Greetings for a beautiful Day!
Today, I’d like to briefly discuss emotional healing.
We all know we have emotions, but, what are they? Where do they come from? Until we understand this, we have no idea what to heal.
Emotions are our feelings about people, places and things. To have emotions requires that we have a body with senses (sentience), and thoughts (mind) to give meaning. For example, without a body, you could not feel pain from fire, yet, without a mind to determine what fire is, you would have no way of connecting the experience of feeling to the idea of fire. Therefore, one could safely say that emotion is both the feeling and interpretation of our ideas as an experience.
All sensations in the body depend upon nerves to feel, and ideas to interpret. Our nerves are dependent upon both blood (oxygen, nutrition and waste removal) and hormones; all neural communication is neurotransmitter and/or hormone action and interaction dependent; our levels of, and balance of hormones are directly tied to diet and lifestyle factors. Our ideas for interpreting emerge from the subconscious mind, which has its governing principles in DNA (ancestral information), and in parental, social, and cultural programming.
Emotional stability and authenticity (is what I’m feeling a consensus reality or totally my own interpretation/experience?) therefore, can only emerge when we have adequate stability in our body or biological sentience (health), coupled with ideas that authentically represent reality. For example, when touching fire, adrenaline depletion may result in one being burned before the impulse to withdraw arises, while excessive adrenaline may result in hypersensitivity to the heat of fire and even the thought of experiencing the heat of fire. Yet, if a child with an otherwise healthy body is taught that touching fire is evil, even the offer to touch fire is likely to heighten their sensitivity to fire to such a degree that even the thought of fire burns! Simply replace the word “fire” with the word “sex”, and most of you will have an inherent sense of the reality of what I’m sharing here!
To effectively begin any emotional healing process requires a two-fold approach:
1. We must assess the health of the body; you can do this with the questionnaires in my book How To Eat, Move and Be Healthy! To the degree that our primary biological systems are imbalanced and/or debilitated by genetic disease, diet and/or lifestyle, we can’t possibly know if our interpretations/experiences of our own thoughts are authentic. Therefore, healing the body is, in most instances, the first step toward healing the mind.
2. We must assess the value structures by which we accumulate and give meaning or life to ideas. This is the function of PPS lessons 1 and 2.
The Double Diary approach is a very simple way to begin the process of your own emotional healing. One diary is used to keep a diary of your foods, drinks, exercise and sleep patterns; this can easily be done with a day-timer calendar. The second diary should be used to record any painful or disconcerting emotions and thoughts that arise with them. After each week, look to see if there are any patterns suggesting a connection between foods eaten, activities engaged in, sleep patterns and the thoughts and emotions being experienced. Then, once a pattern emerges (I see that I have a greater tendency toward anger when I drink coffee!), manipulating the diet and/or lifestyle factor toward either more or less should result in a change in the emotional experience and thought patterns. If it doesn’t -and the body is healthy- chances are good that the emotional pain or imbalance emerges from disruptive childhood programming. For these people, entering into the practice of awareness is the first and most crucial form of medicine or healing.
When challenging thoughts and their emotions emerge, try:
1. Smiling. Hold your smile and see if the negative emotion or thought perception can be maintained. If it can’t, you have evidence that changing your body language and posture can change your mind. Through awareness, you can learn to change your body to change your mind, and therefore, your emotions.
2. Attachment & Detachment: When experiencing emotional pain, count up rapidly by 3 (3,6,9.12!) while speaking aloud (if possible). Do this earnestly for one minute or more. Then revisit your emotional experience while counting and you are very likely to notice that while counting up by increments of three rapidly, your brain could not entertain the painful idea. Therefore, you now have evidence that you can choose not to entertain disempowering thoughts. By detachment from painful thoughts and emotions that no longer serve to authentically represent reality, you can de-activate them, just as pulling the plug on your TV deactivates the ideas being conveyed therein. With a little practice, your mind will learn that that idea is no longer of any value or use and will stop presenting such ideas to you.
In my definition, the spiritual person is one who accepts responsibility for what they create moment to moment. To be spiritual, is to be an adult in the truest sense of the word! When we are given simple tools such as I’ve shared here, but choose not to use them, we are essentially stating through our actions that we, as yet, have not completed our childhood; we need fixations, illnesses and/or diseases as a means of limiting participation with the responsibilities of life. People who are in adult bodies living as children, inevitably come face to face with reality. If they don’t accept reality and embrace the opportunity to learn and grow through contributing to the world, then they are very likely to regress from fixations (addictions) to illness, and finally to disease; once in a hospital or in special care, they have an opportunity to experience surrogate mommies and daddies (nurses and doctors), and catch up on all the cartoons they missed as children because they were taxed with such things as meeting homework assignments and achieving high grades so they could experience mommies and daddies love, which gave them a sense of value. The problem with this approach is that by the time you complete your childhood, your body may be terminally depleted, and, you may be so far behind the mindset of the day that to become an adult again may be daunting.
My advice for anyone desiring emotional healing is to begin immediately so that they may restore balance and enjoy life as a self-actuated (spiritual) human being. To wait for others to correctly diagnose and address your problems is dangerous when considering the fact that only one who has legitimate health and spiritual well-being is qualified to make such a diagnosis! I’ll leave you all to meditate on the implications of that reality when considering that doctors and therapists at large are no more developed than their patients from what I can see; the result is playing doctor/therapist instead of being a doctor, which by definition means “teacher”.
Enjoy the journey into emotional well-being. It’s essential.
Love and chi,
Paul Chek
