Feeling is Healing: How Difficulties Lead to Our Spiritual Awakening

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Last week I shared how you may be reacting to thoughts and feelings of those around you, especially heightened during this global Covid crisis, and how to begin releasing those anxious and fearful energies that may not even be yours.

Yet in my recent work with my Energy Alchemy Mastery students, I am reminded to also share the healing power of your ability to feel your own emotions.

So many of us learned early in childhood how to repress or avoid our feelings when they became too overwhelming, and it can be a very important coping mechanism. Yet that same ability to block our own emotions can lead to a pattern of suppression that often emerges somewhere else in our lives as upsets or in our bodies as illness and injury.

As an energy healer now for three decades, one of my most repeated truths is “Feeling is Healing”. When we are able to fully allow ourselves to feel, express, process and release our emotional waves, they naturally move through us and release and our bodies don’t have to bear the brunt of holding these denser heavy emotional energies, which often express as unwanted physical symptoms.

True Empathy is a Healing Super Power

I have been noticing something shifting for the past few years. Being empathic is a super power on a whole other level. It is not just being able to know what others are feeling, which has its pros and cons. But at the higher levels of awareness, this subtle ability to feel is a great healing gift.

And I believe this is not just for us empaths…I know that everyone can elevate their ability to truly FEEL to a healing level. The depth of loving that I am experiencing when doing healing sessions now seems to be beyond my personal abilities…it feels like I am becoming the Cosmic or Divine Heart itself, and that is the real source of the healing energies.

In Buddhist traditions, this is called the Path of the Heart or Bodhicitta. Bodhicitta includes cultivating the feelings of love and compassion for all sentient beings.

Our Difficulties Can Be Used to Awaken Spiritually

Buddhist monk and renowned author Pema Chodron writes in “Lojong: How to Awaken Your Heart”:

“When I first read the lojong (“mind training”) teachings in The Great Path of Awakening by the nineteenth-century Tibetan teacher Jamgön Kongtrül the Great, I was struck by their unusual message that we can use our difficulties and problems to awaken our hearts. Rather than seeing the unwanted aspects of life as obstacles, Jamgön Kongtrül presented them as the raw material necessary for awakening genuine uncontrived compassion.

Whereas in Kongtrül’s commentary the emphasis is primarily on taking on the suffering of others, it is apparent that in this present age it is necessary to also emphasize that the first step is to develop compassion for our own wounds.

It is unconditional compassion for ourselves that leads naturally to unconditional compassion for others. If we are willing to stand fully in our own shoes and never give up on ourselves, then we will be able to put ourselves in the shoes of others and never give up on them.

True compassion does not come from wanting to help out those less fortunate than ourselves but from realizing our kinship with all beings.”

Time and again, I have experienced the ability to be able to be fully present with painful situations or emotions can be the vehicle for miraculous healing shifts, for both humans and animals.

In this path of the awakened heart, your ability to be truly present to your difficult feelings and thoughts indeed can become the vehicle for serving as a compassionate healer for so many.

CONTEMPLATIONS:

1. Does it surprise you that true compassion must be cultivated with ourselves first?
2. Are you able more and more to view the “unwanted aspects of life as …the raw material necessary for awakening genuine uncontrived compassion?”
3. Do you now see that your ability to feel whatever is going on, first with yourself rather than blocking or stuffing or repressing, is ultimately developing the ability to have enormous healing capacity for yourselves and others?

Healing Release Practice:

1. Bring your focus and all your energies into the Present moment. Breathe
2. What is happening now? Dig deeper than the surface discomfort/diagnosis/injury to the core of your upsetting feelings and thoughts.
3. Can you just be with it? Not moving away, blocking, repressing, distracting.
4. Breathe deeply with awareness and compassion for yourself and your unpleasant feelings or thoughts. This higher vibration compassionate awareness will melt away the lower vibrational upsets with time and practice.