Integrating emotions into our life rather than controlling them is one of the topics people who value awakening the human potential are focusing on more and more. For years people in spiritual circles have tried to deal with emotions by transcending them into a larger context of ‘all is perfect the way it is in the here and now. I have had enough of that. I want to be richly and voluptuously human and that includes embracing my emotions not just energetically but actually opening myself to them, feeling them fully.
My last relationship, which started so full of promise to finally be the ‘real thing’, turned out to be a fiasco. What it did show me once again though, is how little healing had actually taken place in my emotional body, how unwell it was, even though I have had numerous spiritual awakenings. It did not matter that I knew better on an energetic and spiritual level, emotionally I was still looking for fulfilment through the somewhat unreachable prince. Emotionally I was the little girl trying to win the love of daddy, no matter how well I could articulate it to be otherwise.
I have done everything in my life. I don’t need to see one more new place or start one other business. I have had stones thrown at me in an Indian train station, cleaned the most dirty toilet in the world backstage of an Indian theatre, performed for a couple of thousand people, was invited to a champagne cocktail party on the roof top of some important ambassador’s house and had a private audience with Indira Gandhi all in the time-span of two days. I have owned the red Bentley convertible with the white leather seats and the red trim. I have slept in a cave at the banks of the river Ganges together with my then five-year-old son and discovered the leopard paw prints in the sand in front of it in the morning. I have travelled around the world teaching different aspects of meditation and self-fulfilment.
I have built a centre on a tropical island and have seen hundreds of people come to it and leave it a little bit happier. And I have seen that centre fall apart and be guarded by angry dogs. I have given birth to two beautiful sons, homebirths. I have wondered around in waves of bliss of oneness, with everything glowing, being me, me being it for days, weeks. I have wept in despair, been beaten and betrayed. I have sat in meditation retreats for weeks. I have had no money and I have had plenty. I have met the most amazing teachers and I have been pulled to leave them all. I left one teacher after seven years of devotional hard work building a city in the desert. He promised me in front of a thousand people that if I stayed he would build a beach for me. I left because I realised that he was not really interested in anyone around him being free. I left a powerful healer and yogi when I saw how he did not treat the people close to him well. I left an awakened Western woman for the same reason.
I have had such varied experiences and yet if someone asked me today, ‘How has your life been so far?’ I would say: ‘Not really worth mentioning. I have not really let myself FEEL it fully. There was always an element of stress in everything I did.’
I am starting from scratch. I am getting to know my unhealed, unwell emotions in a depth I did not know was possible. A few months ago I started on a therapeutic process called ESH™ (www.enhearten.org). ‘It offers that the core of wounding from childhood is not caused by remembered or repressed traumas, but by our inability to emotionally digest the pain of not having been able to feel our caregivers feel us, consistently and openheartedly.’ — DS Barron. In ESH™ our emotional holding patterns are treated like little beings, like children we have neglected and whom we need to nurse and parent into health and wellbeing.
Rather than indulging in emotions on one hand or denying them on the other, rather than using them to get something or to control someone, in this process they are uncovered, felt fully, nurtured and healed. All my adult life I have put so much energy into hiding my depressed, hurt and anxious aspects even from myself. In dialogues with my emotional sub-selves, hurt, depression and anxiety for example, I am now creating a relationship with them. I am getting to know and feel their story, their ‘architecture’ and fixations, their reasons for believing that the world is an unsafe place for love. As I nurture and feel them like I would a small child they are starting to relax and heal. I am beginning to see what tremendous potential of innocence and creativity I had not tapped into because I did not let myself access my emotions in their pure state.
My depression aspect is a little girl named Isabelle. She is about six years old now. When I asked her what she thought about my article she wrote in her small little handwriting: ‘I think people put to much meaning into words. Words only dance when they don’t have to describe what life is about. I like it when they just fall into the heart like snowflakes, each a different star shape and when they melt to hug you and me. You and me don’t need to make sense when we drink water from the well in the garden.’
I am beginning to feel and treasure her input in my daily life. Something in me is starting to relax on a very deep level. As this healing is happening my emotional leaks to get fulfilment from outside are diminishing. My own inner landscape is becoming so rich, the unreachable prince outside is losing his glamour. It is a quiet, sometimes heart wrenching journey but it does put the sparkle I once had as a little girl, back into my soul.
