As we go through life, we sustain physical injuries. However we have access to bandages and ointments to treat cuts and sprains. We also sustain what we may call psychological injuries. But you hardly know how to treat emotional pain and you end up brooding over memories or thoughts that are distressing to you. The urge to brood over them is compelling. Over time, stress hormones are released into your bloodstream which can put you at an increased risk for cardiovascular disease.
You have ideas about how things should be in your life but those ideas collide with how things are presently. Sometimes you torment yourself about choices you have made or a path you did not follow. Or you may find yourself postponing your happiness with thoughts about what is wrong now or what is missing. Thus, you live in the future. You fail to see that your pain arises from your thoughts.
It is easy for the body to let go of pain the moment the underlying cause is healed but the mind has a sort of instinct for holding on. It finds it difficult to let go. With the use of your mind you create suffering and you imprison yourself in this suffering. You then forget that you created what seems to have imprisoned you so you do not even know that they key to your liberation is with you.
We can feel overwhelmed by the intensity of a strong emotion and simply not know how to deal with it. As a result, we unconsciously try to suppress our feelings and in the process form various coping mechanisms. We suppress our feelings because we seem to believe that we will die if we feel them. So growing up, we have learnt how to push intense emotions down into the subconscious. In trying to survive under challenging circumstances, we not only turn away from emotional pain, we also deny it. But even though we unconsciously suppress the feelings, their energy operates in our lives. You may be cut off from your feelings but that does not mean that they are not there. You are only trying to protect yourself from what you perceive to be intolerable. You feel powerless. So you go about your life pretending to be fine but in the background, there is a feeling which ranges from some sort of uneasiness to intense emotional pain. You wish you had a word to define or describe it.
We often make the mistake of believing that it is something outside that makes us anxious, angry, or afraid. But the cause of every emotion is within. Outside events can only serve as triggers. Give permission to yourself to feel your emotion. See it and experience it. You have been running away from your feeling. First, stop running. Now summon the courage to turn inward and face the pain. You will not die. Your emotion will not kill you even though it seems it will. Your thoughts however can kill you – suicide. So do not dwell in your thoughts but you can bring your presence to your emotion. If you are conscious and allow your emotion to be without labeling or judging it, you create a space around it such that the emotion feels safe to leave.
Do you want to heal that emotional pain? Go within and let it rise into your conscious awareness. Care enough about yourself to spend time with yourself looking within. There is an infinite source of wellbeing and emotional support available to you. But this is available to you from within. What you call negative emotion lets you know that something needs to be seen within you. The negative emotion is therefore calling for your attention. It is calling for your presence. Go within.
