PART
TWO
When
we listen closely to what hurts, we learn what life is asking of us.
The
common denominator in our emotional education is suppression, intolerance,
sharing, punishment, and neglect.
It is
in our families we first learn to distrust our feelings and to be shamed by
them.
Ignoring,
stopping, and shaming or punishing emotion are the three parenting styles that
most often result in emotional illiteracy in children.
Ours
is a dissociative culture – a culture that separates body from mind, body from
spirit, feeling from thinking.
Emotional
vitality and authenticity, a mature sense of emotional wholeness and freedom –
these human capacities are hard to come by in a culture that doesn’t honor the
body and the heart.
We
must learn to listen not only to our bodies but to the wider social context if
we want to find the larger roots of our pain.
We
live in the world and the world lives in us.
The dark emotions that our bodies carry are transpersonal energies
housed in our flesh and rooted in our responses to the world – to the
inevitable pain of being alive and being humanely connected to others.
It is
in the spirit that emotional alchemy takes place – a spirit not divorced from
the body but that flows from what the body knows.
Our
aversion to pain actually sabotages our search for happiness.
Painful
emotions challenge us to know the sacred in the broken; to develop an enlarged
sense of self beyond the suffering ego, an awareness that comes from being
mindful of life’s difficulties, rather than disengaging from them; to arrive at
a wider and deeper perspective not limited by our pain but expanded by it.
Whether
we listen to them or not, the dark emotions will emerge one way or another,
they exert their call through the body – as an act of grace or an act of
violence, a cancerous growth or a surge of creative energy.
Life
is larger than our ego’s agenda.
There
is no safety net against vulnerability so long as one has a body and an ego.
Vulnerability
is not just about hurting. It is about openness.
It is
through surrender to the unwanted that we embrace our vulnerability.
Conscious
surrender is often what life asks of us in those times when we most want to
control the outcome.
Embracing
vulnerability does not mean wallowing in passivity, abdicating responsibility,
or relishing being a victim. It means
being fully present to what is happening and staking no claims on the outcome.
To
become larger spiritually, it is often necessary to get smaller.
What
vulnerability asks of us, ultimately, is not control of our emotions but
transformation of our consciousness through emotional openness.
The
ego can’t see beyond its own pain.
Life
hurts. We are not here to be free of pain.
We are here to have our hearts broken by life.
Grief
arises because we are not alone, and what connects us to others and to the
world also breaks our hearts.
Emotions
are energies in the body that convey information, seek expression, and motivate
action.
Emotions,
while “inner”, are responses to the larger world.
Human
beings have the capacity to feel mindfully and to act consciously, informed by
our emotions.
The
essence of emotional alchemy is the mindful flow of emotional energy – a
process in which we are consciously attentive to what is happening.
Stuck,
toxified emotional energy is an important aspect of what keeps the physical
ailments in place and prevents healing.
