Of all the emotions, I’d say that personally, I find fear to be the most uncomfortable. I find it hard to get into and the somatic feeling is a heavy one, the familiar knotting in the guts and the inability to think clearly and act. Fear and anxiety can be truly paralysing.
On my path of late, a few months ago, the main emotion I seemed to be dealing with was anger.
See blog post "Anger and 2020"
Anger is a very raw emotion. It triggers our fire chi and can actually feel quite good when we express it. Fear is a little harder to define, and I find it extremely hard to face head on. It is very rare that we hear someone come straight out and say “I’m afraid”. I would guess that it’s just another emotion that we are taught is not OK to feel.
For me this fear has come due to a change in circumstances at work. What was a tolerable albeit a demanding job has now become intolerable. The change has prompted me to be a little more disciplined in my energy work and has certainly given me a couple of tough lessons about gut instincts and people.
I may write further about this situation in another blog post
I now find that fear and anxiety is dominating my emotional being at the moment. Before this all started I found myself becoming more and more adept at coming into balance, and staying there for longer periods of time. This has all been down to the energy disciplines taught to me, and maybe a tiny bit due to having a stable job and relationship.
The last couple of months has been a different story though. I have mostly maintained my objectivity but my emotional balance is much less stable. I have lost sleep due to this new work situation, I have lower back pain, and I would say that the monster has been a little noisier of late.
I want to cover “Objectivity” in a post unto itself, but here I will cover briefly how it is so imperative.
First I’m going to have to fill you in on the work situation. I can’t fall into judgment here but I will say that two new work colleagues have made life here very difficult. It is now very easy for me to see when people are operating totally in ego/monster mode, and these two people are. Quick to judge, blame others for their mistakes, can not tolerate criticism, think they know best. It is a disturbing mixture of unamiable qualities and I can say without hesitation that I have not experienced anything like it.
After having worked on my emotions and detaching as much as possible from the “Monster”, I find that being objective comes much more naturally. If I wasn’t being objective at the moment I suspect that I would be much more emotional, it would be very easy to slip into monster mode and direct my undesirable emotions at my new colleagues or start doubting my own abilities in relation to the job. Neither of these would make the situation more comfortable. Maintaining objectivity helps me see that I am very capable at my job and have been for two and a half years, it also allows me to see that these people are just operating from the needs of their ego/monster. It doesn’t cause the experience to be any nicer, I actually do still find it most disturbing. It has however been a great learning experience as I have witnessed what a great deal of pain and suffering being in monster mode can cause.
So back to fear and anxiety… I would say that this new situation is propelling me to think about leaving this current job. I am 39 and do not own a home (my current job is a live-in position). So any thoughts about what comes next do tend to stir up a few fear based thoughts. This would largely be my monster making predictions like “Things won’t work out, you wont find a better job, you’re going to waste your savings.” This does stir up a lot of fear… So what I need to do is recognise it’s the monster and express the emotion that is being triggered.
That’s all any of us really need to do: become aware of what thoughts are the monster, disempower it, and express our emotions. It sounds rather simple as I write it. I don’t want you to believe that I found it easy though… I needed to work with my teacher for at least a year to even start the process effectively.
A couple of things really helped me along the way though…
Not making my emotions someone else's problem
Surrendering to how life really is
See blog post “Surrendering”
I’m doing it again… This post was meant to be about fear and anxiety…
I have had a hard time with these two emotions, so much so that it’s made me wonder whether fear is the emotion that’s underneath so many other difficult emotions. I say this because over the last few years on my particular path I feel like I have somehow tackled “Layers” of trauma. Starting with the lightest layers and peeling them back until now where I find myself facing the deepest buried emotions. I am not surprised at all that fear is there at the core.
I can’t tell you how the universe works, but I can theorize that when a person is ready to heal, certain events will happen in their lives to expose the emotion that needs to be dealt with.
So in my current situation as an example, I would say that yes I am quite fearful of quitting my job, but I’d also say that this is hitting some deeper fears. Perhaps those linked to survival. Apparently I had quite a rough first few days on this planet and was born very prematurely. So I’m putting 2 and 2 together here and wondering whether this trauma is at the core of much of my fear and subsequent suffering.
I’ve heard this called a “core wound”, and nasty as it all is, it’s where I want to be, In a place that I can feel my deepest darkest emotions. Only here can I express and release them so that they don’t continue to trouble me.
It will be the same formula as I’ve been taught to use. Express out loud how afraid and anxious I am, even making it worse if possible. I’m even feeling into this as I write now and have started to bring up these burps of air that I have come to know is my bodies way of releasing emotions.
I would say that I’m still in the thick of it. I know I am writing this blog but by no means am I an expert. I’ll still find ways of avoiding my emotions, I’ll watch TV or have a glass of wine and push them back down. Not clever really because I can say that somehow they will eventually find their way back to the surface, all I’m doing is prolonging the agony.
It’s funny, when you take on a spiritual path or one of healing, it’s like you start a sequence of events that cant be stopped. It’s like healing is gonna come and you cant stop it. A lot of people talk about a spiritual awakening being blissful but I’m sad to say that has not been my experience. It’s been awkward, frightening, lengthy and disturbingly real. No fluff, just continuously facing up to and owning my unpleasant emotions.
I can’t tell you where this will all lead, but that’s not the point of my blog. It is to bring you a blow-by-blow account of how I chose real healing and what’s happening to me during my journey.
To finish this post I just want to say that emotions always seem worse before we actually feel into them. It just takes a bit of getting used to. Even the large amounts of fear I’ve been facing is not so bad once I say out loud “I’m scared”. It’s a little like when I was a child and I had convinced myself there was a monster hiding under the bed. I would be paralysed by fear until I worked up the courage to look underneath me and realise there was nothing there.
Let us all take courage and face that monster head on!!
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