Photo by Ozark Drones on Unsplash
Heart openings can bring up a lot of emotion. I’ve been feeling it the last week or so.
My recent focus has been to better connect my mind with my body. I’ve been more conscious about the way I move, recommitted to my yoga classes and been to a few ecstatic dance and tantra events recently too.
What I hadn’t realised was how much emotion I had kept stored in the body. My methods of dealing with feelings I did not like was to push them away. This meant they were left unexpressed. Over time, a lot of residue has stored up within me.
I’m now experiencing these emotions come up to the surface. I’ve been experiencing flashes of past moments of regret and embarrassment. Reliving these emotion can be tiring, but I also know that this is a critical part of the healing phase.
Mindfulness has been a really helpful aid here. I noticed recently how much my urge has been to ‘fix’ or ‘react’ to an emotion. If I feel bad, my tendency has been to rationalise a reason as to why something went wrong. This usually leads to a drawn out thought process where my brain crafts scenarios of how not to experience these emotions again.
With some maturity, I’ve fortunately recognised how fallible my mind is in this state. When trying to explain the ‘why’ behind an emotion, I’m susceptible to broad brush assumptions about the world. I can then end up judging someone or something because my mind has decided that the reason I felt that way was their fault.
When I truly see emotions as a passing wind that come and go, I realise that I do not have to be so beholden to them. Even if I am having unpleasant feelings, I can see that there’s nothing for me to do or fix. After a while they pass anyway. This is the healing process.
I spoke to one of my coaches this week about my experiences here. He gave me a prompt to take it one step further. Mindfulness can be great to get us away from a reactionary state, but how can I actually flip this experience to be one that I see as a positive?
I realised how important it was to see this process as part of a wider growth phase. Expression of these stored emotions allows me to be lighter. This in turn allows me to feel more deeply without feeling like I need to withdraw. The more I lean into these discomforts, the deeper I go into my transformational journey. This allows me to enjoy the gifts of life in a much more enriching way.
If we were always feeling good, life would be rather boring. And it is often these unpleasant emotions that give us the signal that something was not to our taste.It is these feelings that are pointing me towards where further work is to be done. Where there is discomfort, there is growth.
A lot of nicer memories that I had forgotten have been returning to me. I suddenly found myself thinking about old songs I used to listen to on repeat, as well as moments of happiness that I had totally forgotten about.
Life is about how we frame it. An experience can be positive or negative. We get to choose which, depending on how we look at them. The best day can be terrible and the worst day can be amazing.
Where we truly see that this choice is within our gift, the whole paradigm of our life changes forever.
And if we have the choice, why not frame things positively?