How many times have we heard the phrase “Body, Mind, and Spirit” bandied about? Or how about “the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost”, if you prefer a more traditional way of arranging the players within the phrase? It has become a cliché, especially in alternative or New Age circles that our culture has sidestepped or looked past the feminine principle. The feminine principle, the Mother energy, is inextricably linked to emotions. She-in-us, regardless of gender, is our emotional body, among other qualities with soft, purring features like desire and receptivity and intuition. And, let’s face it, this emotional side of who she is has been thoroughly denied in most of us, even in women.

As consciously growing adults, many of us have started edging towards acceptance of our emotional reality. We are starting to notice when we are feeling angry, sad, hurt, or scared. Sometimes. Other times, we just know we don’t feel good, but we don’t know why. And underneath our so-called negative emotional backlog of anger, fear, and grief that we so often don’t even know is there until it gets triggered, lies the gold… denied joy, spontaneity, laughter, childlikeness. It seems the nature of the beast that when we deny the hard feelings, the ones we’d like to experience go away as well, to one degree or another. The spontaneous and joyful gifts of childhood are the casualties of inner and outer repression.

Denial is hereditary, passed down through generations. As our society matures, many parents are no longer swatting their children for emotionally expressing sound, as many of our parents and their parents did… still, the encouragement to deny expression is everywhere. It’s there in the well-meaning parent joggling a baby to “help her stop fussing”, it’s there in distracting young children with TV and videos and food rewards if they would just quiet down, it’s there in laws and social mores that discourage adults from being outwardly emotional, especially if it’s loud.

The “why’s” of our misfired lives are hidden underneath the emotions and often can’t be accessed mentally until the anger, grief, hurt or fear has had its emotionally expressive say. I have found many clear understandings about what is going on with me after I’ve expressed emotion, but could not find that level of clarity beforehand, no matter how much I tried to get clear before expressing my feelings first.

Some suggestions: find safe ways to express that do not verbally or physically harm you or others. Hit soft things; yell into down pillows to block your sound if sound safety is an issue. Ask your higher power to fill you with loving light. Form peer healing circles, and uncover your own denial within that group. This can be a do-it-yourself process with the occasional support of those who do the same thing in their lives. A therapist is not always necessary.

Give yourself safe, proactive triggers, so that it is not always life’s hardships in your face that are putting you through your paces. I’ve made recordings of triggering music and lit candles and prayed in order to trigger the pain I knew was lurking and impacting on my life every day. Surrender to what rises in you with as little control as possible on the expression. If triggered by another in the space, move away from them when possible, unless the two of you have a longstanding agreement to do this kind of interpersonal work together and are each willing to feel the “cascade” of back and forth triggering along with the leaking blame that spews inevitably as the sparks fly upward. Taking responsibility for your involvement in each and every controversy is important.

Fear ‘or’ Love

“So what’re ya gonna choose: fear or love?” This is the ultimate rhetorical question, posed by smugly smiling gurus of all ilk’s down thru history. There is no possible answer; the two forces are not really oppositional. There’s no way of “choosing” because fear is felt in a millisecond. It’s already there, and it’s quicker than you are.

Fear is embedded in us from the start, and when the sleeping giant of fear gets stirred by an inner or outer event, the real choice around what to do with it is love it (by acknowledging, accepting and expressing how it really feels) or fear it (denying it – pushing it away by mentally lifting out of it with affirmations or a strong intent to “overcome it”).

The way to truly transform “crunchy” emotions like fear, rage, or hurt is to let the emotions vibrate by allowing the sound to come up from the place in our bodies where we feel the emotion, into our throats and out our mouths as sounds; weird sounds, loud sounds, tears. This is the only way to organically transform an emotion at its root. We have all tried cutting emotions off as a way to “get rid of them”, separating ourselves from the feelings in various ways, but that kind of denial catches up with us sooner or later.

I propose the following definition of fear: a deep, non-mental mistrust that something which is perceived to have power over us might hurt us in some way. Or, an indefinable mistrust of ourselves or another. Mistrust is the keyword. Fear, or any emotion that we have labeled negative, can be born into love thru accepting its presence and allowing its expression. And, new understandings will fill us when we are done expressing about why we felt the way we did. Fear or mistrust, once within love, becomes trust.

A big part of our problem with emotional expression is, we’ve been taught from birth to deny the fullness of our emotional expression, and here we approach the roots of denial. Emotions if completely accepted for what they are, express themselves in sound. A baby in its first year of life is a ball of sound. Slowly but surely, inner and outer forces conspire to contain the level, breadth, and freedom of expression until expression in many adults happens rarely if ever. We feel it sometimes rise up from the inner depths still, but we routinely push down this rising inclination to make sound… which then squeezes itself out of us nonetheless, once we’ve magnetized a particular life experience big enough to trigger it (funny how that works). Without self-acceptance, that expression looks as twisted and feels as yucky to ourselves and others as we’ve judged it to be.

“So how will you approach your fear, with fear or with love?”

Fear of Fear Itself

Fear is not the problem; it is simply another emotion to be felt, like grief or anger. Fear of fear is the problem. Fear of fear is rooted in judgment and hatred for how it feels to be afraid. This isn’t wrong; it’s actually quite important to notice what is in the way of feeling and expressing. If you hate your fear, that’s the starting place. Hate it, but let the hatred blow up big and in sound. Judge it, rage at it, spew out loud how much you hate it. Stomp around; imagine putting your fear in chair and whap the life out of it with pillows or something that won’t damage the chair. Eventually, releasing those judgments of fear is going to be important – we’ll talk more about this in future articles.

A friend wondered what feeling her fear was supposed to do for her. She said that what she usually did whenever fearful pictures arose in her mind, which was often, was to suppress the feelings that came with the pictures.

Acknowledging, accepting, feeling and expressing fear in wordless sound or body movement is often extremely uncomfortable, especially at first. Expressing fear safely and with as much acceptance as you can give it actually relieves the pressured feeling inside that any growing, internalized fear bubbling to the surface gives us. That’s what expressing the fear can do for you.

Most people don’t even recognize that emotions are a part of the self, and a part that needs healing because of routine, lifetimes-long denial patterns. We cannot successfully cut off parts of ourselves, but that’s precisely what we attempt to do when we suppress. Emotions are a part of ourselves, and fear only feels bad because we have denied it for so long. Any emotion that gets routinely denied feels dark, monstrous, alien, and scary. Fear doesn’t feel nearly as bad to me as it used to because I don’t deny it nearly as much as I used to.

Before you feel it, the fear feels like a dragon in the closet; as you go into it and come out the other side, the dragon shrinks away, perhaps to a salamander. The judgment that comes up for everybody who considers expressing fear for the first time or first few times is, “If I dare feel or express this fear, what I’m afraid of will manifest”. My experience is that the opposite occurs – if I dare to release the fear by allowing its expression it doesn’t need to draw a reflection of itself in order to trigger it. It’s the denial of fear while focusing on mental pictures that attracts what we fear. Often if I can release the fear ahead of any event, the event either doesn’t happen or manifests much more benignly than I’d originally feared. In this context, “nothing to fear but the denial of fear itself” would be an accurate coining of the old maxim.

Worry is a more sublimated form of fear. It’s the tip of the iceberg of a terror held in the subconscious parts of our being. The continuum looks like this: worry -> anxiety -> fear -> terror. They’re all forms of the same emotion, depending on how much of it is consciously felt or held in a given area. Fear is an emotion, but is not universally understood, recognized or acknowledged as an emotion, like anger or grief is.

Fear can be expressed in several ways; allowing the energy of it into your jaw to make your teeth chatter, allowing spontaneous weird sounds to emerge, or by crying. Private or safe space is best for emotional expression. Expressing fear means giving in to it, allowing it up into the throat, into the voice, and then abandoning control and letting it happen. I nearly always feel better afterward I release, with more understanding of the triggering situation than before I started. This understanding doesn’t always come immediately, or on the same day, but it does come.

Part – 2

“I’m in such a fog today” … “if I only had a brain” … “brain fart” … these are some of the ways we’ve described our state of affairs when we feel our mental bodies to be dysfunctional. How does one heal a mind? First off, who really knows what the mind is? Is the mental body our thoughts? A crucible for making decisions? A psychic radio, tuning in strong, clear signals and homing in on weak ones? Our own private study? How private is this study, anyhow?

I would say the mental body is a halfway house, the balance point, between our spirits and our emotional and physical bodies. It receives input coming up from “below” (physical/emotional) and “above” (spirit) and synthesizes that input, hopefully into something cohesive.

Thinking in western culture is often a proactive activity, and I’m not so sure that is the right role for our mental body. A healed mind might look more like Mr. Spock, offering information and its considered opinion when asked, but otherwise staying behind the scenes, leaving the final decision and spring into action to Captain Kirk (playing the role of the physical body, which in my ideal model is the part of us who “leads”). Spock never took over, he never initiated the action; he waited to be asked, and had usually considered all the angles, because he had all the information at his disposal.

Spock’s downfall, and our mental body’s in its unhealed state, is the mind’s disconnect from the rest of the self. Through damage or trauma, our spiritual essence, our “I-ness”, the part we identify as “Me”, does not descend all the way into our physical and emotional bodies, but merely has a toe dipped in those waters, and lodges some of itself in the mind, leaving its majority floating somewhere just outside the Self. Without spirit fully integrated into the emotional and physical, the “road” leading to our halfway house is in such shoddy repair that in many cases it is undriveable, impassible. There is no flow of information, so mind does not have all the information … only what has worked or not worked in the past, and thus it is inevitably trapped in the same space that Spock’s great mind was trapped: in the seductive vice-grip of The Great God of Logic. A cold, calculating god indeed.

Physical activity such as dancing or hiking helps draw the spiritual and mental bodies into closer contact with the physical and emotional. Intuition and spontaneous visions become unlocked as the mental and spiritual bodies “descend” into corporeal reality. Ever notice how much more alive and clear your thoughts and visions become at various moments while receiving a bodywork session? Integration is happening; the “road” is being repaired, information transfer is restored between emotions, body, and mind.

Stretching, yoga, bodywork (either on one’s self or via a practitioner), and somatic exercises help deepen breathing and help the whole system slow down, especially the mind and its whirling thoughts, by helping spirit descend more into Body. When the spiritual body is fully integrated with the physical and emotions are being noticed and felt, mind becomes more fully embodied as well, and enters the “Now Moment”. Habitually, our mental bodies like to take off into the past or future. At those times, we are not fully present.

The role of judgments, also known as belief structures and expectations, are like walls that compartmentalize and narrow the mind, and this is the main area in which the mental body needs healing.

Judgment Release

A wise teacher once said to me that words are like spells; they can work their magic for or against us. In this context, only a fool says that talk is cheap. The actual cost of pronouncements and the kind of generalities that pepper everyday conversation can be, in fact, quite astronomical, and to painfully extend the metaphor, we can find ourselves paying “interest” for many years, never touching the principal.

Judgments, spoken or thought, are one of the mental body’s coping mechanisms for dealing with overwhelming realities. They give us the illusion of control by making rules or stating the way a situation, person, place, or thing IS. The hidden cost of making judgments is that they become a “thought form” clouding the mind that can magnetize and re-create unpleasant situations that match the judgment’s expectations, narrowing the openings for epiphany. We re-condition ourselves negatively every time we reiterate a judgment we have been holding, both in casual conversation and emotional diatribe. Large parts of us would rather be right than happy, and something’s bassackwards there.

Culturally, we have lost awareness of how powerful our expectations and judgments are; how they shape the realities and experiences that “come toward us from the future”. We have also lost awareness of the intense emotions just under the surface, often powering the judgment’s need to be right. Judgments empower denial of emotional realities within us. Even though we lose when a judgment we’ve been holding proves itself true, there is a “perverse deliciousness” in the satisfaction of saying ‘I knew this would happen!’, and the mental body trumps the emotional … again. This is the main area in the mental body that needs to change if healing is to happen.

Clearing judgments can allow us to see a situation anew in the moment, and in doing so, we can reinvent our reality as it manifests before our eyes. A good way to release mental body judgments is by stating such a release out loud – the antidote to the “black magic spell” we put on ourselves in originally making it. With as much emotional presence as you can muster, say something like “I release the judgment that …” and then name the judgment you’ve been holding, e.g. “… Rottweilers are dangerous”. Then look for the judgments that support the one you just let go. “I release the judgment that dogs are only safe on leashes. I forgive myself for having believed that animals don’t like me. I allow the belief to dissolve that the world is frightening. I let go now of the belief that I can never feel safe.” Use any wording for the form of your judgment release that feels right to you in the moment.

Pay attention inside, as you sift through a particular nest of judgments during their verbal release, for the emotions underneath that may start to stir and move, and allow as much emotional release as you feel you can in whatever ways you can. Releasing judgments and the hidden emotions powering them can allow you to view a situation with fresh eyes, seeing it and accepting it for what it is now. Cultivate the art of speaking specifically rather than generally, e.g. “I got attacked by a Rottweiler when I was ten, and I have felt afraid of them up to now.” Play with releasing as many beliefs as you can find … do a little ceremony if you like … and dare to release the judgment that this process couldn’t work for you, is bullshit, and that you would rather be right than happy!

Avoiding the Unnecessary Danger of Future Thoughts

“Be here now” … “staying present” … “grounding into body” … new age catch-phrases that can leave us going ‘Yeah, sure, ok … so what are we doing after lunch?’ New-ageisms sound too pat nowadays, and we want something more concrete, some applicable awareness that can help us heal our lives.

Try this one on for size – we are safe, invulnerably safe, if we stay put in our current moment, breathing, doing, being .. whatever we are doing and being. There is no danger in the moment! We can’t be hurt if we are in our bodies, fully. When we jump ahead of ourselves, when we spin future pictures based on assumptions, judgments, plans, and pictures of various sorts, we are by definition out of the moment and generating fear, or excitement. It’s either “going to be so good” or “going to be so bad”.

When fear is generated by the passing pictures, it is not often processed. And this is how we set ourselves up for “reversals”, experiences that set us back. By generating more fear that is not then processed, we put ourselves in danger, without even realizing it. Unprocessed fear and the judgments that accompany it have a tendency to attract the very experience feared. We can avoid fear generation by staying as present as possible, refusing to go down the ratholes of the pretty or scary visions. And of course, when we do feel afraid, it is vital to feel and organically express the fear, not technique or rationalize it away.

How to return to the moment when I’ve left it? Just do it. Just come back, accepting that I left for awhile, and express the fear generated by the dangerous experience of having left the safety of my fully embodied moment. Excitement can be expressed too … judging fear or excitement wrong or bad to exist or express is not healing and dealing. “I release the judgment that my fear is wrong to be.” Verbal, out-loud releasing of judgments is crucial to assisting myself to stay present. Which, by the way, is not the same as blocking out all thoughts – it means having the “loving discipline” to bother noticing what feels like truth to incorporate into the moment, and what feels like a distraction that pulls me out of my body. Practicing being able to tell those two types of thoughts apart can assist in learning to tell the difference.

My fear has been that if I allowed myself to stay completely present, letting the pictures of future possibilities roll by unexplored, that I would constantly get blindsided and unprepared for incoming situations. But, what does “prepared” really mean? Armed to the teeth with expectations of how I am going to handle the situation that has not yet come to pass? That behaviour only locks the future into the past. I can’t allow magic, epiphany and serendipity into my new moments if I have already decided how I will respond and act ahead of time. When I do that, I miss the impact of the new experience and my organic response to it.

How will I make informed decisions without considering all the angles in advance? Ask for inner guidance and accept that I have the power to KNOW what to do when the right time comes for acting and responding. Taking full responsibility for my experiences, including my old imprints of victimization and perpetration, means accepting and getting comfortable with my ability to respond. Response-ability generates acceptance, which generates a greater sense of comfort with myself, which generates an increasing ease with staying present in my body, which generates trust and safety instead of more fear and danger.

When the moment for decision comes, the choice will be obvious.

Asses Out of U and Me

“Well, I just assumed you knew” … “You assumed I wouldn’t be up for it?” … “I went on an assumption that we would never make it on time”. Ahhhhhh, yes … the assumption hole. We magically transform normal homo sapiens into braying donkeys, performing this dark, calcifying wizardry on ourselves and others on a daily basis (with due apologies to our full-time burro amigos).

How often have we uttered or heard word for word recitals of the above? How often does assuming we know what is real for a given moment match what’s really happening? (What’s really happening? Hindsight will tell you!) So often, after our assumptions have proven faulty, we sheepishly grin to our partners or friends, “y’know I was wrong about that thing” or, we polarize and say something that defends the assumption, or the reasons for making the assumption.

Either way there are a few things we did there. First, we felt we had all the information we needed to ‘safely’ make an assumption. Secondly, we were operating on old information and failed to check back in to see if it was still true. Thirdly, we were running on fear which led to making the assumption, such as fear of confronting the source of our fear, unsafety around the source itself, be it a person or place or thing, fear of admitting that we don’t know everything already, or fear of success, which subconsciously sabotages a situation in order to prove judgments such as “Nothing ever works” or “life sucks”.

Healing the fear around knowing the truth could be a key to discovering why we make so many assumptions in our daily lives. Releasing this fear and other fears is crucial in order to regularly make decisions that work for us instead of backfiring. In a quiet moment, try touching into a fear of a situation, interaction, or person and see if you can contact root fears that lead to your assumptions about them/it.

See if the fear has an energy in your body. You can release fear through sound that wants to organically emerge directly from the energy you’ve contacted in your mind or body, or through chattering teeth, shivering etc. Allowing and accepting fear’s existence is the key to true release, including allowing it to move through you however it will. Perhaps it will leave you without your emotionally vibrating it, but don’t just banish it … ask it what it needs and give it, including the right to move on. Acknowledging and/or expressing fear can release it, but banishing, or denying fear tends to split the parts feeling the fear off from the rest of the self throwing our babies out with bathwater.

I said earlier that calcification, or mental, physical, emotional stuckness, is part of the assumption process. Assumptions spring from stuck energy in our minds and emotions, reflected in the hard places in our physical musculature. Unquestioned assumptions powered by unfelt, unaccepted fear can manifest in the body, emotions and mind as rock-solid, protected places. A friend said to me today that people who are calcified in certain areas of their being will see calcification everywhere they look, e.g. other people being the same as they were five years ago in all that they do, situations never evolving and always having the same result time after time ad infinitum, etc.