Wednesday, December 31, 2014

Emotional Healing and Love

Jeff Brown is a wonderful writer who posts many of his reflective pieces on his Facebook page. I thought this piece on Emotional Healing and Love was very well said.

"One thing that is clear to me is the value of emotional healing work both in our efforts to prepare for love and in our efforts to sustain it. This is not to say that love cannot enter our lives when we are emotionally unhealthy, but it is helpful if we can do some work to clear our debris in advance."

"When we don't do it, it becomes difficult to recognize love, to attune to love, to hold love safe. This is 'the power of then'- although the physical body travels forward chronologically, one's emotional consciousness always lingers at any point of departure. To move forward on the path, we have to go back and heal the wounds and memories that obstruct us. We've got to be there there before we can be here now."

"Clearing our emotional debris has many positive impacts. It creates more space inside for love to enter and it gives us more energy to see love all the way through. Unresolved material is like undigested food-- it blocks the channel and prevents new nourishment from entering. All bunked up, we may not even notice love when it walks through the portal. Releasing our emotional holdings cleans our lens, allowing us to notice love when it comes. With a dirty lens, love is blind and we are blind to it."

"And working through our issues expands our awareness, providing us with the tools we will need to manage our triggers and patterns. Of course, love will bring up new challenges from their burial ground, but with more intimacy with the processes of pattern recognition and healing, we stand a better chance of staying out of our own way. If you don't know the stuff you come in with, you are going to have a hard time managing the new levels of material that love excavates."

"This is the actual new earth. It isn't a place where we imagine that watching our pain body will actually transform it. It isn't a place where we confuse dissociation with expansion. It's a place where we jump right into the heart of the emotional material, shaping it like clay into a newer, truer lens. Real presence is a whole being experience."

The Six Principles of Compassionate Living

These points are from Pema Chodron, as summarized by my colleague Brock Davis. They offer a wonderful context within which to begin the new year.

1. Generosity: Giving as a path of learning to let go.

2. Discipline: Training in not causing harm in a way that is daring and flexible.

3. Patience: Training in abiding with the restlessness of our energy and letting things evolve at their own speed. If waking up takes forever, still we go moment by moment, giving up all hope of fruition and enjoying the process.

4. Joyful enthusiasm: Letting go of our perfectionism and connecting with the living quality of every moment.

5. Meditation: Training in coming back to being right here with gentleness and precision.

6. Prajna (or transcendent wisdom): Cultivating an open, inquiring mind.