The Nature of Repressed Emotions
The human body has everything it needs to keep itself healthy, but we have forgotten how to tap into a lot of it.
Shadow work is the skill set of learning how to process and release the energies of fear, doubt, guilt, shame, anger, etc… that get built up inside of us. It is a method for resolving negative emotional frequencies so that they can be released and dissolved, instead of trapped and stored. It is the method of reconnecting to our truest selves by reintegrating the emotions that we have forgotten about through generations of repressing our human nature.
Just think of the uptight etiquette rules of high-class society where repressing our nature has essentially been the goal. Think of the tight, restricting clothing that women were forced to wear, the way men were taught to stuff down their emotions and the ways that we have all been repressing our base urges (like sexuality) in various periods and cultures of our collective societal developments. In an effort to appear to be civilized and to be more than base animals, we have shut down a lot of very essential aspects of our humanity, forgotten who we were and caused ourselves a lot of damage. If we simply connected to some of our more primal instincts, we would know how to release our negative energies immediately and instinctively and we would never need to do this thing that we now call ‘shadow work’.
In the wild, after a gazelle escapes a predator, it will lie down and shake uncontrollably for a while. This is it's instinctive (and very effective) way of releasing the energy of fear that got built up inside of itself during the chase.[1]
The fear was helpful to the gazelle during the chase. It was evolutionarily beneficial. There was a literal physical danger and the fear provided endorphins and adrenaline to help the gazelle run faster, to escape this danger and survive.
Once it is out of danger, however, this fear energy no longer serves a purpose and needs to be released. Otherwise, the fear energy sticks around and starts to corrode the gazelle from the inside out. The gazelle will remain in constant fear to some extent from that moment on until this energy is released. It lives in a state of perpetual fear that there is always some predator chasing it. That fear will subside for brief periods and fly under the radar, but it’s still there and the gazelle will get triggered into fear much more easily from that moment on.
Every moment of every day, the remnants of past trauma are trying to get released. The unresolved fear keeps trying to come up to get released for your own benefit, but it’s still uncomfortable and you don’t recognize that this is what’s happening, so you stuff it back down. Your body will then use any event in your life that resonates with that unreleased emotion at all to try and remind you that the old pain is still there, waiting for you to deal with it.
And… THAT is what a trigger is!
A trigger is something that happens in your life that sparks an emotional frequency that resonates with stored emotions inside of you that never got released. Basically, the thing that triggers you in the present isn’t your problem. The only real problem is that this trigger brought up an old emotion that you never dealt with, and your brain - not noticing this - attaches the old emotion to this new event and creates this self-perpetuating cycle where you keep bringing up old trauma just to stuff it back down.
To put that more simply, something that happens in your life brings up a small amount of anger in you. That small amount of anger activates the reservoir of trapped anger inside of you, making you get angrier than you needed to (I mean… you didn’t need to get angry at all, but whatever). Your brain then thinks that this intense anger that you’re feeling REALLY IS because of what happened to you right now (it doesn’t recognize that it’s just your past pain getting triggered), and so you never use this opportunity that your body just gave you. Your emotional body offered you a chance to heal by showing you your past pain but you turned your attention to the thing that triggered you instead. So, you stuffed the anger back down and piled this extra new problem on top of it. Your body gave you an opportunity to heal and you turned it down and turned it into just one more moment of unresolved emotional trauma that you’ll need to deal with later.
Every moment of emotional distress that you experience presents you with that opportunity. Face it and heal, or stuff it down, run, and add an extra few liters of unresolved trauma to the reservoir of pain inside of yourself. You are always either moving up or down on this spiral staircase of emotional wellness.
What you don’t realize then, is that a trigger is actually a GOOD THING! When you get triggered, it is because your emotional body is desperately trying to release this trauma energy from the past. This thing that’s happening in your life right now creates a tiny instance of an emotion that is already trapped inside of you, and your emotional body is trying to connect you to that past pain because you still need to release it. It is trying to reconnect your pores to your sweat glands because this thing that is hurting you in the present moment is reminding your heart and your brain of the stuff that never had a chance to get released and expressed before.
There’s past pain that exists inside of you, unresolved. That pain was created in a moment where you weren’t safe to feel it, express it and release it… but now you ARE safe. You have been safe for a long time, but you never realized that, so you kept running from it. Your brain has constantly been under the impression that it is in danger, because your heart has been sending it these fear, doubt, guilt and shame signals ever since the initial trauma happened. Every time your heart had any opportunity to remind you of your past pain, it tried to - SO THAT YOU COULD HEAL, but you never recognized this, listened, or allowed the healing to take place.
Your heart is sending up this old pain to the brain, saying “hey… here’s this pain you’ve been holding on to for 20 years, are you ready to feel it and deal with it?” and your brain says “no… I think I’m still in danger and I don’t know how to safely feel those emotions, so cram it down… I’m not ready”. The longer you’ve been stuffing this pain down, the more that you have stored up to clear so it just gets harder and harder with every passing year. I assure you though… it is NEVER too late!
Your emotional body has been trying to help you by connecting your surface level triggers to the buried pain inside of you, but you never learned how to make use of this evolutionarily crucial response to trauma that your brain has been trying to activate. Crying, for example, is a natural human response to trauma, but we have trained ourselves not to cry in a lot of cases. We have attempted to shut down our bodies’ natural way of dealing with pain. So, the pain remains.
Unlike the gazelle, ‘civilized’ humans have forgotten how to naturally and safely release trauma energy. In fact, we didn’t just forget! We actively programmed ourselves to shut that process down. We have over-intellectualized our own nature, and forgotten that we are - at our cores - emotional beings, and that our emotions need to be taken seriously and be dealt with appropriately and directly. The very nature of emotions is that THEY ARE NOT STRICTLY RATIONAL! So… what makes you think that a logical understanding of what caused your trauma in the first place is the ultimate solution to healing said trauma?
Yes… an understanding of this stuff is important to help get us to a certain point… but in order for true healing to take place, the process will need to be a little more holistic and intuitive.
Shadow work - then - is the process of learning what to do with negative emotions when they get triggered in us, so that we can use those moments to release the energy of a current and/or past trauma, to finally be free and clear of that energy.
Does that make sense?
Personally, I believe that this is a much more comprehensible and helpful explanation of what Shadow Work is than the academic Jungian understanding of the ‘undesirable and repressed parts of our personality that need to be reintegrated’. Most people don’t understand what that means (even if they think they do), but everyone can understand what ‘stuffing down and not being in touch with your emotions’ means.
What Is the GOAL of Shadow Work?
The goal of shadow work is to rediscover the fullness of who we truly are. It is to release all of the fear-based programming that we have built up along the way to help us avoid feeling pain, so that we can start TRULY expressing ourselves again, and so that we can live in a more heart-centered fashion. What we don’t realize along the way is that blocking ourselves off from pain necessarily forced us to block ourselves off from GOOD emotions also. You can’t shut off the bad without also shutting off the good. We do shadow work to help us escape the low frequency of our unresolved pain and the cycles it created, and to open ourselves back up to the greatest emotions that this world has to offer and that our human bodies are capable of experiencing.
Ultimately, the goal of shadow work is 3 simple words… perhaps the most important words you will ever hear…
UNCONDITIONAL SELF-LOVE!
That is what this journey is all about.
If you had nothing but those 3 words to guide you, you would be able to find your way.
In fact, it is those 3 words alone that started me on my path. Those 3 words were all I had to truly help me start navigating this path of inner healing.
The foundation of EVERYTHING that we are doing on this healing journey and everything we should be doing on this Earth MUST be unconditional self-love. When you truly come to understand the depths and the intricacies of what those words really mean, they will lead you to a level of inner peace that most people in the western or modern world have never even stopped to consider or contemplate. To be living from true unconditional self-love implies so much more than you are likely ready to understand.
There are a million ways in which we betray ourselves every day. You don’t realize all the things you’re doing every single day that cause you to be in more suffering and pain than you need to be. This includes all of the fear based emotional defense mechanisms that we have built up to protect ourselves from pain. You don’t realize how often you are using them and how much pain and suffering they are causing in your life. You don’t realize how you yourself are the main cause of most of your problems, and how your defense mechanisms are absolutely the cause of the vast majority of your suffering.
You yourself are perpetuating the cycles that keep you in pain… you just can’t see it yet. You have not yet ‘woken up’ and raised your consciousness above those cycles enough to see them clearly.
Your life is completely in your own hands, and only by taking control of yourself in those ways can you start moving towards a better life for yourself, but most people spend their whole lifetimes playing the game the other way around.[2] They try to get their external lives in order so that they can feel good and safe first and then - if they are still not at peace - maybe they will look at their emotional wellbeing directly. Ie - you believe that when you have enough money in the bank, when you have the right home, the right relationship and the right car, THEN you will be able to feel at peace, and only when you have all of those things but are still not happy will you bother to look inside and see what’s wrong. You think that the reason you are suffering is external and you’re trying to fix that first.
In fact, it is the complete opposite that is true. When you have learned how to master yourself and how to be happy in the moment regardless of what you may or may not have, THEN you will be in the best position to create the life that you want for yourself.
No amount of money can buy you inner peace, but inner peace can help lead you to make plenty of money - if that is still your goal once you have attained it - because people will pay to learn from you, or simply because you will have the strength of character, the determination, and the will power, etc… to turn whatever venture you strive to bring to life a success, and/or to pick yourself up time and time again after ‘failures’ until you eventually find what you are seeking.
Inner strength and mastery will always lead to outer success for those who seek it, but the opposite is hardly ever true. External success will NEVER lead you to inner peace, no matter how successful you become, but inner peace will always lead you to success. The best that external success can do is give you the time and sense of freedom to pursue inner healing more… but you didn’t really need all that money to get started, you were just doing a better job of distracting yourself until you had all the things you thought you wanted and found that you still weren’t happy. You got to the end of the road on your left, only to finally realize that you should have gone right at the fork.
So, the overall goal is to achieve unconditional self-love, where we are always acting in alignment with who we are, so that we can end this self-betrayal and inner conflict and start moving into a life that is founded on inner strength and self-love, rather than fear, self-betrayal and cowardice of connecting to our emotions and expressing our true selves.
Unconditional self-love will naturally lead us to learning unconditional love for others, because - as already mentioned - hurting someone else in fact hurts us at the emotional, spiritual and psychological levels. It is impossible for someone who truly loves themselves to be knowingly or intentionally cruel to another without also causing themselves pain. Therefore, to fully love oneself is also to fully love others unconditionally and to be kind and compassionate and understanding.
Yes… there are lines that need to be drawn and boundaries set up against behavior that doesn’t serve us, but ultimately - for our own benefit - we must love others unconditionally. We must never betray ourselves in order to give unconditional love to another, but we must also never avoid giving unconditional love because doing so is a matter of self-betrayal. Unconditional self-love requires unconditional love for others. It just requires that it’s done in the right way (I’ll discuss this more later in this book).
It is vitally important though to realize that the opposite is NOT true.
It is NOT the case that unconditional love for others naturally leads us to discover love for ourselves, and that is a cycle that many of us have been in for a long time. This is the reason that self-love must be the foundation.
Many people suffer from being people-pleasers, or they keep slipping into savior syndrome or martyrdom, thinking that sacrificing their own well-being for the well-being of others is in fact the best and most moral thing to do. People try to cover up their own self-loathing by over-giving of themselves to others. Ultimately though, this just leads to them draining themselves and perpetuating negative, self-harming cycles that ultimately leave them empty and incapable of truly giving the best of themselves to anyone.
So, if your focus is on others first… you will ultimately find yourself drained and empty with nothing truly left to offer to others. While you are in this state, the love that you offer these people is not truly a solid unconditional love. It is faux-love. It is actually a cry for help from your inner self, desperately asking you to turn that love and energy that you are offering to the other person back onto yourself. Your subconscious is using this other person as a mirror, trying to get your attention onto your emotional wounds.
If unconditional love towards others is your golden rule, you will follow that rule until you kill yourself and no-one will really benefit in the long run. If you focus on self-love though, once you are somewhat stable you will start focusing on how to love others unconditionally and in a healthy way because that is how you reach the next level of your own happiness and fulfillment. Then, everyone wins.
The logical outcome of unconditional self-love is unconditional love for others because doing any less than that for others is just another way of betraying ourselves. Whereas the logical outcome of unconditional love for others - when unrestrained by unconditional self-love - is self-destruction. So, we need to build everything on self-love. For everyone’s benefit, you MUST put yourself first!
What is Self-love?
It’s important to note that when we talk about ‘self-love’ as being the ultimate foundation of everything we should do, we are referring to a deep level of self-love that goes beyond the practical elements of our lives and our decisions. A lot of people think that self-love ultimately leads to selfishness, but that’s not at all true. It’s really about us taking care of ourselves at the soul level so that we can be the best version of ourselves to give to the world. True self-love will include the concept of being of service to others.
To try to put it as simply as possible, self-love is about being in alignment with one’s self. Self-love is about eliminating the conflict that exists inside of us by making sure that all elements of our being are aimed in the same direction. There are various elements of your personality, but more importantly, various elements of your experience of reality, that are all trying to guide you in your life. When these elements are in alignment with each other, we can find inner peace and head in a solid direction with strength, force, and speed. When these elements are out of alignment, however, we spend every minute in inner conflict, trying to go in multiple opposing directions at once, which will only go to perpetuate negative cycles that will encourage that inner conflict to grow.
It turns out, we actually have 3 ‘brains’. Our heads, our hearts, and our guts. Each of these helps to produce a different element of our experience of reality - namely - our thoughts, our emotions, and our sensations.
[Ok… while the above statement is indeed true (scientists are aware that the heart and the gut operate with their own independent nervous systems and they are starting to recognize the ‘3 brains’ and how they each play a role in our conscious experiences in subtle ways that we didn’t realize before), I’m being slightly metaphorical here when I equate your ‘heart brain’ with your ‘emotions’ or your ‘gut brain’ with your physical sensations... So, don’t worry so much about the minutiae of the biological details. The main point is that there are 3 overall elements to our experience of reality; our thoughts, our emotions, and our sensations. There is nothing that you can consciously experience that does not fall into one of those categories, and - for the sake of simplicity - from here on out, I will refer to these elements of your experience of reality as your heart (Cardiac Brain - emotions), your gut (Enteric Brain - sensations) and your actual brain (Cephalic Brain - your cognitive abilities and conscious thoughts).]
In order to achieve unconditional self-love, we need to make sure that these 3 brains are all aimed in the same direction, but this is where things get tricky…
Your Brain is an Asshole (and a Coward)
Our goal is to connect and align all 3 brains, but you’ve quite literally spent your entire life building up walls between them. We’ve already talked about this a little, but let’s dive deeper into how we’ve built these walls in the first place.
When we first came into this world, we were nothing but light and love and joy and everything that is awesome in this world, but then we started experiencing trauma in our lives and this created pain at the emotional, spiritual, and sensational (physical sensations) level. This is when the brain clicked on and said, “WOAH!!! I am not enjoying this experience. I don’t like this pain and I don’t know what to do with it”, and in that moment your brain did what it could to disconnect from the pain signals being sent to it from the heart and the gut.[3] It started learning how to tune out from those signals and how to block them so that it didn’t need to suffer in the moment.
This is the same way that pain-killers work, by the way. Instead of dealing with the source of the pain, they shut off the brain’s pain receptors so that you don’t feel it. The source of the pain is still there. Even the pain signals are still there. You have just turned off the part of you that understands how to feel it. You are disconnected enough from the source to not feel the pain coming from it and to not suffer because of it in a direct way. This is what your brain did with uncomfortable emotions and sensations. It learned how to shut off its pain receptors towards this kind of discomfort.
What happens, though, if you break your leg but you never do anything about it other than take pain killers? You’ll completely destroy your leg by continuing to walk on it until it is completely useless and beyond repair, and that’s what you’ve been doing with your emotional body. You haven’t been healing your wounds. You’ve just been training yourself not to notice the pain, continuing to put stress and pressure onto an already injured part of yourself, making the problem worse day by day by ignoring a piece of you that needed healing.
So, your brain started creating the defense mechanisms that would slowly cause a complete divide between your conscious brain and your emotional body - in order to help you stay in control when you experienced emotional, spiritual, or physical distress and trauma.
Trauma didn’t need to be anything extreme, by the way. Basically, anything that brought up frequencies of distress and fear in the moment counts as trauma. It could have been something as simple as telling one of your schoolyard friends that you liked a particular TV show and then having that friend tell you that they hate that show and that the show is stupid. Then, maybe, other kids started teasing you for it and it became a whole thing.
In that moment, your brain made an association. It recognized that when you opened up and expressed yourself honestly, sharing your passions and joys, that led to judgment, criticism and pain. Neurons fired down certain pathways simultaneously, creating a conscious and subconscious connection between the parts of the brain responsible for processing the various elements of the situation that just happened. In that moment, the parts of your brain responsible for self-expression were firing at the same time as the pathways for emotional distress, and so now your brain associates those two things as having a direct relationship, and since the emotion that you felt in that moment was strong, so is the association that your brain formed in that moment.
The brain’s job is to then analyze the things that caused you pain in the past and calculate all the ways that they might happen again in the future. It can then help to determine a rational course of action that is most likely to help you avoid encountering the same scenario in the future. Its job is also to find ways of not feeling the pain when it comes to us so that we can survive our day to day lives in this 3D world and keep moving forward through the more practical aspects of our lives.
Hopefully, you can already see how this means that you are constantly acting from fear. Your brain has shut down its connection to the heart and the gut in order to avoid feeling the uncomfortable emotions and sensations that never got processed (it is afraid to allow those feelings through), and it is making all of its decisions based on the logic of “how to avoid potential future pain”. Most major decisions that you have made have been founded on the reasoning of “I don’t want to feel the emotional pain of the past ever again”.
That is fear.
Your heart is always trying to push you in the direction of love, and your brain is - more or less - always pushing you in the direction of fear.
When we were in emotional or physical pain and we didn’t know how to deal with it, we retreated to the cognitive parts of ourselves and tried to compartmentalize the various aspects of our experience. We created a divide inside of ourselves and a hierarchy where our heads needed to always be in control. God help us if we ever let our emotions show in public or were to truly be vulnerable with another human being. Our hearts and our guts couldn’t handle that kind of true connection with another, because we had severed our connections inside of ourselves so much that our ability to process high intensity emotions - even the good ones - has been crippled.
With our heads in control and our conscious minds having completely forgotten what it actually once felt like to be in true alignment with oneself and living from the heart space, we continued to live these superficial versions of our own lives, until we completely lost track of the fullness of what being human is meant to feel like.
Fortunately, one by one… we all started experiencing this ‘awakening’ that - if you are reading these words right now - you are going through. The ‘awakening’ is a remembering of the fact that there is more to us than this cold, logical, intellectual, physical version of ourselves, and that the pleasures of the external world pale in comparison to the immense potential of inner joy that we can cultivate inside of ourselves.
Awakenings can be a lot of things, actually, but for now what we can agree on is that there are latent parts of yourself that are starting to come online again. That’s why you’re doing this work. You’re slowly starting to remember, either at the conscious, subconscious, emotional or spiritual level that there used to be more to who you were or that there can be more to who you are, and you are looking to reconnect with all those lost parts of yourself.
In order to do that, like I said, we need to get our heads, our hearts, and our guts into alignment. If your heart is telling you to go one way and your brain wants you to go another, there is inner conflict and turmoil. This is - in my opinion - the actual root cause of anxiety, by the way. When our 3 brains are aimed in different directions, it creates a fairly literal storm within ourselves, the same way that a cold front and a warm front coming into contact with each other will cause intense weather shifts. The two cannot exist harmoniously in the same place and your body is trying to figure out what to do with these conflicting signals and energies, and that causes the looping thoughts and the turning feeling in the pit of our stomachs or hearts that we generally call anxiety.
When the 3 brains are out of alignment, the inner ‘you’ can’t decide what to do. One part of you wants to go left, one part of you wants to go right, one part of you wants to just sit down and scream, and that inability to come to a conclusion - the torturous inner conflict between the battling parts of yourself - is what causes anxiety. When all of our brains are aimed in the same direction, however, anxiety disappears. I have seen this time and time again with my clients and in myself.
Here’s the thing though…
Your brain is programmable. We spend every minute of every day training our brains. Every thought, every word, every action, everything that we see, hear, taste, etc… is shooting neurons down certain pathways in our brains and every time we shoot neurons down a certain pathway we help to pave that pathway, thereby training the brain to go down that same pathway again the next time. So, the things that you allow yourself to experience and to choose repeatedly start creating deeply entrenched pathways in your brain that slowly - and literally - program your personality and the way that you experience and process reality.[4]
Think of your brain like an open, fresh field of grass. If you walk through a field once, you’ll barely leave a mark. But if you walk through it 10 times, 100 times, 10,000 times… eventually you start paving a clear pathway. Eventually, you’ll pave a pathway so clear that you would never even think to walk any other way through that field again. We will always naturally gravitate to the easiest path, in just the same way that water always flows to the lowest point. Without some reason not to, we will always choose the path of least resistance.
Eventually you will have completely forgotten that you were the one who paved that pathway in the first place, that the pathway could have been completely different, and that you can change and start building a new pathway any time you want to. You’ve become so accustomed to the old pathways that you’re operating completely on auto-pilot, never bothering to realize or consider why you are walking that pathway to begin with.
Now that you’re starting to wake up and recognize the self-harming nature of your old pathways, you finally have a high enough state of consciousness - and the proper motivation - to start taking control of your subconscious cycles and to start paving new pathways.
But… paving a new pathway can’t happen in an instant. You had to walk down that old path 10,000 times to pave it. Now it’s going to take 10,000 times to pave the new one, while you fight the urge to keep walking down the old, easier, pre-paved pathway. So, please recognize that this is all a process. Don’t expect one giant switch to flip over at any one instance and have all your problems slip away. Just realize that at any given moment you can choose to start walking a different path. Every time you go for a walk (metaphorically), you will need to choose to put in the extra effort to start paving that new pathway, and every time you DO choose that, you pave the new pathway a little more and you let the old one grow over a little bit.
When you make the grand decision to change, sometimes you’ll remember to walk the new path and sometimes you’ll walk the old one because you’re still getting used to the new way and/or because you slipped back into auto-pilot mode for a moment. There will be some back and forth while you start making this transition and that’s fully ok. If you give yourself crap for not being perfect with your new habits immediately, you will just create a shame cycle that will keep you in your old pathways even longer.[5]
Power of the Heart
So, our brains are being programmed every minute of every day, every single time we shoot neurons down a given pathway.
Our hearts, on the other hand… CANNOT be programmed! The heart knows what it knows and wants what it wants and that’s all there is to it. You can’t force the heart to love someone or something it doesn’t love and you can’t force it to stop loving something that it already loves (trust me… I’ve tried). The heart is much more connected to external frequencies and is far more intuitive than you realize. It knows things that can’t be expressed to the brain. It doesn’t operate with the same kind of programmable neural connections that the brain does, so it cannot be trained in the same way.
So, we have spent our lifetimes programming our cephalic brains (head brains) to stay in control in ways that are in complete misalignment with the part of ourselves that CANNOT be programmed (your emotions - heart brain). That means that your heart has been spending your lifetime desperately trying to make you go right, and you have spent your lifetime programming your brain to go left. Your heart kept yelling and yelling “RIGHT!!!!” because your heart can NEVER be at peace unless you move in that direction, and your brain… too afraid to face the emotional pain that’s blocking the path on your right… kept ignoring that and saying “left”.
So, you went left. Over and over and over. You ignored the part of you saying “right” for so long that you completely forgot how to hear it and what its voice actually sounds like; because this is a voice that you need to PRACTICE hearing. Your heart speaks a different language than your brain and if you don’t keep practicing that language of emotion you forget how to speak it.
Your emotional brain has been locked away for a long time, yelling at someone who isn’t listening and who doesn’t even speak its language anymore. An ‘awakening’ is about that voice getting louder and louder, and you not being able to ignore it anymore - even though you currently don’t really know how to listen to it or understand it. Right now, it’s just this frustrating background noise behind everything you do. It’s an underlying uncomfortable feeling that follows you everywhere you go because you know that something isn’t quite right with the way that you are living your life. It’s like having a stranger follow you around yelling at you in Chinese all day long.
As you train yourself to listen to it, trust it, and follow it, though… everything else will become clear, and that ‘background noise’ that’s driving you insane right now turns into beautiful heavenly music guiding you on every step of your life and journey. Slowly, you start to understand what that Chinese person is saying, and it opens you back up to a larger version of who you once were. You used to speak Chinese… you just forgot.
Now, if we want to get these 3 brains into alignment, we are going to have to realize that since we cannot program our hearts, we are going to need to program our brains instead, to be in alignment with what the heart wants. Our hearts NEED to go right, but our brains can be trained to go in any direction. So, the only way to make sure that both are always moving in the same direction is to program our brains to follow our hearts (rather than silencing our hearts in order to follow our brains, which is what we have been doing so far).
And that, my friends, is the simple truth in all of this.
Our hearts are the core of who we are and our hearts need to be leading the way. If they are not given the reigns to lead, then we will necessarily be in conflict within ourselves and that’s all there is to it. In order to achieve self-love, the heart is going to need to be in control. This means that we desperately need to learn how to speak the language of the heart again. This is why shadow work is not an intellectual activity - because the whole point is that we are trying to reactivate the part of ourselves that doesn’t speak the same language as the intellect. Your brain is speaking to you in English, your heart is yelling at you in Chinese. You won’t be able to help the Chinese man until you learn to speak his language. I.e. you can’t solve a problem of the heart by speaking the language of the head. You can’t heal your emotional wounds with logic.
It’s time for your brain to retire. It can go play shuffleboard and bingo on the beach in Florida. The next stage of our evolution, our self-actualization and of our consciousness can only be achieved through the heart and we need to learn how to speak the unconscious language of emotions in order to get there.
Getting back to the Heart
So, what is it going to take for us to reconnect with our hearts and reprogram our brains to surrender to the path that the heart wants to take?
Basically, it’s going to be a process of learning how to confront uncomfortable emotions. Step by step and in a safe manner, of course. Overall, it is going to be a process of confronting and eliminating fear. Now that we are no longer in the danger that we were in when the initial traumas created those fear based pathways in our brains, we are going to need to learn and to realize that we are safe to finally feel all of that unpleasant stuff that wants to run through us.
The problem is that there is a lifetime’s worth of pain that is currently trying to work its way through a heart that has been ignored and stuffed away for who knows how long. Your heart is (metaphorically) a muscle that needs to be exercised. You need to practice listening to it and connecting with it in order to train it to be able to handle heavier and heavier emotions. This is what it means to be emotionally healthy and strong. To be able to experience intense emotions and maintain self awareness during times of emotional distress (or intense emotional pleasure, for that matter). To be able to feel the most intense emotions possible without losing ourselves in those moments and doing something that will cause more problems.
In order to do that, we will need to clear away all of the unresolved emotions that are stuck inside of us (because those are the things that get triggered that push us to react poorly and enter these negative, self-harming cycles), but we can’t just start diving into the worst things that happened to you right away. You’re not ready for that big stuff! Your heart isn’t strong enough yet!
The core wounds that first happened to you that set all of this stuff in motion in the first place are like the 200-pound weights of emotional distress inside of you. Plus, those heaviest weights are currently buried under a lifetime’s worth of other weights, and right now… you’re not even strong enough to lift 5 pounds because no-one has ever shown you how to do so properly. You’ve never learned how to confront the little triggers that come up and how to deal with your small uncomfortable emotions in a healthy way, so what makes you think that you’re prepared to dive into all of your worst childhood trauma and release your pain that way?
It’s just not going to happen.
It would be like walking into a gym and saying to the physical trainer, “Hey… I’d like to lift 500 pounds today. I don’t want to work out or train for years, I’d like you to just show me how to lift 500 pounds right now, and once I do that, I’ll never have to come back into the gym again.”
[1] There are healing modalities that try to mimic this, known as Trauma Releasing Exercises (or TRE).
[2] It is only half true (at most) that your life is fully in your own hands. When we get to the higher levels of spiritual awareness there is a whole other discussion to be had about how you are not actually in control of your life at all, but… there are levels to our understanding and for now it’s important that you start recognizing the ways that you ARE in control - or should be.
[3] Your initial traumas were NEVER rooted in your cognitive brain. It was never your intellect that was suffering. You were experiencing either emotional, spiritual or sensational pain. Never ‘cognitive’ pain. It was only as a result of this initial trauma that your brain formed the cognitive association between an event and some form of suffering that would be able to cause us cognitive pain later. Pain never begins there.
[4] This is why we need to be impeccable with our words and not speak judgment, slander, lies, etc... by the way. Because you are constantly paving pathways in your brain with every word you speak or think. See my other book ‘10 Mind Hacks for Quicker Emotional Healing’ for more info on this. You can find that book on Amazon or some other online book retailers, or at http://benjysherercoaching.com/MHBook.
[5] Once again, you can find more info on this in my other book ‘10 Mind Hacks for Quicker Emotional Healing’. You can read more about this shame cycle and how to avoid it in the chapter titled “Give Your Brain a Cookie”.