Emotional Healing Work

Posted by miracarroll on February 10, 2012 · 8 Comments 

Emotional healing work is a choice to not hoard grief.
Instead we allow grief energy to move through us,
and then pour love into the empty space.

Emotional healing work is crucial to the full manifestation of each soul’s purpose in life. We need to clear the fog from the glen, as it were. Through healing our wounds we become able to hold the fullest reflection of God IN our lives—living in peace, love, joy, safety and abundance.

Historically, for good and for ill, spirituality and health have been intertwined in our consciousness. The caduceus—two winged snakes wrapped like strands of DNA around a staff (the symbol of the American medical profession)—communicates this basic relationship. One snake represents healing and the other spirituality, weaving back and forth with each other as they make their ascent. In the late 1800’s the germ theory of disease emerged in the West, supplanting the idea that sickness had moral causes. Before that it was widely believed that the “morally inferior” were stricken with disease. Since, in fact, many communicable diseases were incubated in the squalor of urban poverty at that time, through self-serving (egoic) reasoning the poor were also considered “morally inferior.” The logic went like this: sick = morally inferior AND poor = sick, THEREFORE poor = morally inferior.

Despite such misunderstandings, spirituality IS indeed unfailingly linked with healing. We are mind and mind creates. The mind of humanity, collectively and seemingly individually, has mis-created traumatic experiences. Our unhealed wounds from these traumas of mental, emotional, physical and spiritual experience block us from realizing and manifesting our full gift from Spirit, which is unblemished perfection. We are made in God’s Image, like Father, like child. Nothing can sully what God has Created.

Mental, emotional and physical healing spiral around each other like twine, and the resulting strand of “healing” spirals round and round with spirituality.

As I clean up my emotional baggage I better practice and embody the results of mental decisions made from an ever higher perspective. As I heal my thinking, I pick up less and less emotional baggage. The clearer and more healed my thinking is and the less emotional baggage I carry, the more I give and receive the gifts of Spirit and the more peaceful my life. The more peaceful my life, the more open I am to the messages of Spirit. Being frozen at any place on the intertwining spirals of healing and spirituality will halt progress on both strands.

 I’m Okay, You’re Okay—So Leave Me Alone?

Merely accepting and focusing on the idea that we are perfect in Truth is not an efficient way to restore peace, love, joy, safety and abundance to our being-in-the-world because this method attempts to bypass our (messy, difficult, scary) emotions. Sitting in meditation concentrating on the idea that I am created in God’s Image might eventually work for me, but I don’t want to take the time to find out. Instead I want to fast-track my progress on the spiritual path by practicing forgiveness, and in order to do that without hurting myself (through denying and suppressing emotions) I have to do my emotional healing work. While in Truth emotional blocks are “unreal,” in our lives on Earth they seem VERY real indeed. They don’t succumb to mental decision alone because they’re infused with energy that was made when we totally believed in the idea of being separate from God. For example, the common core issue of feeling unlovable holds energy from many experiences in the past, which may include personal history, when the adults around were too busy or distracted to pick up and hold a child, and that child had no understanding of being the very embodiment of love all the way to the collective history of the first notion of separation from God.

. . . you MUST change your mind and help others change theirs. It is pointless to refuse to tolerate change or changing because you believe that you can demonstrate by doing so [refusing] that the Separation never occurred. The dreamer who doubts the reality of his dream while he is still dreaming it is not really healing the level-split.

You HAVE dreamed of a separated ego, and you HAVE believed in a world which rested upon it. This is very real to you. You cannot undo this by doing nothing and not changing.
(A Course in Miracles Urtext, T 4 B 12-13)

There is no way around the emotional pain from the past BUT through it. AFTER having cleared and healed this emotional baggage, we are able to begin to apply mental clarity about the unreality of anything but our God-given perfection to the present time forward. For the vast majority of people this emotional clearing is a process that takes place over a long period of time. If you think you are an exception to this, it is highly likely that your woundedness is tempting you to bypass emotional healing because the stored energies and memories are painful and/or frightening. This is understandable. BUT, it won’t work.

H.O.A.R.D.—Holding On Attempting to Relieve Discomfort

The need to do emotional healing work is just like the need to clean up the environment of a hoarder. Pretending the stuff isn’t there, tuning it out, covering it up, literally fleeing—none of these have any impact whatsoever on the filth and clutter. And no matter how much a hoarder thinks, talks, intellectualizes or “therapizes” about the hows and whys of their problem, healing doesn’t actually begin until the hoard is being cleared. Why? Because the hoard has insulating properties, thus clearing the hoard advances the hoarder to the very edge of the comfort zone (aka “discomfort zone”), where healing occurs.

And so it is with emotional healing work. Our emotional blocks once served a protective purpose, and healing occurs on their uncomfortable exposed edge, right up against all the hidden stuff, which is probably also dirty because piles of stuff collect dirt.

Many of us waffle when it comes to doing our emotional healing work. One moment we’re in a place of clarity, humility and enlightened self-interest, ready to do whatever is necessary. The next we’re clutching reasons why NOT to do the work, even “spiritual” reasons. For instance, we might latch on to the idea that we are perfect as God Created us, and so there is nothing for us to do. The ego has no shame about using anything, even truth, to keep us from healing. The ego is ruthless AND insane. and all about preserving itself.

“It is perfectly obvious that if the Holy Spirit looks with love on all He perceives, He looks with love on you. His evaluation of you is based on His knowledge of what you are, and so He evaluates you truly. And this evaluation must be in your mind because He is. The ego is also in your mind because you have accepted it there. Its evaluation of you, however, is the exact opposite of the Holy Spirit’s because the ego does not love you. It is unaware of what you are and wholly mistrustful of everything it perceives because its own perceptions are so shifting. The ego is therefore capable of suspiciousness at best and viciousness at worst. That is its range. It cannot exceed it because of its uncertainty. And it can never go beyond it because it can never be certain.”

(A Course in Miracles Text, Chapter 9, VII.3.1-10,
Foundation for Inner Peace, emphases from prior versions)

 Are We There Yet?

So how can you really tell if you still need to do more emotional healing work? Try this brief, meditative exercise:

1. Sit comfortably for a moment, spine straight, get quiet and get real. Close your eyes.
2. Ask your Higher Self, “What remains unhealed in me?”
3. Listen to the thoughts that arise. Notice if you want to argue with them or attempt to edit them. If so, stick with the original thought.
4. Take notes.

If the meditative exercise did not reveal aspects of your life that remain unhealed, look at your current life in terms of peace, joy and ease. Recall your worst day in the past month or so. How much peace did you feel that day? How much of your day is normally spent feeling peaceful and joyful? How easily do you return to a peaceful place when you have lost it? Can you think about ANY period of time in your life and maintain your peace? What happens when you share about difficult times in your life with a friend? Do you do whatever you need to do in life with relative ease (this is not the same as having an “easy” life), or do a significant number of things seem hard for you?

How would you assess the four main areas of your life right now, on a scale of 1-10, 10 being “perfect”?

• Physical: your health, vitality, energy and prosperity
• Emotional: your attitudes, awareness of and ability to express emotions and satisfaction with relationships
• Mental: your beliefs, thought patterns and clarity of thought
• Spiritual: your experience of peace, love, joy, safety and abundance and your feeling of connection to a power greater than yourself

Are these four areas of your life roughly in balance, or are some areas weaker than others?

Most of us will find something that could still benefit from the attention of “work” and often, if we haven’t already dived in whole-heartedly, it is in the emotional realm. So please do your emotional healing work. If not now, when?

 I Can Do Anything!

Yes, you can! But go pie-in-the-sky with your own healing before you try to go pie-in-the-sky in the world. A lack of personal healing, especially emotional healing, is the underpinning of MANY “crash and burn” experiences. Lack of emotional healing underlies prosperity issues and relationship problems. Would you give two children under the age of sixteen all the money needed to live for a year and trust them to handle it together? Neither would I. Energy in conflict (unhealed and unconscious v. conscious intellectual beliefs) does not make stable support in the world of density. Any house built on an unhealed foundation is sure to fall down. Ironically, this kind of energetic conflict keeps the world of density in place and yet our endeavors within the world crumbling.

Thank God we can work on the foundation of our life as it stands today. Emotional healing work often starts as a formalized, focused activity—a “therapy session” or deeper-reaching bodywork such as Sacred Lomi, for example. The ego exaggerates the prominence of pain in this work in an attempt to scare us away. True, pain can be consciously revisited, but we have already lived through this pain. And when we do the work of releasing from a spiritual place, from a dip into pain’s depths we’re able to bounce back higher into peace, love and joy. Eventually we earn that our pain is not bottomless. Doing emotional healing work becomes a way of life, and the work evolves into a most meaningful juggling act. Our healing work even gives the ego what it craves—”15 minutes of fame.” Our work allows the wounded and furious inner child the space to be heard—have a tantrum if need be—and through this release, the pressure and momentum of its wounded energy subsides. Emotional healing leaves more room for the creative voice and our true, God-given nature to manifest.

 Leggo My Ego?

Bear in mind that we don’t heal the ego out of existence. Instead, metaphorically speaking, we treat it like a beloved but unruly child. We LOVE the child, put her in the back seat, fasten her safety belt, give her a stevia-sweetened, organic sucker, keep a close eye on her and blow her some kisses—all while we enjoy the ride. And when the child starts getting noisy again, we stop the car, let her kick, scream and cry if she needs to, then calmly, lovingly look her straight in the eye and remind her who’s the boss. With the child safely buttressed in the back seat again, we bring our attention back to our ongoing conversation with God, who’s been riding shotgun with us the whole time. We’re free to enjoy the ride of peace, love, joy, safety and abundance until the next layer of healing work is uncovered.

 I rule my mind, which I alone must rule.
(ACIM Workbook Lesson 236)

Emotional healing work makes this possible. And so it is.

With Peace, Love and Joy,
Mira Carroll

www.alohaservices.org

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Filed under A Course in Miracles, Emotional Healing, Forgiveness, Healing, Self-Help, Spiritual Healing, Spirituality · Tagged with A Course in Miracles, ACIM, Forgiveness, Healing, Self-Help, Spirituality