exploring this metaphysical stuff. I was writing that "far out" metaphysical fable at the same time I was doing my inner child healing and codependency recovery and saw them pretty much as two different things. It was when they came together in some public talks I did in 1991 that Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls was born. Prior to writing the True Nature of Love series in 1999, I had mostly tried to avoid getting into "far out" metaphysical stuff in what I was posting on my web site and limit it to the subscription area of my site. In the the first of two excerpts below from an article in that series, I use a quote from that Fable - which I refer to as the first book of a Trilogy (a trilogy that will never be completed I know now) - and even kind of apologized for getting so far out in that writing.
"Many of the expressions that are in common usage in the language of human interrelationship are incredibly accurate on multiple levels. One such expression is 'giving your power away.' If we are not clear in our relationship with self, if we are reacting to the definitions of self that we learned in childhood, then we are giving power away both literally and figuratively on multiple levels.
The level that most people are not aware of, and that is important for the focus of this column, is energetically. When we give power away to other people because our relationship with self is dysfunctional, we actually allow cords of energy to tie us to those people. These cords (ribbons, cables, tethers, threads, strands) of energy exist on the Etheric plane - which is where the Life Force energy runs through the chakra system.
We can literally be drained of our Life Force by these dysfunctional connections to other people. All of us learned to allow ourselves to both be drained of Life Force by others as well as to steal Life Force energy from others to survive.
We need to steal Life Force energy from others because we are blocked from clearly accessing our own Life Force energy by our dysfunctional relationship with self. Because our inner channel is not clear. In clearing up our inner channel to tune into the higher vibrational emotional energy of Light, Love, Joy, and Truth, we are also accessing our own Life Force energy. (The Life Force energy and the vibrational range of Light, Love, Joy, Truth, and Beauty are not the same thing but they are intimately interrelated.)
So, when I talk about giving our power away on an energetic level, it is an actual drain of energy, of power. Our codependence/ego defense system is set up to help us survive by trying to keep us from being drained of power at the same time it tries to steal energy from outside sources. Since we cannot clearly access the Source energy we have available to us to within, we look externally for sources of power and energy.
Codependency is outer or external dependence. We are dependent on outer or external sources to feed us the energy we need to survive. We make people, places, and things and/or money, property and prestige the Higher Power that we look to as the source of our energy, our power.
We are attached to those things literally on an energetic level by the cords of energy that are created on the Etheric plane due to the relationship between the bodies of our being that exist on that plane - which includes our mental and emotional bodies.
(I am now going to use a quote from my Trilogy, and again a little later in this column a continuation of this quote as well as a quote from another article, that are part of my Joy2MeU Journal and are only available to subscribers of that Journal. I apologize for that to all of you that are not subscribers. This is not an attempt to get you to subscribe - although it would certainly be OK if you decided to do that - it is just the best way I can find to facilitate communicating what I am attempting to communicate here. For those of you who are not subscribers, there is plenty of material on this web site to focus on that will help you clear up your relationship with your self without having to understand the more metaphysical aspects of this life experience. In fact, many people focus on the metaphysical aspects as a way of avoiding doing the emotional healing - so sometimes it is best not to get too caught up in the metaphysical.)
"The holographic illusion which is the Physical plane is composed of multiple levels of illusions. The most basic illusion within the Physical plane is that substance and separation exist. They do not. Everything in the physical universe is composed of energy. This energy interacts to form energy fields. These energy fields interact according to energy patterns to form other energy fields, which in turn interact according to energy patterns to form other energy fields, which in turn interact . . . etc., etc. The interaction of the One energy produces energy fields on the sub-subatomic level. These energy fields interact to produce subatomic energy fields, which in turn combine/interact to produce the energy field that we call the atom. (Remember energy fields are formed by energy vortex interaction, and atoms are are little bundles of swirling energy.) These atoms interact/combine to form the energy field that is the molecule. Molecular energy fields interact to form every type of substance/matter which humans perceive.
All energy fields are temporary effects of energy vortex interaction. (Temporary is a relative term. Physicists measure the lifetime of some subatomic particles/energy fields in quintillionths of a seconds, while the planet Earth has existed for billions of years - both are temporary.) The energy patterns which govern these interactions are also energy fields in and of themselves. For example - the individual human mind is an energy field, but it is also an energy pattern that governs the flow of communications between a humans' Spiritual being and physical being, and within the seven bodies which make up the humans' being. (The seven bodies and the mind will be discussed later. Note that attitudes in the mind can block the flow of communication from the Soul because the mind is an energy pattern.)
Each energy field vibrates at certain frequencies, and is interrelated and interdependent with all other energy fields. Each letter in this sentence is an energy field composed of energy fields vibrating at certain frequencies, each combination of letters that forms a word, each combination of words that forms a sentence, etc., etc., etc. (Millions of atoms can go into making up a single letter - aren't you glad you asked.) Each word, each concept, each idea, is an energy field interacting according to energy patterns that are energy fields.
(Get the point? The bottom line is that nothing is what it appears to be. You are made up of the same subatomic, atomic, and molecular energy as the chair you are sitting in and the air you are breathing. Just bring to consciousness for a moment the fact that your physical body vehicle is composed of an uncountable number of energy fields interacting according to energy patterns. Just to imagine the number of energy fields interacting within your physical body at this moment is overwhelming. Now think of the number of energy fields and energy patterns that come into play when dealing with something outside of yourself, and then of course there is your emotional body and your mental body, etc. - and you wonder why relationships are so hard.) - The Dance of the Wounded Souls Trilogy Book 1 - "In The Beginning . . ." History of the Universe Part V
The fact that the mind is an energy field that is also an energy pattern of interaction is very important to realize. Communication from within (both internally between different parts of our being and from our spirit/Soul/Higher Power) and without - stimulation from our environment and everything/everyone in it - flows through the energy field that is the mind to our being.
Our experiential reality is determined by the interpretations of our mind - by the intellectual paradigm which we are using to define / determine / translate / explain our reality. The attitudes, definitions, and belief systems which we hold mentally dictate our emotional reactions. Attitudes, definitions, and beliefs determine perspective and expectation - which in turn dictates our relationships. Our relationships to our self, to life, to other people, to The God-Force / Goddess Energy / Great Spirit. Our relationships to our own emotions, bodies, gender, etc., are dictated by the attitudes, definitions, and beliefs that we are holding mentally / intellectually. And we acquired those mental constructs / ideas / concepts in early childhood from the emotional experiences, intellectual teachings, and role modeling of the beings around us. If we have not done our emotional healing so that we can get in touch with our subconscious intellectual programming then we are still reacting to that early childhood programming / intellectual paradigm even though we may not be aware of it consciously.
"The Truth is that the intellectual value systems, the attitudes, that we use in deciding what's right and wrong were not ours in the first place. We accepted on a subconscious and emotional level the values that were imposed on us as children. Even if we throw out those attitudes and beliefs intellectually as adults, they still dictate our emotional reactions. Even if, especially if, we live our lives rebelling against them. By going to either extreme - accepting them without question or rejecting them without consideration - we are giving power away."
"It was impossible to start Loving myself and trusting myself, impossible to start finding some peace within, until I started to change my perspective of, and my definitions of, who I was and what emotions it was okay for me to feel.
Enlarging my perspective means changing my definitions, the definitions that were imposed on me as a child about who I am and how to do this life business. In Recovery it has been necessary to change my definitions of, and my perspective of, almost everything. That was the only way that it was possible to start learning how to Love myself.
I spent most of my life feeling like I was being punished because I was taught that God was punishing and that I was unworthy and deserved to be punished. I had thrown out those beliefs about God and life on a conscious, intellectual level in my late teens - but in Recovery I was horrified to discover that I was still reacting to life emotionally based on those beliefs.
I realized that my perspective of life was being determined by beliefs that I had been taught as a child even though they were not what I believed as an adult."Quotes from Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls
"I went home to do some writing and was pretty amazed at what it revealed. I realized that I was still reacting to life out of the religious programming of my childhood - even though I had thrown out that belief system on a conscious, intellectual level in my late teens and early twenties. The writing that I did that night helped me to recognize that my emotional programming was dictating my relationship with life even though it was not what I consciously believed.
I realized that the belief that "life was about sin and punishment and I was a sinner who deserved to be punished" was running my life. When I felt "bad" or "bad" things happened to me - I tried to blame it on others to keep from realizing how much I was hating myself for being flawed and defective, a sinner. When I felt good or good things happened I was holding my breath because I knew it would be taken away because I didn't deserve it. Often when things got too good I would sabotage it because I couldn't stand the suspense of waiting for god to take it away - which "he" would because I didn't deserve it.
I could suddenly see that I had been playing a game, with that punishing god I learned about in childhood, for all of my adult life. I tried not to show that I enjoyed or valued anything too much so that maybe god wouldn't notice and take it away. In other words, I could never relax and be in the moment in Joy or peace because the moment I showed that I was enjoying life god would step in to punish me." - Joy2MeU Journal Premier issue The Story of "Joy to You & Me"
We cannot get clearly in touch with the subconscious programming without doing the grief work. The subconscious intellectual programming is tied to the emotional wounds we suffered and many years of suppressing those feelings has also buried the attitudes, definitions, and beliefs that are connected to those emotional wounds. It is possible to get intellectually aware of some of them through such tools as hypnosis, or having a therapist or psychic or energy healer tell us they are there - but we cannot really understand how much power they carry without feeling the emotional context - and cannot change them without reducing the emotional charge / releasing the emotional energy tied to them. Knowing they are there will not make them go away.""It does not make any difference what our conscious intellectual beliefs are as long as we are reacting energetically to old programming. That is why it is so vital to do the emotional healing. In order to clear our emotional body of the repressed emotional energy so that we can change the intellectual paradigm that is embedded in our mental body / mind, it is necessary to do the emotional healing. All of the intellectual knowledge of Spiritual Truth and healthy relationship behavior that we can acquire will not significantly transform the behavioral patterns that are being driven by the subconscious programming. We cannot heal our fear of intimacy so that we can open up to receiving Love without feeling the feelings. . . .***
. . . . The power / energy / juice that we need comes from within - not from outside. People, places, and things can sometimes help us to access the power that is within us - but they are not the source of that power. The source is within!
It has always come from within - we were just trained to look outside for it because of the reversity of the planets energy field of emotional consciousness has caused human beings to do human backwards. Codependence is a disease of reversed focus - looking externally for that which is available within us. . . . .
. . . . There is nothing wrong with who we are - it is our relationship to our self that is messed up. We are all Spiritual Beings having a human experience. We all have Divine worth as children of The Source. We are all perfect parts of The Source. In our relationship with ourselves on this level we need to learn to open up to receiving / accessing the Love that is our True state of being - that is why we are here. To heal so that we can reconnect with Love.
We can have healthy ties / threads / cords of energy connecting us to other people but only by learning to see ourselves clearly. As long as our self definition is enmeshed with other people's attitudes and behaviors, we are incapable of making True choices about our own best interests. Until we start seeing ourselves clearly, we will continue to be energetically drawn to people who will recreate our childhood emotional wounds.
"Both the classic codependent patterns and the classic counterdependent patterns are behavioral defenses, strategies, designed to protect us from the devastating pain and debilitating shame of being abandoned because we are flawed, because we are not good enough, not worthy and lovable. One tries to protect against abandonment by avoiding confrontation and pleasing the other - while the second tries to avoid abandonment by pretending we don't need anyone else. Both are dysfunctional and dishonest." - Joy2MeU Journal - article The Defensive Dance - Codependent & Counterdependent Behavior
On an energetic level, abandonment means getting unplugged from our energy source. Abandonment feels life-threatening because the cords that bind us to other people, and feed us Life Force energy, gets unplugged and we do not know how to access that energy for ourselves. That is why it is so important to learn to plug in internally, access the Transcendent emotional energy of Love, Light, Joy, and Truth that is available to us within." - The True Nature of Love - part 4, Energetic Clarity
A key line in this is that 'The attitudes, definitions, and belief systems which we hold mentally dictate our emotional reactions.' This is a key point in the Law of Attraction teachings - and it is the Truth. We need to change the intellectual paradigm that is dicating our relationship with life in order to learn to be positive co-creators in our lives instead of the negative co-creators we were programmed to be in childhood. It is vital to change the intellectual programming - it is the only way to change our emotional experience of life. That is one of the reasons it is so important to align with the Law of Attraction - so that we can start creating more positive effect in our lives.
What so many people who are teaching the Law of Attraction don't seem to understand however - or at least don't communicate it in how they are teaching it - is that changing that ego programming now does not make the emotional energy from the past disappear. We cannot just start being in the Now and let go of the past (except in the moment - the more we heal the more ability we have to let go of the past and be present in the moment for more moments of the day.) We have repressed, suppressed, pressurized emotional energy within us in relationship to our emotional wounds. That is why it is so important to do the grief work to release some of that energy - to take power from those emotional "buttons" that dictate our reactions in intimate relationships. We can't just start being spiritual in our relationships with other human beings without healing those emotional wounds from the past - releasing some of that repressed emotional energy.
"If you have ever wondered why it is so much easier to feel Spiritual in relationship to nature or animals, here is your answer. It was people who wounded us in childhood. It is people who our egos developed defense systems to protect us from.
I have told people for years, that the only reason to do inner child healing work is if we are going to interact with other people. If one is going to live in isolation on a mountain top meditating, it will be fairly easy to feel Spiritually connected. It is relating to other human beings that is messy." - Reprogramming our dysfunctional ego defenses
Within the following long excerpt from a chapter of my online book about the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001 I use quote from the "Trilogy" book that is a continuation of the quote from it used above. I also quote several short sections that were quoted earlier but I am doing that because I think if gives some useful context and reiterates some important messages. (I decided to use the same color for the quote from my Trilogy book in this excerpt - and one immediately after it and another one below - for clarity.)
"One of the fascinating things about the Age of Healing and Joy that has dawned in human consciousness is that the tools and knowledge that we need to raise our consciousness, to awaken to consciousness, have been unfolding in all areas of human endeavor over time, and at an accelerated rate in the last fifty to one hundred years. One of the most fascinating things to me, and a key in my personal healing process, is in the area of physics."Quote from Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls
I was so desperate to find some meaning and purpose to life that I was willing to go where I was led in my quest to find a concept of a Higher Power that could possibly Love me. I was open to the messages that were coming my way - and willing to buy Illusions when I discovered it in a grocery store at only 3 months of sobriety. I was later willing to start reading and trying to understand quantum physics when I was led to books like The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra and The Dancing Wu Li Masters by Gary Zukov.
And, let me tell you, I hated science in school. In college I took geology to fulfill my science requirement - even though it involved twice as many course hours - because I hated physics and chemistry and such. (I ended up really getting into geology by the way - fascinating stuff.) So, we are talking a major surrender here.
I don't remember now how I was led to studying quantum physics - or when exactly on my Spiritual growth path it happened - but it was a major influence for me in a multitude of ways.
One of the most important ways it helped me, was in my relationship with my own emotions. As I opened up my intellectual paradigm to starting to understand that everything was energetic - and that there were different levels and types of energy - I started to understand the importance of emotions as energy. Eventually I came to understand that emotional energy is generated in a dimension that is not part of the three-dimensional concrete reality that traditional views of science, medicine, etc., are based upon.
I am not going to go into a lot of detail here because as I have stated, understanding how it all works is not important - and it is in reality impossible for human beings to see the whole of the puzzle. What is important is having enough imagination to open up to larger perspectives of life so that we can change our relationship with ourselves.
"None of the details of any of these explanations of the unexplainable should be taken too seriously or literally - it is impossible to describe the indescribable. They are merely tools to facilitate a paradigm shift in consciousness - to help us open up to larger definitions of the Creation than those we were taught in childhood. The goal here is to empower a more expansive context within which to view the dance of life - one which allows for a perspective of human existence that does not include shame and sin." - The Dance of the Wounded Souls Trilogy Book 1 History of the Universe Part IV "Notes to Earthlings"I am going to use another quote from my Trilogy here in the hopes that it will help you to be open to expanding your intellectual paradigm. Understanding intellectually is not as important as resonating with the memory. What is important is to remember that everything in the puzzle does fit together perfectly - so that you can start being more Loving to yourself. So that you can stop buying into the lies of sin and shame. So that you can stop buying into the arrogant, codependent messages coming from the disease - the damaged ego - that tell you that everyone else is a child of God but there is something defective about you personally. (The sentence that is most important - in terms of emotional process - in this quote is in bold.)
"All of the interactions within the Creation Dream are a result of the basic interaction of energy in motion being resisted by energy that is motionless. This is the primary level of interaction. Out of this interaction are created the energy fields on the sub-sub-atomic level, which interact to form the subatomic, the atomic, and the molecular levels of the cosmic dance of energy that is the dream-movie. On all levels energy interactions take the form of energy vortexes. This the cause of the spiral, or helix, pattern which is the blueprint for the physical universe. It is also the cause of rotation around an internal axis of everything from subatomic and atomic particles (as was stated earlier, what physicists call particles - whether subatomic or the atom itself - are not particles of mass but rather energy fields - bundles of energy - that are energy vortexes.) to the planet Earth itself, which rotates on an axis through the North and South poles. The planet is an energy vortex, the solar system is an energy vortex, (thus planets which rotate on an internal axis rotate around the sun, which rotates on it's own internal axis) the Creation Dream itself is an energy vortex.
What all of the energy vortexes, within the dream-movie, have in common - and what causes different dimensions to exist . . . . . . - is that they "wobble" on their internal axis. This can be pictured as being like a spinning top as it is slowing down. As the top slows down it starts to wobble on it's axis, rather than spinning on a straight vertical axis as it does when at it's maximum spin velocity. The difference between a top and energy vortexes, is that the energy vortexes do not slow down but rather wobble at a constant rate continuously. Within the dream movie there are multiple dimensions because there are different rates of wobble. The Etheric plane, for example, has a different rate of wobble than the Physical plane and thus it's energy is not discernible in terms of any conventional human means of measurement or detection.
Thus everything in the dream-movie is made up of the same basic energetic structure, with the differences between Dimensions and dimensions being caused by vibrational frequency and rate of wobble. This causes each plane of existence, and the different dimensions within those planes, to differ from each other in terms of density. Because of this difference in density, all seven Dimensions can, and do, exist in the same space (as has been mentioned "space," as we understand it, only exists on the densest plane, the Physical.) A way that this can be understood is in terms of something we understand on the Physical plane. Think of the relative difference in density between your physical body vehicle and air. Air is relatively less dense to a degree that you can walk through it without noticing it. The difference in relative density between the dimensions can be greater, or less, than the relative density difference between your physical being and air.
Or better yet, picture the difference in density between yourself and television/radio waves. When you turn on your television or radio you get a picture and sound, or music. That is proof to you that these waves are present in your space - yet you do not perceive them in the normal course of events. The relative density of their atomic structure due to vibrational frequency (even with the same rate of wobble) is such that you would not know that they existed in your space - except that you have a receiver (radio/TV) which is capable of tuning into the appropriate energy frequencies so that they can be manifested in a form that is perceivable. This is an example, not only of how "less dense" dimensions of reality can be present in your space, but also that these different frequencies can be tuned in (manifested) with the proper receiver. Every human being is equipped with the "proper receiver" to tune into the Transcendent vibrational frequencies. The human receiver exists within, and the clearer your inner channel, the more consistently you can tune into the higher frequencies." - The Dance of the Wounded Souls Trilogy Book 1 History of the Universe Part VI" Quantum physics, the study of the microscopic, the subatomic world, has gone even further. Quantum physics has now proven that everything we see is an illusion, that the physical world is an illusion.
Everything is made up of interacting energy. Energy interacts on a subatomic level to form energy fields which physicists call subatomic particles. These subatomic energy fields interact to form atomic energy fields, atoms, which interact to form molecules. Everything in the physical world is made up of interacting atomic and molecular energy fields.
There is no such thing as separation in the physical world. . . . . . . Separation is an illusion. There is energy traveling at thousands of miles per second in your body right at this moment. There is energy interacting between, passing between, you and the chair you are sitting on, you and the air around you, you and any other beings in the room. . . . . . . We are all part of one gigantic, dynamic dance of energy.
Oneness is the Truth, the scientifically proven Truth, on this physical plane. It is also the Truth on multiple levels through multi-dimensional interrelationships.
All the pieces of the puzzle fit together perfectly according to logical, rational, precise, mathematically and musically attuned laws of energy interaction. When we look at the life experience in a large enough perspective we can remember that.
The mystical Truth that we are all ONE in God has been known through the ages. What we have never had before is the ability to integrate that mystical Truth into human physical, perceptual reality.
We now have the tools and the knowledge that we need to do that. We now have the guidance we need to integrate Spiritual Truth into physical experiential reality. To find a place of balance in the physical world in alignment with Spiritual Truth."Quote from Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls
Etheric plane
Phrases expressing Metaphysical / Spiritual Truth are sprinkled throughout our language. We use them often without realizing the full implications of them. We hear athletes and movie stars and rap singers use the phrase "everything happens for a reason" when describing how God helped them to win the game or the award or what have you. "Every cloud has a silver lining" or "what goes around, comes around" or "giving your power away" are just a few of the phrases that we use without ever being conscious of the elemental Truths that spawned the phrases - or the power to change our experience of life that are contained in these nuggets of Truth.(The energy vortex interaction that I wrote about in the above quotes is the reason that spiral is one of the most powerful ancient symbols. I include an excerpt from my Journal about the importance to me of the spiral and it's presence in my book on one of the pages of my web site that originally just included some helpful handouts.)
"The level that most people are not aware of, and that is important for the focus of this column, is energetically. When we give power away to other people because our relationship with self is dysfunctional, we actually allow cords of energy to tie us to those people. These cords (ribbons, cables, tethers, threads, strands) of energy exist on the Etheric plane - which is where the Life Force energy runs through the chakra system.
We can literally be drained of our Life Force by these dysfunctional connections to other people. All of us learned to allow ourselves to both be drained of Life Force by others as well as to steal Life Force energy from others to survive. We need to steal Life Force energy from others because we are blocked from clearly accessing our own Life Force energy by our dysfunctional relationship with self. Because our inner channel is not clear. In clearing up our inner channel to tune into the higher vibrational emotional energy of Light, Love, Joy, and Truth, we are also accessing our own Life Force energy. (The Life Force energy and the vibrational range of Light, Love, Joy, Truth, and Beauty are not the same thing but they are intimately interrelated.)
So, when I talk about giving our power away on an energetic level, it is an actual drain of energy, of power. Our codependence / ego defense system is set up to help us survive by trying to keep us from being drained of power at the same time it tries to steal energy from outside sources. Since we cannot clearly access the Source energy we have available to us to within, we look externally for sources of power and energy.
Codependency is outer or external dependence. We are dependent on outer or external sources to feed us the energy we need to survive. We make people, places, and things and/or money, property and prestige the Higher Power that we look to as the source of our energy, our power.
We are attached to those things literally on an energetic level by the cords of energy that are created on the Etheric plane due to the relationship between the bodies of our being that exist on that plane - which includes our mental and emotional bodies." - The True Nature of Love - part 4, Energetic Clarity
The series of article on The True Nature of Love that I wrote in 1999, is a series where I talk about metaphysical levels of the disease and recovery process in a way that I don't think I have anywhere else except in my Journal. That is very interesting to me considering my life circumstances in 1999. I will be talking about that more specifically in the next chapter. I mention it here because I am using some long quotes from that series in describing the metaphysical levels I am discussing in this and the next chapter (including a quote in the Grieving article portion of this chapter.)
I want to again emphasis that it is not necessary to understand all of this metaphysical stuff. What is important is to feel the resonance of Truth that will help you remember that it is all perfect when looked at from a large enough paradigm. Emotional energy is generated in our emotional body on the Etheric plane. That is where the chakra system exists. Many of you have probably had energy work done that helps you to understand that there is Truth in the ancient Chinese techniques of acupuncture. That there are energy junctions in our body - that are not acknowledged in traditional Western medicine - that do affect our physical bodies.
Opening up your imagination to remembering that this human experience includes dimensions and levels that are not concrete and rational from a three-dimensional perspective will help you to change your relationship with your own emotions. Emotions are energy. They exist on a level of reality that needs to be honored and respected if we are going to heal our relationship with ourselves. Discounting emotions is dysfunctional if our goal is to see ourselves and our relationships clearly enough to heal and tune into Love and Joy. - Attack on America - September 11, 2001 A Spiritual Healing Perspective & Call for Higher Consciousness Chapter 8 At War Within
(The reference above to my life circumstances when I wrote the True Nature of Love series of articles is something that I mentioned in a quote in the Law of Attraction article - that I wrote them while I was homeless for 6 months in 1999. That story is on my Joy2MeU biography page.)
"The chakra system of the human body exists on the Etheric plane in the subtle body. The chakras are bioenergetic centers which are gateways through which the flowing energy of the higher frequencies, including the Life Force, enter the human body. These energies then are dispersed throughout the chakra energy system. (The pressure points of acupuncture are smaller energy centers - junctions in the network - of the chakra system.) Each chakra can be thought of as acting like a physical heart, in that energy is flowing into and out of the different levels of the system through each chakra, just as blood flows into and out of the heart. (The heart is in fact a physical representation of the chakras, with blood being a physical symbol of the Life Force energy. The heart is, of course, part of a closed system while the chakra system is open to the Universal flow.) Just as blood nourishes and feeds the physical body, so does the energy of the higher frequencies nourish and feed the bodies of the spirit - including the physical body." - The Dance of the Wounded Souls Trilogy Book 1 History of the Universe Part VI "Notes to Earthlings"
Tuning into Love instead of fear and shame
Here is a quote from my Trilogy in which I discuss what the horizontal and vertical mean in my understanding. The difference between the horizontal and the vertical emotions is what I was referring to in the Law of Attraction article when I wrote: '. . . a statement from Marianne Williamson that "What is not love is fear." That is not only black and white but simplistic and linear as if Love and fear were the same type of emotional energy.' As I have said, the goal is to align attitudinally with Love as the Truth - but that doesn't mean we are not going to feel fear at times in our human adventure. It is important to own our horizontal human emotions at the same time we are aligning with Higher Truth attitudinally. Developing a boundary between emotional and mental - relating to our thoughts and emotions as two different kinds / levels of energy, because they are - is the key to integrating Spiritual Truth into our emotional relationship with life. We need to clear our intellectual programming (including subconscious) of false beliefs and dysfunctional definitions and attitudes, at the same time we are learning to be Loving, nurturing and compassionate in relating to our own emotional wounds to take power away from the repressed emotional energy from our past. We need to set boundaries with both the critical parent voice and with the emotional wounds / inner children so that we can stop letting the past have so much power in how we are living today.
In the several quotes on this page I have referred to tuning into, or plugging into, energy internally. As I stated in the quote from my Trilogy above, 'Every human being is equipped with the "proper receiver" to tune into the Transcendent vibrational frequencies.'
"Each and every one of us has an inner channel. . . .
But our inner channel is blocked and cluttered with repressed emotional energy and dysfunctional attitudes. The more we clear our inner channel through aligning with Truth attitudinally, and releasing the repressed emotional energy through the grief process, the clearer we can tune into the music of Love and Joy, Light and Truth."
Quote from Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls
Aligning with Truth attitudinally - aligning with the metaphysical Law of Attraction - is vital to our healing and Spiritual awakening. Releasing the repressed emotional energy is also - which is the point I am trying to make in this article.
One way of looking at this experience of being human that I have found very helpful - that helped me to change my perspective of, and therefore my relationship with life - is to look at this human experience as having the horizontal and vertical components / planes."Codependency and recovery are both multi-leveled, multi-dimensional phenomena. What we are trying to achieve is integration and balance on, and between, different levels. One of the ways it is helpful to me to think of this is in terms of the horizontal and vertical. The horizontal is about being human and relating to other humans and our environment. The vertical is Spiritual, about our relationship to a Higher Power, to the Universal Source.
In this context, what we are trying to achieve in recovery is to integrate the Truth of a Loving God-Force / Goddess Energy / Great Spirit into our relationship with the horizontal. That is what helps us to achieve some balance in our emotional, physical, and mental relationship with being human and in how we relate to other humans and our environment. . . . .
. . . . . Looking at the horizontal and vertical dimensions of life helped me to start being and to start doing in a more balanced way. It helped me to stop being a human doing - thinking that what I accomplished, or how I looked, on the outside is what gives me worth.
I talked in last months column about the transcendent emotions of Joy and Love and how we can access these emotions by being in the moment when relating to nature for instance. I am going to close out this months column with a quote from one of my Update Newsletters where I talk about transcendent vertical emotions and horizontal human emotions.
"I capitalize words such as Truth, Joy, and Love in my writing because that capitalization indicates that I am referring to the Transcendent vibrational energy that flows through the Illusion on the vertical plane. When I do not capitalize joy and love, I am referring to emotions of the horizontal plane. . . . .
. . . . . Happiness is a term I use in relationship to external circumstances. It (happiness) comes from doing, experiencing, interacting, etc. Joy - with the capital J - is about being, not doing."" - Balance on the horizontal, Integration of the vertical "The higher vibrational emotional frequency of Love, Light, Joy and Truth is not only a higher frequency but also has a different rate of wobble - which makes it possible for this energy to be flowing throughout the Illusion on all levels. This is the anomaly that was mentioned in the discussion of emotional energy in History V - and the reason that the joy that is a horizontal emotion is different from the Joy that is a Transcendent vertical emotion. Here is that discussion to refresh your memory.
There are many aspects of the human emotional process that have been, and will be, discussed throughout these books but it is necessary at this point to mention the difference between vertical emotions and horizontal emotions. The emotional energy vibrational frequency range that is Love, Light, Beauty, Joy, and Truth, is a vertical Transcendent emotion - that is, it exists through all levels within the Illusion, from the Spiritual Plane downward vibrationally to the physical plane. It is the highest vibration naturally occurring within the Temporal Plane, and exists as an anomaly - that is an exception to the structure of the lower vibrational frequencies - because it is not a lower vibrational frequency. It is available to all humans in the moment when they are willing and able to be present and to feel their feelings (stop and smell the roses) - and is available an ever increasing percentage of the time to individuals who are awakening Spiritually as they clear their inner channel and tune in to the Truth within them.
The horizontal emotion of joy can feel very much the same as Joy - and can in fact help us to access the Transcendent emotional energy of Joy. But the horizontal emotion that is joy is a relative reaction to external stimuli. That is, joy is felt because of some outside or external condition that raises our vibrational frequency within the vertical component of the horizontal emotional spectrum. This can be: an accomplishment such as achieving a goal or winning a contest; the feeling we get from experiencing the Love of another being - or an animal; a sensual experience such as the taste of food, or the feel of silk, or the touch of another being; or any of a number of other types of stimuli that are dependent upon outside circumstances or agencies. There is nothing wrong with feeling joy in reaction to these outer or external stimuli - what is dysfunctional is believing that they are the only source of joy. When we buy into the belief that the only joy or happiness we can experience is dependent upon external circumstances or outside agencies then we are giving power over our relationship with self to the illusions - we are worshiping false gods.
Horizontal emotions exist within the Temporal Plane. These emotions - which include anger, fear, joy, happiness, sadness, etc. - have a vertical component, (that is, higher and lower vibrational frequencies within an emotional range and between different emotions) but are not the lower frequencies of the Love, Light, and Truth frequency range. They are a completely different but, of course related, type of emotion.
The transcendent, vertical, emotions of Love, Joy, etc., exist within and are accessed by tuning into the God place within us. The horizontal emotions are generated by attitudes and experiences of the physical plane, and can be felt in the absence of, or in conjunction with, the transcendent emotional energy.
The Transcendent emotional energy of Joy on the other hand has nothing to do with winning or accomplishing - it is about being. About tuning into the Joy that is the Truth of who we really are - Spiritual beings who are part of the Holy Mother Source Energy. It is about the Love that is our True essence. Outside influences can help to remind us of this connection - a sunset, a baby, the Love we see reflected in another's eyes - but the connection is made in the quality of our interaction with that outside influence. It is in being in the moment that we can tune into the Love, Light, and Joy of our connection with everyone and everything.
The quality of our interactions is dependent upon the intellectual paradigm - the attitudes, beliefs, and definitions - that we are empowering to determine our perspective and expectations. Those perspectives and expectations are what dictate the quality of our relationship with life. As we align our intellectual paradigm with the Truth of Unconditional Love, Joy, and Abundance, we change the quality of our relationship with our self and with life.
We can tune into the Transcendent vibrational frequency of Joy even when conditions on the outside appear to be tragic. The more we awaken Spiritually, and enlarge the intellectual paradigm that is dictating our relationship with life, the more freedom we have to feel Joy in any moment of our lives - because that Joy, that Love, is the Real Truth of who we are. The more we let go of taking the illusion personally and seriously, the more we can have the capacity to be happy, Joyous, and free in the moment.
There is nothing wrong with feeling joy at doing, or receiving, or experiencing, on the human level - but the more that we are aligned with Truth, the more we can magnify those moments of joy to include the Joy of being Unconditionally Loved and Lovable. This also helps us stop giving power to the illusion by believing that something or someone outside of us is the source of Joy - the Source is within." - The Dance of the Wounded Souls Trilogy Book 1 History of the Universe Part VI "Notes to Earthlings"
Marianne Williamson is obviously a powerful teacher of Truth, a mystical messenger carrying the message of Love - but she could use some codependency recovery to help her stop making black and white statements that are shaming and give people the impression they are doing something wrong if they feel fear.
All of us who are drawn to this healing, who have a soul compulsion to follow a spiritual path, who are in recovery seeking answers beyond what is available in most 12 step meetings, are old souls who are present in body in this lifetime to heal these wounds and settle Karma. Marianne Williamson is obviously an old soul who has done much work clearing her inner channel to Truth and Love and Light, but I do wish she would recognize the importance of clearing our inner channels of the repressed grief energy."The planetary conditions that blocked humans from accessing Christ Consciousness - the vibrational Knowing of the Truth of ONENESS - were in place for tens of thousands of years. Conditions have now changed! We have entered a new time, an Age of Healing & Joy has dawned in Human Consciousness on the planet. All of the "old-souls" involved in healing in this time have the capacity to access the Truth of ONENESS and Love through their inner channel.
(The term "old-soul" refers to the stage of consciousness evolution an individual has attained by this lifetime - it does not mean better than, or farther along than, those who do not have to do the healing. There is no hierarchy in the Truth of a Loving Great Spirit - those who appear to have low, or no, consciousness in this lifetime are simply doing their healing in another space-time illusion parallel to this one. All old-souls are born at a heart-chakra level of consciousness and therefore have more sensitivity, and less capacity for denial, than other people. In other words, the gift of having access to Truth and Love carries with it the price of greatly increased emotional sensitivity.)
Due to the planetary conditions, the human ego developed a belief in separation - which is what made violence possible and caused the human condition as we inherited it. The reflection of that human condition on the individual level is the disease of Codependence. Codependence is caused by the ego being traumatized and programed in early childhood so that our relationship with ourselves and the God-Force is dysfunctional - that is, it does not work to help us access the Truth of ONENESS and Love. It is through healing our relationship with ourselves that we open our inner channel and start tuning into the Truth." - Jesus & Christ Consciousness
"One of most important steps to empowerment is integrating Spiritual Truth into our experience of the process. In order to do that it is necessary to practice discernment in our relationship with the emotional and mental components of our being.
We learned to relate to our inner process from a reversed perspective. We were trained to be emotionally dishonest (that is, to not feel the feelings or to go to the other extreme by allowing the feelings to totally run our lives) and to give power to, to buy into, the reversed attitudes (it is shameful to be human, it is bad to make mistakes, God is punishing and judgmental etc.) To find balance within we have to change our relationship with our inner process.
Feeling and releasing the emotional energy without giving power to the false beliefs is a vital component of achieving balance between the emotional and the mental. The more we align ourselves attitudinally, and clear out our inner channel, the easier it is for us to pick out the Truth from amid the dysfunctional attitudes - so that we can set an internal boundary between the emotional and mental.
Feelings are real but they are not necessarily fact or Truth.
We can feel like a victim and still know that the fact is we set ourselves up. We can feel like we made a mistake and still know that every mistake is an opportunity for growth, a perfect part of the learning process. We can feel betrayed or abandoned or shamed, and still know that we have just been given an opportunity to become aware of an area that needs some light shined on it, an issue that needs some healing.
We can have moments where we feel like God/life is punishing us and still know that "This, too, shall pass" and "More will be revealed," - that later on, down the path a ways, we will be able to look back and see that what we perceived in the moment to be tragedy and injustice is really just another opportunity for growth, another gift of fertilizer to help us grow.
I needed to learn how to set boundaries within, both emotionally and mentally by integrating Spiritual Truth into my process. Because "I feel feel like a failure" does not mean that is the Truth. The Spiritual Truth is that "failure" is an opportunity for growth. I can set a boundary with my emotions by not buying into the illusion that what I am feeling is who I am. I can set a boundary intellectually by telling that part of my mind that is judging and shaming me to shut up, because that is my disease lying to me. I can feel and release the emotional pain energy at the same time I am telling myself the Truth by not buying into the shame and judgment.
If I am feeling like a "failure" and giving power to the "critical parent" voice within that is telling me that I am a failure - then I can get stuck in a very painful place where I am shaming myself for being me. In this dynamic I am being the victim of myself and also being my own perpetrator - and the next step is to rescue myself by using one of the old tools to go unconscious (food, alcohol, sex, etc.) Thus the disease has me running around in a squirrel cage of suffering and shame, a dance of pain, blame, and self-abuse.
By learning to set a boundary with and between our emotional truth, what we feel, and our mental perspective, what we believe - in alignment with the Spiritual Truth we have integrated into the process - we can honor and release the feelings without buying into the false beliefs.
The more we can learn intellectual discernment within, so that we are not giving power to false beliefs, the clearer we can become in seeing and accepting our own personal path. The more honest and balanced we become in our emotional process, the clearer we can become in following our own personal Truth."{/xtypo_info}
Quote from Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls
This next excerpt is from an article in which I stress the importance of recognizing that healing and recovery are a process. Life is not about reaching destinations - it is a journey. The goal is to learn to relax and enjoy the journey while we are healing. When we are living life in reaction to old tapes and old wounds, we do not have the capacity to relax and enjoy the journey.
Etheric X-ray
"I learned in my own grieving process - and later applied in my work with clients - to pay attention to where the energy was manifesting in the body. The grief associated with my emotional incest issues was being carried in my lower back on the right side. As I mentioned above, this grief was near the second chakra because it was associated with my relationship with my own body and sexuality. It was in my back because that is where I carry issues I don't want to see. It was on my right side - which is the masculine side - because it was blocking me in my relationship with my own gender, which was greatly affecting my relationship with women.
It would seem that the process of healing would be easier if we could go into a healers office and get an etheric x-ray taken of our emotional, mental, spiritual bodies as well as of our physical bodies. The diagnosis might come out sounding something like this:
Well, we have, what looks like a good 3 pounds of grief energy here in your back near the second chakra - that indicates some grief related to sexual issues that you don't want to look at, probably some sexual abuse, or at the least some wounds in relationship to sexuality and gender.
But the reality of how the healing process works is that we need to peel away the layers of our codependent defense system gradually. There are healers who can tell us that we have these grief issues - as I stated in the quote from my True Nature of Love series that I used in the article on grieving that was part of the last chapter.
And a good 5 pounds of grief around your heart chakra. Those indicate multiple traumas to the heart - a strong pattern of looking for Love in all the wrong places, trying to fill your heart with love from external sources.
There is also some severe congestion in your throat area. Your throat chakra is completely closed - which indicates an inability to own your voice and speak your Truth. It also includes internal communication problems, that is blockage in your ability to trust your own intuition. Which is related to the dark mass here in your forehead. That is your third eye - or Spiritual vision - chakra, and shows that the intellectual programming in your mind is too limited and blocks your ability to see your self or life from an expanded Spiritual perspective. etc., etc."It is possible to get intellectually aware of some of them through such tools as hypnosis, or having a therapist or psychic or energy healer tell us they are there - but we cannot really understand how much power they carry without feeling the emotional context - and cannot change them without reducing the emotional charge / releasing the emotional energy tied to them. Knowing they are there will not make them go away." - Grieving - examples of how the process works
In the same case study that I quote there, I mention how I said to the man the very first session that there were childhood issues that were keeping him from being able to let go. I could have quizzed him more completely about his history and most likely have pinpointed that the time of his parents divorce was the crucial period in relationship to what he was going through when he came to me. But that would not have helped him to get in touch with those issues in an emotional context. He needed to go through the process of pealing layers of his defenses to gradually get to those specific emotional wounds.
There was a quote in a meditation book that I read a year before I went into treatment. This was before I had surrendered to doing the emotional healing. It was a message from the Universe that was part of my path of being lead to do the emotional work. It really made me angry when I first read it. A year later when I was in treatment, someone in my primary therapy group - which I attended at least once every weekday - would be asked to read the days meditation. There were 5 or 6 daily meditation books lying around in that therapy room. Whoever was asked to read the days meditation would pick one of those books and open it up - either randomly or specifically to the meditation for that day. During my 30 days in treatment, I only was asked to read the meditation once. I reached down on the floor and grabbed the nearest meditation book and opened it up. I opened it up to the same quote I had read a year earlier. It still made me angry. It said something to this affect:
A knowledge of the path does not replace putting one foot in front of the other.
We are here to go through the process - to experience the journey. The human part of me wants to jump to the end and get to happily ever after. I needed to learn to accept that the process unfolded gradually, that there were always more layers of the onion to be peeled - and some tears to be cried with each level.
It is through experiencing the journey in the moment one day at a time, that we heal our wounds and settle the Karma we are here to settle.
The reality is that our emotional pain is so great that if all of our defenses and denial were stripped away at once, it would kill us. So, getting such an etheric x-ray would only point us in the direction we need to travel - it wouldn't help us skip any part of the process. We get the guidance we need to know the direction to travel, by following the carrots - the messages from the Universe. We don't get to know what the future holds. We do get everything we need for our journey one day at a time - even when it doesn't feel like it.
"There is no quick fix! Understanding the process does not replace going through it! There is no magic pill, there is no magic book, there is no guru or channeled entity that can make it possible to avoid the journey within, the journey through the feelings." - Attack on America - Chapter 9 Vomiting out grief energy
This last excerpt is important because it does emphasize that we need to go through the process - that life and recovery are a journey. As the quote from my book that ended that excerpt states: Understanding the process does not replace going through it! It doesn't matter how much knowledge one has of the metaphysics, we still need to feel and release the emotions in order to clear our inner channel to Truth and Love.
"Each and every one of us has an inner channel. We now have the capability to atone - which means tune into - to atone, to tune into the Higher Consciousness. To tune into the Higher vibrational emotional energies that are Joy, Light, Truth, Beauty, and Love.
We can tune into the Truth of "at ONE ness." Atone = at ONE. Atonement = at ONE ment, in a condition of ONENESS.
We now have access to the highest vibrational frequencies - we can tune into the Truth of ONENESS. By aligning with Truth we are tuning into the higher energy vibrations that reconnect us with the Truth of ONENESS.
This is the age of atonement, but it does not have anything to do with judgment and punishment. It has to do with tuning our inner channel into the right frequencies.
But our inner channel is blocked and cluttered with repressed emotional energy and dysfunctional attitudes. The more we clear our inner channel through aligning with Truth attitudinally, and releasing the repressed emotional energy through the grief process, the clearer we can tune into the music of Love and Joy, Light and Truth.
It is not easy because we have been taught to look at being human backwards. We were forced to accept a reversed perspective. We were emotionally and subconsciously programmed to react to life dysfunctionally based on reversed belief systems.
We are Spiritual Beings having a human experience.
NOT human creatures who have to earn Spiritual existence. We are not flawed, shameful humans who have to do human perfectly, who have to do the "right" things in order to transcend."
Quote from Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls
A quote I use later on this page I state: 'We are the music of The Great Spirit - we've just been way out of tune.' Chapter 13 in my online book is focused on the same theme."When I was working on these two chapters focused on codependency and the New Age Movement, I got an e-mail from someone who had recently ordered my book that said the following:
"Dance, Dance, wherever you may be. That's what the Lord of the Dance said He. Dance, Dance, wherever you may be and I'll be with you in the Dance said He."
The later two quotes are from my page: The True Nature of Love - part 3, Love as a Vibrational Frequency. The second one in a different color because it is a quote from my Trilogy that I used on that page. I believe that the first part of the person's e-mail - up to "I'll be with you in the Dance said He." - is from a song called Lord of the Dance.
The trick is to change the music! I got it! The trick is to get free, so you can dance to a different music. The freer you get the more you hear, or should I say feel or see the music. You did a great job - Thanks "
"The dance of life for humans has been grounded in shame and fear, empowered by belief in separation, lack, and scarcity. These are lower vibrational emotions and beliefs based on the three dimensional illusion that humans experience as reality. As long as the dance of humans harmonizes to music - vibrational emanations - that are rooted in shame, fear, and separation the only way to do the dance is destructively."
"It is on the Spiritual Plane that the highest vibrational frequency range naturally available to human experience is generated (by the Souls). This frequency range is the transcendent Emotional energy of Love. This Love frequency range also contains frequencies which are experienced as Truth, Joy, Beauty, and Light as well as sometimes being called; the God within, the Goddess within, the Christ within, The Holy Spirit, etc."
What is important about this e-mail I received is that the person did "get it." We need to change the music we are dancing to - and in order to do that we need to change the subconscious intellectual paradigm that is dictating our emotional reactions. And we cannot do that without doing the deep emotional healing. . . . .
. . . . . Our emotions are what drive us, what propel us, through life. Our emotions tell us who we are. If our relationship with our own emotions is messed up, we cannot see reality clearly.
It is through doing our deep emotional healing and changing the subconscious intellectual paradigm - changing the music that we are dancing to - that we can start having discernment internally that allows us to more clearly hear / feel the messages of our intuition. There is a huge difference between our emotional truth - the feelings that are triggered by our emotional wounds and/or created by the perspective we are viewing life from - and intuitive Truth that is coming from our Soul. As long as our emotional truth - what we feel - is being dictated by childhood emotional wounds and the perspectives of self and life learned in childhood, then our relationship to this human dance will be dictated by music provided by our damaged ego self rather than the intuitive Truth that is coming from our Spiritual Self. . . .
If life is a dance, then our emotions provide the music. Dancing in the dark according to rules that are dysfunctional is not much fun. Dancing through life believing that we have responsibility for the feelings and behaviors of others, doesn't allow us to relax and enjoy life very much. Believing that we have to earn love by doing the dance "right,' by being perfect, in order to reach the destination where we will get to live happily-ever-after - sets us up to be unhappy and blame ourselves for being unworthy and unlovable." - Emotional Honesty and Emotional Responsibility Part 2 - codependence recovery
. . . . We have been dancing through life in disharmony and imbalance - in dis-ease. It is by clearing up our relationship with our own internal process - so that we can change our core relationship with self and life - that we can start to dance with some balance and harmony to the music of the ultimate Truth of Love and Joy." - Codependency Recovery: Wounded Souls Dancing in the Light Book 2: A Dysfunctional Relationship with Life Chapter 13: Changing the Music: Love instead of fear and shame
Multiple Levels / Perspectives
One of the reasons that many of my articles get very long (as this one obviously is;-), is because there are so many levels involved in this experience of being human - and I catch myself wanting to explain those levels and how they relate to each other. I try to communicate about multiple perspectives from the metaphysical and Cosmic down to and including how the process looks and feels on a personal level. It can get pretty complicated.
"The individual human being is a fully contained system involving multiple interrelationships within multiple levels. This is easy to see, and understand, when looking at the physical level. The interrelationship of the organs to each other, to the blood, to the skin, to the nervous system, etc. - is a dance of grand, and compelling, complexity.
Just as grand, and compelling, is the complexity of the dance of interrelationship between the mental, emotional, and spiritual components/levels that dynamically interact to form the make up of the individual being - the persona, personality, consciousness, of the self. The more awareness is acquired about the different levels of the self, and the interrelationships between those levels, the easier it becomes to diagnose the dysfunctional interaction dynamics." - Codependency Recovery: Wounded Souls Dancing in the Light Book 2: A Dysfunctional Relationship with Life Author's Foreword
It is vitally important to become conscious of the larger perspective - that is what consciousness raising / enLightenment is all about. But the larger perspective / aligning with Metaphysical Law - though vital to change our intellectual programming and make a paradigm shift to a more Loving perspective of life - does not help us make fundamental, significant changes to how we live our lives day to day, or how we relate to people on an intimate level, until we can integrate the larger Truth into our emotional relationship with life, love, and the experience of being human. Or as I explained it more bluntly in this quote from my book. Learning to have internal boundaries is the key to being able to be consciously present in the moment. We need to stop putting so much time, energy, and effort into trying to figure out how to control the things we cannot control - like the future - at the same time we are taking actions that will help us head in the directions we want to go. Just living in the now is out of balance and dysfunctional because then we are not being conscious co-creators in our lives. We need to take control of the things we have some control over (which includes our attitudes towards the situations and people in our lives) and let go of trying to control the things we cannot control - like the future - at the same time we are taking actions that will help us to head in the direction of what we want to create for ourselves in the future. To shame people for feeling fear is really awful. Fear of the unknown is innate to human beings. It is part of the human survival programming. If we had not learned to check the cave for saber toothed tigers before moving the family in, we would not still be here. We need to own and accept our fear of the unknown. It is our codependent fear that is dysfunctional. That codependent fear is - as I say in some of my writing - a magnified mutant monster type of fear. Fear and shame were the music of the dance that we were dancing as long as we were reacting to life out of ego-self - our ego programming (which included feeling ashamed for feeling fear and shame.) The more we can align with living life out of Spiritual Self instead of ego self - the more we can change the music of our dance. Another reason my articles get so long is because I want to qualify statements so that they don't come across as if I were saying what is right and what is wrong. In doing a final proofreading of this article I saw again how in trying to communicate about how important it is to not buy into the black and white thinking it sometimes comes off as sounding black and white. When I say 'We cannot just start being in the Now and let go of the past' - that is a True statement in the context I was using it in - but not Truth in and of itself. We can be in the Now and let go of the past - in the moment. We can't let go of the past and have it gone - never to haunt us again - but we can let go of it in the moment. [I did end up deciding to add this aside: (except in the moment - the more we heal the more ability we have to let go of the past and be present in the moment for more moments of the day.) You wouldn't believe how many times I could add some qualification like that because it is hard using polarized language to explain all this complicated stuff.] The "and such" part included notes on the etheric plane and such. We can't possibly understand all of this, it is just important to be open to larger perspectives that are aligned with Love. If someone is giving out messages that feel shaming, feel black and white, that don't feel Loving - then don't buy into it. Pick out the baby from the dirty bath water. Take what works for you and leave the rest.
"In the next section, Part Five, when I discuss the Cosmic Perspective and the Cosmic Perfection of this life experience, I will be discussing the paradox, and confusion to human beings, that has been the result of these multiple levels of reality - but I have devoted Part Two and Part Four to discussing the Spiritual growth process and our perspective on that process because the Cosmic Perfection does not mean crap unless we can start integrating it into our day to day life experience."
Quote from Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls
In order to help you understand what it looks and feels like to experience the feelings and the process, I am going to include a couple of examples at this point. I referred earlier to sometimes ranting and raving when I see people giving out messages that it is not okay to feel the feelings. I thought I would share here one of the times I was really bursting with frustration about the emotional dishonesty I was seeing - in the aftermath of the terrorist attach of 9/11.
"If I see one more person on television starting to get emotional and then choke it down and apologize, I AM GOING TO SCREAM!
Please feel your feelings. Let those sobs out. We are supposed to feel. It is healthy to grieve. Breathe right into those feelings. Sobs are little balls of emotional energy being released. If you breathe into the feelings it breaks up the grief and the little energy balls of emotions can rise up and be released from your being. That is good. Keep taking deep breaths. Get into a rhythm. Inhale, sob sob sob cry cry cry as you exhale, inhale, sob sob sob cry cry cry - that is good. That is healthy. Do not shame yourself for feeling. Do not apologize for your feelings. It means your human. It means you care. Sobs, tears, snot from the nose are all ways of releasing energy and cleansing chemicals out of our body. Grief is not a pretty sight - but it is a beautifully healing and a Loving thing to do for yourself. That emotional energy does not go away just because we stop breathing and choke it back down. It does not disappear. The more you can release, the faster you can move through it. Watch the History Channel some time when they interview vets from World War II or something like that. People who have never really grieved will get emotional and choke it back down 40 - 50 years later, because they never released it. It didn't go away, they have been repressing it and denying it all those years. Release it now. It is healthy. It is the Loving thing to do for yourself. Amen. . . .
. . . . . Feel your feelings and release them. Give yourself permission to let it all out. Wail and scream and sob. Try not to let the messages of an emotionally dysfunctional society, or the discomfort of emotionally repressed people around you, keep you from owning the grief to the fullest. They want you to pull it together and get yourself under control so they will be comfortable. Let it out! Release it! Do not shame yourself for it, or apologize - it is marvelously healing to grieve. Owning our grief is part of being True to our self. In an emotionally honest society Dan Rather would have been crying and sobbing on his own program - serving as a role model for others - instead of keeping up appearances and stuffing his grief until some of it leaked out on the David Letterman Show." - Attack on America: A Spiritual Healing Perspective & Call for Higher Consciousness Chapter 1
I have made reference to how important it is to start learning how to set internal boundaries within, and between, the mental and emotional levels of our being.
Within the mental we want to start countering the negative, black and white, fear and shame based messages coming from the critical parent voice with positive affirmations and reality checks - so that we can choose to relate to whatever is happening in our lives from the perspective of our adult recovering spiritual consciousness / recovery control center, instead reacting and projecting our past experiences and old perspectives onto what is happening in the now.
Having a boundary between mental and emotional allows us to focus on Higher Truth intellectually while also owning and having compassion for our emotional wounds.
We can then have a boundary with those emotional wounds by not allowing them to define what we are experiencing in the now, but at the same time owning and releasing any repressed emotional energy from the past that has been triggered by what happens in the now.
Here is an example of how that looks from one of the earliest Newsletters that I wrote for my original web site in 1998."Working on the positive affirmations page was also a perfect part of my process as usual. While I was doing it I got a perfect example of how wonderful and powerful positive affirmations are - and how dramatically they have changed the quality of my life.
My car broke down.
It was a wonderful opportunity to be reminded of how much work I have done over the years in integrating my Spiritual belief system into my emotional responses to life - when some seeming tragedy occurs like my car breaking down, my very first reaction is gratitude that it happened when and where it did instead of when and where it could have. I used to react to life events (like car break downs) and other people's behavior out of my childhood programming that told me that if something "bad" happened it was because I was bad. I had gotten the message in childhood (in a variety of ways) that there was something wrong with me, that I was unworthy and unlovable, and that God was going to punish me for it. So life events felt like punishment.
Due to all the work that I have done in changing my subconscious programming (including at several different times making recordings of positive affirmations and messages of Love in my own voice to myself that I would play as I was going to sleep at night) my first reaction to life events now, and for the last 4 or 5 years, has been acceptance followed by gratitude because whatever it was could have happened at a worse time and place than it did.
It is amazing to me to see my capacity to let go of things that used to drive me crazy with worry and feel like punishment. The key for me has definitely been integrating the belief that everything is unfolding perfectly into my emotional process - it makes life so much easier.
Of course, that does not mean to ignore the feelings. Unfortunately, a lot of people use tools like affirmations, meditation, gratitude lists, etc. as another way of denying the feelings. These tools are meant to be used to balance the feelings not negate them. After my initial reaction of gratitude, then I let my adult take charge in terms of doing the footwork - finding a mechanic, calling a friend, calling a tow truck. As the car was being towed and I was following with my friend then I relaxed into the feelings and let myself cry with the pain of how hard life can feel sometimes. And when I say cry I mean cry - with heaving sobs. I can access those feelings and release them because of the energy/breath techniques that I have learned on the way (I describe these on the Grief Process page).
Just using the affirmations to keep from feeling my feelings would be out of balance, just staying in the adult to keep from feeling my feelings would be out of balance, just feeling the feelings and letting myself feel like a victim is also out of balance - we need to be able to use all of the tools and own all of the parts of ourselves.
What we are working toward is to find balance. That means using tools like the positive affirmations to integrate a supportive Spiritual belief system into our inner process, as well as using them to balance the feelings that come up. It does not matter what happens in my life I start immediately to tell my self and my inner children that it is all perfect somehow, that everything is going to work out in the long run - that way I can keep from buying into the shame and doom messages that are coming from the disease so that I can maintain some emotional balance." - Joy to You & Me Update Newsletters 8-23-98 and 10-25-98
Here is a quote from one of the Question & Answer pages (the Q & A pages were the idea I had that my critical parent voice was beating me up for, at the same time my inner child was thinking we were going to be rewarded, in the excerpt I used in the Law of Attraction article) I had on my original web site."We are powerless over outcomes in the future. The future is not really our business - it is our Higher Powers. We worry about the future because of our innate human fear of the unknown - it is natural and normal for humans to fear the unknown - but ultimately the future is not something we can control. Now that does not mean that we are not co-creators of our lives - that doesn't mean that we just sit around doing nothing. There is an old story about a guy who wanted a garden and went out on his land and spent every day praying to God for a garden. This went on for days and then weeks and then months - finally one day the man got fed up and yelled at God "Where is my garden?" A gentle voice came down from heaven saying, "My son, you must plant the seeds."
We need to do any footwork necessary, gather any information that is helpful, make any connections that can help us, etc. and then let go of the outcome. Some days are seed planting days and some days aren't - if we put all of our energy into trying to create the future we want then we miss out on today - but if we just think of today and never think of the future then we are not being co-creators of our life.
We need to have a balance between being a responsible adult and being free to be spontaneous in the moment. By having internal boundaries and starting to change our patterns so we are not always reacting to the past - we can start having the choice of being present in the now. It is very important to be available for life today. I heard someone in a Twelve Step meeting not long ago say "What if today is the happiest day of my life and I miss it because I am busy getting better?" Balance is what we are seeking - balance between being in the now and taking care of business so we can eat tomorrow. . . . .
And most important, remember to lighten up and enjoy life when you can - take time to smell the roses and hear the birds and watch the sunset - we need to own the anger and the pain and the fear but they are not what defines us - who we really are is Light and Love and Joy and Beauty - and that is the Truth. We are the music of The Great Spirit - we've just been way out of tune." - Excerpt from Joy to You & Me Question & Answer Page 5 9-98 quoted on The Recovery Process for inner child healing - emotional balance"Fear of the unknown is a natural, normal part of being human. It has a purpose - and deserves to be honored as something which serves us. But, like our relationship with all the aspects of our being, our relationship with that fear is dysfunctional.
The damaged ego responds to it's programming by generating fear of the things we learned to fear as a child: making mistakes; doing it wrong; being emotional; speaking our Truth; taking risks; being alone; not being alone; whatever. We then empower the fear by focusing on it, magnifying it, and generally giving it the power to define us and our life - or by denying it, which also gives it power because in denying our fear we are denying our self and reality. Going to either extreme results in the inability to see the situation clearly.
Because our ego was programmed to react to life from fear, negativity, scarcity, and lack (again due to emotional trauma we experienced, and the messages and role modeling of the adults around us) the disease focuses on and magnifies fear - and then it scrambles around trying to find something to cover up and repress the very fear it is generating. The disease blows the fear way out of proportion and then leads us to addictive and/or compulsive behavior as a way of stuffing the fear.
This is the essence of the dysfunction. We live our life reacting to fear, and the shame, that the disease empowers and then "helps" us avoid by causing us to focus on something outside of ourselves as the cause and/or the cure for the core place within us where we feel empty - where we feel unlovable and unworthy.
We are afraid of our own emotions - of all the repressed feelings and unresolved grief that we are carrying. We learned to be afraid of our own anger and pain and fear. We feel afraid of our fear of our own emotions. It is this fear once (or twice) removed that is paralyzing. That is, the fear of our own fear is our greatest block to healing. We are afraid of our own pain and anger - and then we are afraid of our fear of our own pain and anger.
In order to start finding some balance in recovery, it is important to learn how to take power away from the fear. In order to do that, it is very important to clear up our relationship with fear. And to look at all the different levels involved in our reaction.
The first step is to stop judging ourselves for our fear (or anger, or pain, or loneliness, etc.) - or denying to ourselves that we even have fear." The Recovery Process for inner child healing - through the fear"Thus, one piece of the puzzle fell into place. Emotions are energy. Energy has a vibrational frequency. Anger has a higher vibrational frequency than pain or fear - thus the human defense mechanism which allows us to turn pain or fear into anger because it is has more energy mass and therefore feels empowering instead of vulnerable and weak. Much of world history becomes clearer just by understanding how humans - as part of trying to survive - have reacted to fear and pain by getting angry and acting out that anger.
. . . . . The dance of life for humans has been grounded in shame and fear, empowered by belief in separation, lack, and scarcity. These are lower vibrational emotions and beliefs based on the three dimensional illusion that humans experience as reality. As long as the dance of humans harmonizes to music - vibrational emanations - that are rooted in shame, fear, and separation the only way to do the dance is destructively.
As I did my deep grief work and started to clear up my internal process so that I could more clearly differentiate between Truth that was a vibrational communication from my Soul and the emotional truth that was coming from my wounded soul, I was able to start trusting myself to be able to discern Truth. . . .
. . . . I was able to have a more trusting and Loving relationship with myself through getting more in touch with my Spiritual Self, my Higher Self, and through that Higher Self with God as I was coming to understand God. I was able to start having a personal, intimate relationship with my own concept of a Higher Power / God / Goddess / Great Spirit. I learned to trust the vibrational communications, the feeling of something resonating within. I was studying Quantum Physics, Molecular Biology, religion, theology, philosophy, mythology, esoteric metaphysics, science fiction - whatever was brought into my path to study. In those studies I was sorting out the wheat from the chaff - I was picking out the nuggets of Truth from the twisted, distorted beliefs they were embedded within.
I started writing a book based on what I was learning. This book was the first book of a Trilogy that was an adult fable about the history of the Universe. In that book I wrote about different vibrational levels of reality. I was writing a mystical, magical fairy tale based on a belief system that made it possible to view life as fair and Loving from a Cosmic Perspective. The Higher Power in this belief system is so powerful that everything is unfolding perfectly, with no accidents, coincidences, or mistakes. And this Higher Power is unconditionally Loving because we are part of this Higher Power - not separate from it. We have never been separate from the God Force. Every human is just a little piece of the energy of ALL THAT IS which exists in perfect ONENESS because it vibrates at the frequency of Absolute Harmony that is LOVE.
We are extensions of, manifestations of, this Higher Power temporarily in human form experiencing life in a lower vibrational illusion of three dimensional reality. We are Spiritual Beings having a human experience - not sinful, shameful humans who have to earn the Love of the Source. We are here to experience being human - to go through the school of Spiritual Evolution. . . .
. . . . It is on the Spiritual Plane that the highest vibrational frequency range naturally available to human experience is generated (by the Souls). This frequency range is the transcendent Emotional energy of Love. This Love frequency range also contains frequencies which are experienced as Truth, Joy, Beauty, and Light as well as sometimes being called; the God within, the Goddess within, the Christ within, The Holy Spirit, etc." - The True Nature of Love - part 3, Love as a Vibrational Frequency
Anyone who has done a lot of healing or spiritual work and has gotten to a very peaceful, serene, happy, Joyous place in their journey while living alone - and then gets in a romantic relationship knows this one. 'It is interacting with other human beings that gets messy.' ;-)
Anyway, I just decided to conclude this with a quote from my book where I address the trying to communicate about a multilevel reality in polarized language conundrum. I think I have made my point about emotional energy and need to stop now.;-)
"We were taught to look at and do "human" backwards. We need to make a 180-degree swing in our perspectives.
That includes our perspective on this healing process. Many of us have pursued healing and Recovery just like we did the rest of our lives - as if it were a destination to be reached where we would find "happily ever after." We have gone to healers and psychics and therapists in order to learn the "right" way to do life.
Recovery is not a dance of right and wrong, of black and white - it is a dance of integration and balance. The questions in Recovery are: Is it working for you? Is the way you live your life working to meet your needs? Is the way you are living your life bringing you some happiness?
When I state that the grief process works, I am not saying that it is the "right" thing to do, or that you are bad or wrong if you are not actively pursuing your emotional healing.
Maybe it has not been time for you to do your grief work yet. Maybe you have not had a safe place to do it. Maybe it is not part of your path in this lifetime.
No one can tell you what your path is!
What I am telling you is that the grief process works to dramatically change the quality of the life experience. What I am saying is that it is possible to find some Peace and Joy in life. Unfortunately, in sharing this information I am forced to use language that is polarized - that is black and white.
When I say that you cannot Truly Love others unless you Love yourself - that does not mean that you have to completely Love yourself first before you can start to Love others. The way the process works is that every time we learn to Love and accept ourselves a little tiny bit more, we also gain the capacity to Love and accept others a little tiny bit more.
When I say that you cannot start to access intuitive Truth until you clear out your inner channel - I am not saying that you have to complete your healing process before you can start getting messages. You can start getting messages as soon as you are willing to start listening. The more you heal the clearer the messages become.
When I talk about ways that we use to go unconscious - like workaholism, or exercise, or food, or whatever - I am not saying that you should be ashamed if you are doing some of these things.
We cannot go from unconscious to conscious overnight! This healing is a long gradual process. We all still need to go unconscious sometimes. Recovery is a dance that celebrates progress, not one that achieves perfection."
Quote from Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls
Progress not perfection. As I said in quote from my article on Soul Mates and Twin Souls that I shared at the beginning of the law of Attraction article:"I very seriously pursued learning about past lives and different planes of existence and all of the esoteric, metaphysical knowledge I could access. And that pursuit was important in helping me to enlarge my intellectual paradigm - but a few years later I realized that the whole purpose of the pursuit had been to bring about a shift in my relationship with myself, my concept of God/Goddess, and with life. The details that I had accessed about past lives and other dimensions of existence were not really important in terms of how I live my life today - but the shift in my paradigm, and therefore my relationships, was vital. At that point in time, I threw away all the notes I had taken about different past lives and such.
The whole purpose of my quest was to discover a belief system that could allow me to start believing that I am in fact Lovable and worthy. Figuring out how it all works isn't what is important - what is important is discovering the faith to believe that there is a Loving Force in control. That is what helped me start Loving myself more - to start relaxing and enjoying life a little bit more instead of always giving fear and shame all of the power." - The True Nature of Love - Twin Souls, Souls Mates, and Kindred Spirits
I posted this page last night ending it with the quote from my book - and then woke up this morning knowing that it wasn't quite finished. I used a lot of quotes from writings that I wrote years ago for these two articles, because I don't write much about the metaphysical and cosmic perspectives these days. Not because I don't believe them any more - but because they aren't really important in my day to day life now. As I have mentioned repeatedly, it is important to enlarge our perspective in order to have a more Loving relationship with ourselves and life - so it was important that I spent a lot of time and energy investigating levels that most people don't ever really have to think much about in their recovery. I hope these articles will help you to stop buying into any messages you hear that don't ultimately support Love as the highest Truth, as the ultimate Truth. I wrote these two articles because I see a lot of spiritual teachers out there who are teaching that Love is who you really are and that we are all connected in ONENESS - but sadly, are still giving out messages that aren't Loving.
I am going to end this article with first a quote from my Attack on America book - which includes a quote from my Trilogy about my Cosmic beliefs. And then I am going to include some lines from the very end of my book Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls. The purpose of these articles is to help you learn to be a little more Loving to your self. We are all butterflies whose minds keep telling us we are caterpillars; Swans who still feel like ugly ducklings. It is our codependency that causes us to keep allowing the old tapes and old wounds to define us. Codependency Recovery is about owning who we really are by tuning into the Truth that resonates with our Spirit - even when, especially when, life is not feeling very Loving.
Life is in some ways not feeling very Loving to me right now, so I wrote these articles to remind me of who I am and why I am here in human body at this place in time. I hope that sharing my experience, strength, and hope helps remind you of who you really are and why you are here - so that you can lighten up and enJoy today more than you would have if you hadn't read this article.
I end all of my workshops and grief groups with two prayers. One of them is a group Serenity Prayer. The other is to have everyone do the Hokey Pokey. That is a reminder to lighten up and not take this life business so personally and seriously. We are unconditionally Loved. We always have been, and always will be. Each and every one of us is perfectly where we are supposed to be on our Spiritual Path - and we are being guided Home. Love & Joy to You & Me. ~ Robert 11/9/08
"The bottom line is finding a way to live life that works to help us be more Loving to ourselves. That works to help us open up to happiness and Joy and freedom from living in reaction to the past. I am sharing my relative Truth with you as an alternate perspective for you to consider. It has helped me to Lighten up and enjoy life. (We are moving from dark to Light and from heavy / serious to light and not so attached to the illusion - learning to relate to life more as a sitcom and less as a tragedy.) A quote from that personal journal I write for my Joy2MeU Journal states it quite nicely I think.
"I was explaining to someone in a phone counseling session the other day, about how important I believe a Loving Spiritual belief system is in recovery. She said, but that is just a crutch, you are just playing a mind trick on yourself.
I really like that: why let it mess up my life today. ;-)
I said, so what. It works. Who can know what the Ultimate Truth really is? Not me. I choose a belief system that helps make my life easier and more enjoyable today. That works for me. That is the bottom line - it is functional.
I also happen to believe it is the Truth. What I have discovered as I kept surrendering and enlarging my paradigm - is that each new level I arrived at made perfect logical sense. I have to surrender to the intuitive, emotional side in order to reach a higher perspective, that I can then see makes perfect sense in a rational logical way.
That is how I have arrived at a more balanced way of living life, at a way that makes life a lot more enjoyable. If god really is judgmental and punishing, I will find out soon enough - that doesn't mean I have to let it mess up my life today. ;-)" - Joy2MeU Journal: My Unfolding Process - Transition, June -July 2001 - posted 7-01
. . . . In the meantime, I am going to end this with a capsule summary of my Cosmic belief system. This is the understanding of Truth that works for me."
