Dealing with emotions

Yet I always live inside your hearts and I wait for moments in your time when you are open and susceptible to my energy. My energy, the Christ energy that is being reborn in this time, is not solely my energy. It is not simply the energy of one man who lived on earth at one time; it is a collective energy field in which you take part in a way that is more profound than you realize.

You all made a vow once, you all set your intention to carry this energy forth into the reality of earth, to anchor it in earth. Many lifetimes, many centuries, you have worked on this mission. You are all in the process of birthing the Christ seed within and I am helping you. I was a forerunner, yet the sowing of the Christ seed was a collective effort. Even my coming to earth was possible only because of the field of energy that was present here, woven by you. We work together, we are a unity. Therefore I am accessible to all of you. I am not exclusively available to any one person. I am at the service of all of you.

Today I want to speak about an issue that touches you deeply and frequently in your day to day life. It is about dealing with emotions.

 

Last time I spoke about the energies of the male and the female which run through your energy field and chakras. I have emphasized the importance of healing the lowest three chakras as a part of becoming whole and complete unto yourself. I thought it was important to emphasize this as some of you who crave the spiritual tend to withdraw yourself, both in thought and feeling, to the higher chakras.

The heart, the third eye and the crown chakra are attractive to you, because these energy centers connect you with the higher realms that are so natural to you. But the real inner breakthroughs must now occur on a lower level, in the area of the lower chakras, closer to earth.

 

The area of the emotions is a vital area in your growth process towards freedom and wholeness. You are spiritual beings. You come from a plane of reality where the density and coarseness of earth reality was unknown to you. To cope with this has been difficult.

 

Throughout many lives you have tried to express your cosmic energy here on earth. And in this expression, in the channeling of your energy to earth, many deep traumas have been built up. The emotional body that you all have is rife with wounds and traumas. Of that I wish to speak today.

 

Anyone who walks the path of inner growth knows the importance of emotions: that you should not repress them, that you have to come to terms with them in some way, that you must ultimately release them. But how it all really works is not always so clear.

 

I first want to make a distinction between emotions and feelings. I am not concerned here with specific terms or labels and you may call it by different names, but I want to make a distinction between emotions in the sense of energies that are essentially expressions of misunderstanding and feelings or energies that are a form of higher understanding.

 

Feelings are your teachers, while emotions are your children.

 

Emotions are energies that have a clear manifestation in the physical body. Emotions are reactions to things that you do not really understand. Consider what happens when you are overcome by a fit of rage. For instance someone hurts your feelings unexpectedly and you feel yourself becoming angry. You can feel this very clearly in your body; in certain places you feel the energy go tense. This physical tension or tightening that follows the energetic shock shows there is something you do not understand. There is an energy coming toward you that you feel is unjustified. The feeling of being treated unjustly, in short the not-understanding, is vented through the emotion. The emotion is the expression of the not-understanding, it is an energetic explosion and a release.

 

When this happens, you are confronted with the following choice: what am I going to do with this emotion? Am I going to base my actual behavior on it? Am I going to use this as fuel for my reactions to other people or do I let the emotion be and base my actions on something else?

 

Before answering this question, I want to explain the nature of feelings.

 

Emotions are essentially explosions of misunderstanding that you can clearly perceive in the body. Feelings, on the other hand, are of a different nature and are perceived differently as well. Feelings are more quiet than emotions. They are the whispers of the soul that reach you through gentle nudges, an inner knowingness or a sudden intuitive action that later appears to have been very wise.

 

Emotions always have something very intense and dramatic to them. Consider anxiety attacks, fear, rage or deep sadness. Emotions take hold of you completely and pull you away from your spiritual center. In the moment you are highly emotional, you are full of a kind of energy that pulls you away from your center, your inner clarity. In that sense, emotions are like clouds hovering before the sun.

 

With this, I do not want to say anything against emotions. Emotions should not be repressed; they are very valuable as a means to get to know yourself more intimately. But I do want to state what the nature of emotional energy is: it is an explosion of misunderstanding. Emotions essentially take you out of your center.

Feelings, on the other hand, bring you deeper into yourself, into your center. Feelings are closely associated with what you call intuition. Feelings express a higher understanding, a kind of understanding that transcends both the emotions and the mind.

 

Feelings originate in a non-physical realm, outside of the body. That is why they are not so clearly located within one spot of the physical body. Consider what happens when you sense something, an atmosphere or a mood, or when you have presentiments about a situation. There is a kind of knowingness within you then that seems to come from the outside and that is not a reaction from you to something external. It comes “out of nothing” (“out of the blue” as you so beautifully put it). In such a moment, you may feel something open up in your heart chakra.

There are many moments in which such an inner knowingness comes to you. For instance, you may “know” something about someone without having really talked with him or her. You can sense something about the two of you that later on will play an important role in your relationship. Such things are not easy to grasp in words – “simply a feeling” – and certainly not easily understood by the mind. (These are the moments in which your mind gets skeptical, telling you that you are making things up or are going crazy).

 

I would like to mention another energy that has more of a “feeling” nature than an emotional one. It is joy. Joy can be a phenomenon that transcends the emotional. Sometimes you can feel a kind of joy inside that lifts you up without a particular reason. You feel the divinity inside you and your intimate connection to all that exists. Such a feeling may come to you when you least expect it. It is as if Something Greater touches you or as if you touch a Greater Reality. Feelings are not so easily summoned and seem to come to you “out of the blue.” Emotions almost always have a clear immediate cause: a trigger in the outside world that “pushes your buttons.”

 

Feelings originate from the dimension of your Higher or Greater Self. You need to be quiet inside to catch those whispers in your heart. Emotions can disturb this inner silence and peace. Therefore it is vital to become emotionally calm and to heal and release repressed emotions. Only from your feeling which connects you to your soul can you make balanced decisions.

 

By being quiet and peaceful, you can feel with all of your being what is right for you at a certain moment. Making decisions based on emotions is making decisions from a non-centered position. You need to release the emotions first and get in touch with your inner core where there is clarity.

 

Now I want to go into the question of how you can best deal with your emotions.

 

I said that “feelings are your teachers and emotions are your children.” The parallels between “being emotional” and “being like a child” are striking. Your “inner child” is the seat of your emotions. Also there is a striking resemblance between the way you deal with your own emotions and the way you deal with real children.

 

Children are honest and spontaneous in their emotions and they do not hide or repress them until adults encourage them to do so. The fact that children spontaneously express their emotions does not however mean that children experience their emotions in a balanced way. Everyone knows that children can be carried away by their emotions (rage, fear or sadness) and are often unable to put a stop to them. In such a situation, the child can almost drown in their emotions and that makes them unbalanced, i.e. out-of-center.

 

One of the reasons for this unbounded emotionality is that the child has only recently left a world in which there are hardly any boundaries. In the ethereal or astral dimensions, there were no such restrictions and limitations as there are in the physical realm, within the physical body. The child’s emotions are often “reactions of misunderstanding” to this physical reality. Therefore when he or she grows up, the child needs help and support in dealing with their emotions. This is part of the process of “balanced incarnating” on earth.

 

So how do you deal with emotions, whether in yourself or in your children?

 

Emotions should not be judged or repressed. Emotions are a vital part of you as a human being and as such they need to be respected and accepted. You can look upon your emotions as your children who need your attention and respect and your guidance.

 

An emotion can best be viewed as an energy that comes to you for healing. Therefore it is important to not be completely swept away by the emotion, but to remain able to look at it from a neutral stance. It is important to stay conscious. One might put it like this; you should not repress an emotion, but you should not drown in it either. For when you drown in it, when you identify with it completely, the child in you becomes a tyrant that will lead you astray.

 

The most important thing you can do with an emotion is to allow it in, to feel all aspects of it while not losing your consciousness. Take for instance anger. You can invite anger to be fully present, experiencing it in your body at several places, while you are at the same time neutrally observing it. Such a type of consciousness is healing. What happens in this instance is that you embrace the emotion, which is essentially a form of misunderstanding, with understanding. This is spiritual alchemy.

 

Let me explain with the help of an example. Your child has bumped her knee on the table and it really hurts. She is upset, screaming with pain and she kicks the table because she is angry with it. She considers the table to be the source of her pain.

 

Emotional guidance at this moment means that the parent first helps the child name her experience. “You are angry, aren’t you – you are in pain, right?” Naming it is essential. You transfer the root of the problem from the table to the child herself. “It’s not in the table, it is you who are hurt, it is you who is angry. And yes, I understand your emotion!”

 

The parent embraces the emotion of the child with understanding, with love. The moment the child feels understood and recognized, her anger will gradually fade away. The physical pain may still be present. But her resistance to the pain, the anger around it, can dissolve. The child reads compassion and understanding in your eyes, and this relaxes and soothes her emotions. The table, the cause of the emotions, is not relevant anymore.

 

In embracing an emotion with understanding and compassion, you shift the focus of the child’s attention from outside to inside, and you teach the child to take responsibility for the emotion. You are showing her that her reaction to an outside trigger is not a given, but that it is a matter of choice. You can choose misunderstanding or understanding. You can choose to fight or to accept. You can choose.

 

This also applies to the relationship with your own emotions, your own inner child. Allowing your emotions in, naming them and making an effort to understand them, means that you truly respect and cherish your inner child. Making the shift from “outer” to “inner,” taking responsibility for the emotion, helps to create an inner child that does not want to hurt anyone else, that does not feel victimized. Strong emotions – whether anger, grief or fear – always have the component of powerlessness, i.e. the sense that you are the victim of something outside of you. What you do when you focus not on the circumstances outside of you but instead on your reaction and your pain is that you “dismiss” the outside world as the cause of your emotions. You do not care that much about what gave rise to the emotion. You completely turn inward and you say to yourself: okay, this has been my reaction and I understand why. I understand why I feel the way that I do and I am going to support myself in this.

 

Turning toward your emotions in such a loving manner is liberating. It does require a kind of self-discipline. Releasing outside reality as the “source of the evil” and taking full responsibility yourself means that you acknowledge that “you choose to react a certain way.” You stop arguing about who is right and who is wrong, who is to blame for what and you simply release the whole chain of events that happened outside of your control. “I now experience this emotion in the full awareness that I choose to do so.” That is taking responsibility. That is courage!

 

The self-discipline in this is that you give up on being righteous and on being the helpless victim. You give up on feeling angry, misunderstood and all the other expressions of victimhood that can feel quite good at some times. (Truly, you often cherish the emotions that bug you the most). Taking responsibility is an act of humbleness. It means being honest with yourself, even at your weakest moment.

 

This is the self-discipline that is asked of you. At the same time, this kind of turning inward requires the highest compassion. The emotion you are honestly prepared to face as your own creation is also looked upon with gentle understanding. “You chose anger this time, didn’t you?” Compassion tells you: “Okay, I can see why and I forgive you. Perhaps when you feel my love and support more clearly you will not feel inclined to take that response next time.”

 

This is the true role of consciousness in self-healing. This is what spiritual alchemy means. Consciousness does not fight or reject anything; it encircles darkness with awareness. It encircles the energies of misunderstanding with understanding and thus transforms ordinary metal into gold. Consciousness and love are essentially the same. Being conscious means letting something be and surrounding it with your love and compassion.

 

Often you think that “consciousness alone” is not enough to overcome your emotional problems. You say: I know I have repressed emotions, I know the cause of it, I am aware but it does not go away.

 

In that case, there is a subtle resistance within you to that emotion. You keep the emotion at a distance, from fear of being overwhelmed by it. But you are never overwhelmed by an emotion when you consciously choose to allow it.

As long as you keep the emotion at a distance, you are at war with it. You are fighting the emotion and it will turn against you in several ways. You cannot keep it outside in the end. It will manifest itself in your body as an ache or tension or as a feeling of depression. Feeling down or weary frequently is a clear sign that you are repressing certain emotions.

The thing is that you need to allow the emotions to fully enter your consciousness. If you do not know exactly what emotions are there, you can very well start by feeling the tensions in your body. This is a gateway to the emotions. In your body it is all stored. For instance, if you feel pain or tension in the area of your stomach, you can go there with your awareness and ask what is the matter. Let the cells of your body speak to you. Or imagine that right there, a child is present. Ask the child to show you what emotion is predominant in him or her.

 

There are several ways to connect with your emotions. It is vital to realize that the energy that got stuck in the emotion wants to move. This energy wants to be released and therefore it knocks at your door as a physical complaint or as a feeling of stress or depression. For you it is a matter of really opening up and being prepared to feel the emotion.

 

Emotions are part of your earthly reality – but they should not get a hold over you. Emotions are like clouds for the sun. Therefore it is so important to be aware of your emotions and to deal with them consciously. From a clear and balanced emotional body, it is much easier to contact your soul or inner core through your intuition.

 

In your society, there is much confusion about emotions. This is evident, among other things, from the amount of debate and confusion there is about how to raise your children. Children clearly are much more emotionally spontaneous than you are as adults. This creates difficulties. What if some of your moral boundaries are crossed? What if the situation gets out of hand and chaos arises? Does one have to discipline children or let them express themselves freely? Do their emotions have to be controlled or not?

 

What is important in a child’s upbringing is that they learn to understand their emotions, to understand where they come from and to take responsibility for them. With your help, the child can learn to see their emotions as “explosions of misunderstanding.” This understanding prevents your child from “drowning” in their emotions and going out of control. Understanding liberates and brings you back to your own center without repressing the emotions. The parent teaches their child to deal with emotions in this way by being the living example of it.

 

All the questions you have about dealing with your children also apply to yourself. How do you cope with your own emotions? Are you hard on yourself? When you feel angry or sad for some time, do you discipline yourself by saying: “Come on, get yourself together and move on”? Do you suppress the emotion? Do you feel that disciplining yourself is good and necessary? Who taught you this? Was it a parent?

Or do you go to the other side? Do you wallow in your emotion, not wanting to let go of it. This also is frequently the case. You may have felt for a long time that you were a victim of some situation outside of you, for example your upbringing, your partner or your work environment. At a certain moment, it may have been very liberating to get in touch with the anger inside you about the negative things that influenced you. Anger can enable you to break free from these influences and go your own way. However you may get so enamored with your anger that you do not want to give it up anymore. Instead of becoming a doorway, it becomes a way of living. A form of victimhood then arises which is anything but healing. It holds you back from truly standing in your own power.

 

It is very important to take responsibility for your own emotions and not to make absolute truths of them. When you give them the status of truths, instead of looking upon them as “explosions of misunderstanding,” you will base your actions on them and that will lead to uncentered decisions.

 

The same happens with children who are allowed too much emotional freedom. They run wild and become uncontrollable; they become little tyrants and that is not right. Emotional chaos is just as unpleasant for the child as it is for the parent.

 

In short you can either be too strict or too lenient in dealing with your emotions (and, by analogy, with your children). I want to go a little more into the “lenient” way, for that seems to be more of an issue nowadays. Since the sixties there has been a collective realization that it will not do to suppress your emotions, for then you are stifling your spontaneity and creativity, indeed your very soul. Society will produce disciplined and obedient children who care more for rules than the whispers of the heart and that is a tragedy – for society as well as the individual.

 

But what about that other extreme: what about justifying emotions in such a way that they take over and rule your life?

 

You can very well observe inside you whether there are emotions that you cherish in such a way that you regard them as truth instead of what they really are: explosions of misunderstanding. These are emotions you have identified with. The paradox is that often enough, these are emotions that cause you much suffering. For instance: powerlessness (“I cannot help it”), control (“I’ll handle it”), anger (“it’s their fault”) or grief (“life is miserable”). These are all emotions that are painful but yet, on another level, they give you something special to hold on to.

 

Take powerlessness or the “victim feeling.” There can be advantages to this emotional pattern. It may give you a sense of safety. It releases you from certain obligations or responsibilities. “I can’t help it, can I?” It is a dark corner you’re sitting in but it seems a safe one. The danger of identifying or “merging” with such an emotional pattern for a long time is that you lose touch with your own true freedom, your innermost divine core.

 

Things may have entered your life path that have justifiably provoked emotions of anger and resentment within you. This may have happened in your youth, later on or even in past lives. It is very important that you get in touch with these emotions consciously and that you become aware of the anger, sadness or any other intensely charged energy within you. But at a certain point, you need to take responsibility for your emotions, for they constitute your reactions to an outside event.

 

Being centered, being in a state of clarity and spiritual balance, means that you take full responsibility for all the emotions that are in you. You can then recognize the emotion of, for instance, anger within you and say at the same time: this was my reaction to certain events. I surround this reaction with understanding, but at the same time I intend to release it.

 

Life is ultimately not about being right; it is about being free and whole. It is very liberating to release old emotional responses that have grown into a lifestyle.

 

One might say that it is all about the subtle middle road between suppressing emotions and drowning in them. On both sides, you have been raised with opinions and ideals that are not in accordance with the nature of spiritual alchemy. The essence of spiritual growth is that you do not suppress anything, but at the same time you take full responsibility for it. I feel this, I choose this reaction, so I can heal it. Claiming your mastership – that is what my message is about truly.

 

Perhaps it is not really a middle road, but a different road. It is all about spiritual mastership. In accepting all there is within you, you rise above it and become its master. Mastership is both strong and gentle. It is very allowing and yet it takes great discipline: the discipline of courage and honesty.

 

Claim your mastership, become the master of the emotional bits and pieces that torment you, often behind your back. Get in touch with them, take responsibility. Don’t let yourself be driven by unconscious emotional hurts that sidetrack you and block your road to inner freedom. It is your consciousness that heals. No one else can restore the power over your own emotions for you. There are no external instruments or means to take away those emotions. It is in becoming aware of them with strength, determination and compassion that they are released into the Light.

 

Becoming whole and free on the emotional level is one of the most important aspects of growing spiritually. I want to finish by saying: do not make it more difficult than it is. The spiritual path is a simple path. It is about love for yourself and inner clarity. It does not require any specific knowledge or any specific rituals, rules or methods. All things you need for your spiritual growth are within you.

 

At a quiet moment, go to the feeling side of you. Let this feeling side of you tell you what needs to be clarified and cleansed within you. Trust your intuition. Work on it. Believe in yourself. You are the master of your life, the master of your unique path to love and freedom.

© Pamela Kribbe

 

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