“The rest of the afternoon passed by, in a hazy awareness of distant emotions that sat silently in some part of my body, where I had stored all the other pain. It was like a room with no view or door, no window to look out from. Somehow it absorbed the pain into its walls by osmosis and there the feelings sat like trapped little prisoners on death row, in no man’s land, experiencing neither life nor death, nor release. The room was lost floating somewhere in the cells of my body and I was lost to the room.” The Other Side of my Reflection by Lilith White (view book here)
Sitting in my little apartment, in a strange town, having to face myself squarely, I realised I had spent too many years, treading water, to even count. Had I merely been pretending when I affirmed that all was well in my world? Had practising the law of attraction, just been another distraction from being one hundred per cent authentic with myself? Once I had allowed myself to ‘stop’ and ‘wait’ and after I had awakened to having to forgive everything and everyone in my life, I began a process of discovering why I had never had the courage to visit my room with no view. that I had referred to in my book. I realised that, in my culture, it is ingrained in us not to give expression to our feelings.
Our society’s way of dealing with uncomfortable emotions, is to rather not deal with or tolerate them. They are very often relegated to the realm of the sub-conscious where they don’t have to be acknowledged. Once they are suppressed and buried in ‘the room with no view’ a neglected and forgotten place inside of us, they become part of what is known as our shadow self. We spend a large part of our lives keeping our innermost feelings hidden and if and when they do surface, we will do almost anything not feel them. Our solution is to disassociate from our ‘negative emotions’. We will go out and buy a book, get advice from the internet, take drugs to numb us, have anonymous sex or keep ourselves busy with all types of distractions. This little phrase ‘negative emotions’ has become very prevalent in the self help industry and with proponents of the law of attraction; if an emotion doesn’t feel good it must be negated, replaced and simply thrown into the trash.
WHAT IS EMOTION?
Emotion is the expression and release of a feeling. Feelings are our intuitive compass and our emotions are our guidance system. When a feeling arises, within us, our mind will unconsciously allocate an emotive response, according to what it considers to be good or bad. This is weighed up against how nice or unpleasant the feeling has impacted on us. If we feel good, it is expressed as a positive emotion. If it makes us feel bad, it is considered to be negative. The natural inclination is to allow the feel good ones and suppress the feel bad ones. In other words, any emotion that comes up for us as uncomfortable, embarrassing, disturbing or overwhelming is considered to be negative. We have been taught not to display these unpleasant feelings so we invariably take them under control by beating them into submission. If we are unable to overcome, hide and suppress these emotions, we consider ourselves weak, flawed or even unspiritual – there is, at the moment a lot of information about how to control our negative emotions, which in itself makes us feel guilty for having them. Not much is being said about the fact that our emotions are actually our guidance system that gives us clues as to what we need to do, or overcome in order to restore peace and balance. Ask any poet, writer or philosopher about when they had their most profound moments of genius. I doubt they will tell you, they were asking deep existential questions, whilst they were happily going about their day to day lives. Most people only question the deeper meaning of life when they are in pain because they are too busy enjoying the ride when they are happy and content. In other words, pain is a teacher, through which we grow and expand. Life is never static. The only certainty is that there will be change. There is always a dance between joy and pain.
ARE FEELINGS AND EMOTIONS REAL?
This is a very complex question. When you have a feeling, it becomes real enough, for you to express as it an emotion, in reality. The scientific community, as well as proponents of the law of attraction, will probably tell you that it is just in your mind…something you made up or created that you can easily overcome, simply by changing your thinking response to it. Even science is now re-examining this clinical approach. Scientific studies are now being done to prove that our consciousness continues when there is no brain activity, after death. There are too many accounts of near death experiences; people crossing over into another realm, with their faculties intact, to ignore. From this information, we are able to deduce, that it is our non-physical consciousness that gives form to our reality. If this is the case, then it is plausible that our consciousness gives form to our feelings in order for us to naturally demonstrate them in the physical, as emotion.
WHERE DO UNRESOLVED EMOTIONS GO?
If feelings belong in the sub-conscious, intuitive realm and emotions are the form in which we express our feelings, what happens to them if we suppress them? There is no way that anybody can definitively answer this question. If you are able to disassociate from a so-called negative emotion, is it gone for good or does it still need an outlet? Are we merely delaying an inevitable overload by continually burying gunk that gets stored in our body, on a sub conscious or even on a physical, cellular level?
Carl Jung believed that the unpleasant emotions we have been socialised to hide from others and eventually, from ourselves, become another aspect of ourselves, called the shadow self. This is the part of ourselves that we dare not show the world or express openly for fear that we will be punished (as a child), judged or rejected. Through conditioning, we learn to abhor this aspect of ourselves and the more we suppress it, the more hidden and buried it becomes until we no longer acknowledge or see this as an integral part of who we are.
WHAT I BELIEVE
Emotions need an outlet.
When we disassociate or suppress emotions they do not dissipate and simply evaporate. They get stored in the shadow self as sub-conscious emotional pain, which clutters up our system to become an overload of emotional baggage.
When the baggage gets too heavy or big to carry around with us, the universe breaks us down, which, in our society is often ‘labelled’ a nervous breakdown or it can manifest as physical dis-ease in our body or both.
We can either suppress further by escaping into addictions or using prescribed medication as a last, desperate act or we can go through the courageous process of facing and clearing away the mountain of emotional clutter we have accumulated over a period of time, perhaps even our whole lives.
This is by no means an easy process, nor is it a quick fix. It requires a commitment to heal and perhaps even a complete ‘taking time off’ to give the process our full attention.
The three basic steps, which anybody can start working on immediately and I suggest that you use these steps with all new emotional challenges as they arise:-
Allow
Allowing is the opposite of disassociating or suppressing. It is giving yourself permission to feel the painful emotions, without judgement of whether or not they are good or bad, positive or negative, relevant or irrelevant. Don’t ever berate yourself for giving expression to your emotions. For the purpose of this process you are allowed to indulge in them, not forever, just for now so that you can acknowledge them and look at them with complete honesty to yourself.
Many years ago, I read a book entitled The Primal Scream by Arthur Janov. People entered themselves into a program to get rid of all their emotional baggage. A day or two before the process, they were booked into a hotel room. They were not allowed to distract themselves with anything like TV or phone calls or dissociate with smoking, alcohol or drugs. The idea was sensory deprivation where the only thing they had to reflect upon, was their innermost selves.
They were then ready to be isolated in a padded cell where they could curse, cry, hit the walls and invariably let out the primal scream or many primal screams if that’s what they needed. This was a safe environment to ‘allow’. I suggest that you also find a safe place with few distractions to allow your own process.
Some Suggestions
- If you are a spiritually conscious person ask for guidance from your higher self, source or whoever or whatever you believe to be a higher power.
- Think about how you feel, holding nothing back. Try to deal with one aspect, that created this emotion, at a time. Looking at all your emotional pain at once may be too overwhelming and you may miss an important process that links to something very specific that caused you pain.
- Grieve openly. If you need to have a good cry, do it.
- Beat a pillow.
- Scream in the car with the windows wound up so nobody can hear you or go to a deserted nature spot and scream.
- If somebody hurt or abused you, find the words to express how you feel about them and say it out loud (not necessarily to them directly).
- Write down everything that comes to the surface, holding nothing back.
- Write a letter to somebody telling them exactly how you feel about a situation, even if that person has passed away or you are no longer in contact with them. This letter is just for you. You don’t want to send ‘blame’ letters. You just want to express everything you feel about it to allow it to come out. At a later stage you will take responsibility for the part you played. It is seldom just about them versus us.
Release
Once you have flung open the door to your own personal room with no view, the conscious work really begins. This is where you will find outlets to clear away the old clutter from the past to make way for the new. Releasing is all about the ‘doing’. It will be different for everybody. Listen to your intuition and ask, ‘What do I need to do, to clear this once and for all?’
Some Suggestions
- Write a letter of forgiveness to somebody you want to forgive.
- Write a letter of forgiveness to yourself and forgive yourself for your part in a situation.
- Write a goodbye letter to somebody who has passed away and that you are holding on to. If you are keeping ashes because you can’t face letting them go, it is now time to do a farewell ritual and release them.
- If you have any regrets about anything that you never said or did, it is time to say what you needed to say or do what you needed to do.
- If there is anything you want to apologise for, now is the time to do it. Acknowledge that you made a mistake. Ask for forgiveness.
Letting Go.
Letting go means that these aspects of your past are over and done with. You have acknowledged them, cleared and released them. You will be mindful about re-creating events that could manifest the same patterns of emotional trauma. You do not need to re-visit these situations that caused you pain because you have set them free. If at this point you still feel you are holding on to the past then you have not fully released it or accepted that it is time to let go.
If you do not want to let go of your pain, you may want to explore further how holding on to your pain serves you. Does it keep you inside a ‘victim control drama’ or do you still need to stay with the ‘allowing’ stage for longer? Don’t judge or berate yourself if you still can’t quite manage to let go. Set the intension that you would like to let go of this pain and that you would like the other parties involved to be free as well. If you set this intension honestly, the ‘how to’ will manifest. It is not negative. It just is. Be aware that you have not yet released this aspect of your process and make sure that you don’t lock it away again, in your own personal ‘room with no view’ inside of you.
Some Suggestions
- Do a visualisation technique where you imagine pure white light coming into a point at the top of your head and flowing into every part of you. Allow it to cleanse you and then flow out of your feet to wash away. Bring in a person or even an emotion you want to let go of. If you bring in a person, surround them with white light and then cut an imaginary cord between you and let them gently drift away. If you want to let go of an emotion, write it on a piece of paper, tie it to a balloon and then release the balloon into the sky.
- Clearly state that you let the person or emotion free.
- You may want to burn some of those letters you wrote during your allowing process. This will be a symbolic gesture to the universe that you are letting go as the smoke dissipates into the ether.
Bring thoughts of gratitude into your awareness. Acknowledge that you are loved. Now allow yourself to feel a new sense of freedom from the past. Focus your awareness on this very moment as if it was the first day of the rest of your life. Go and bask in the sun or take a walk as you consciously breathe in the air or take a drive into nature with the windows wound down.
We all strive to live our best lives. There is a lovely saying, “Angels can fly because they are so light!” We must always be mindful to allow the light to shine into our lives and live in anticipation of moments of joy. Sometimes they were difficult to recognise through the murky fog of our heavy, emotional baggage. Perhaps they are right in front of us, in the simplistic and small things in the life, we often miss out on. Look out for them…the flowering plants in spring that remind us of new growth, the delicious taste of our favourite dessert that sends bliss waves through our mouths and the full spectrum of the colours of the rainbow that surround us at every turn. Let it all go, to experience a lightness of being – perhaps you too will become so light that you will fly, just like an angel.
May your light continue to shine brightly.
Lilith White.
Please note: I am not a qualified psychologist or mental health practitioner. This article does not claim to have all the answers for everybody. We are all individuals with our own journey and must do what resonates with or is good for us. Please do not hesitate to contact a professional if you need help, guidance and support.
If you are inspired by these new reflections of Lilith White you may be interested in reading my memoir –The Other Side of My Reflection by Lilith White (view here)