Anger

I do a lot to support positive feelings and positive states.  Sometimes we ascribe a negative connotation to emotions like anger.  One the one hand, this is  accurate, but its not the whole story.  So today I am going to suggest a radical approach, but one that can work wonders for you if you can use it in a productive, not destructive way.  Anger can be used in a very productive way to release a lot of feelings that you might not be able to do otherwise.  There is a tendency to see anger as one emotion that is best left alone in spiritual practice, as though it is a coarser emotion that will somehow overtake us or ruin us.

Anger is a powerful emotion, no doubt about it. Behind anger is the sheer force of energy that is being expressed in what we know to be anger.  Energy is energy, and how it is expressed is also how it is experienced. There is a very positive side to anger in truth, and it can be very cathartic. Its a strong force because of how it is being expressed, so I would say do not be afraid to feel anger, but like a loaded gun, consider where you are pointing it.

I have gotten very angry recently.  I have allowed myself to just let the anger flow instead of keeping it pent up.  No one else was around.  I was not kicking the cat (I never kick the cat!), I was just letting it flow in a very empty house. Behind it, though, I could also feel a lot of nervous energy.  Letting it out also let out a lot of pent up energy. That which is repressed gets expressed as dysfunction.  Anger can be used in a productive way instead of its usual destructive way that serves to hurt others (because we ourselves feel like someone has hurt us for example...) and this anger is used like a violent flame that burns with great intensity but not out of control. Sometimes, anger can play an important role in healing.  Arthur Janov developed an effective way to help people with this pent up emotion through his Primal Therapy (there is a link to his site on the side bar to the right of this post). This is what most people know as  Primal Scream Therapy.  You might think it silly, but it taps something that allows us to get to the root of some hard issues.  Turns out my own mother used Primal Therapy years ago in order to get at a very old issue from her early childhood.  It works because it admits that sometimes we are like a volcano with all this fire in us that needs to be let out.

When you deal with anger,  you let it flow through you without hurting anyone by not focusing your anger on another person.  This energy is real, and if you connect someone into that stream, you do them and yourself real harm by wishing to use such a powerful force on them.  Even in their absence. All of this flows through the universe, everything is connected by this vast inner-net that is the All. So be careful.  Be angry, yes, but own your anger and do not put it onto another.  They will feel it in some form or another if you do.  The feeling can help guide you to a still deeper issue or truth that is inside of you which is causing the anger in the first place.  Until you deal with the anger, you are merely erupting over and over without getting deeper.  I am giving you permission to move through the anger to go still deeper inside of yourself.

By doing this, I am also going to caution you not to go at this in a mental way.  Let yourself go. Allow yourself to FEEL. Don't expect some outcome.  Let the feeling be the end.  If you do this, you will release your limiting mental process and become much more open to what lies beneath.  I am going to suggest to you that its entirely possible that you haven't a clue what lies beneath.  It could be an utter surprise. It could actually be incredibly peaceful, but you will never know when there is all of this magma lying atop it distorting the view deeper down. Remove, then, all thoughts of what might be or should be or expectations.  Be in the moment.  Be open, and be free.  FEEL. Then let feeling guide you. Most issues are so irrational the mind isn't going to be of any help to you anyway.  You see what I mean?  Don't be afraid not to know.  Be curious.  Give yourself over to feeling. The anger is a force like wind blowing through you. If you see it in a positive way, your awareness will tend to move through it in a more positive way.

The positive character to anger is that it helps you to recognize what needs to change.  It can be a powerful catalyst for helping you to understand what your own issues are.  This happens most constructively when you realize that what bothers you is also what you happen to mirror in the world.  You are not the victim in all of this. As long as we remain the victim, we turn away from the full truth of the universe, of our lives, and our own truth as sovereign beings here.

But it doesn't mean that you LIKE what you mirror. In fact, it can get you so mad and upset that you want to tear your hair out, stamp around and even scream.  Maybe yell.  See, all of the things you have shoved down inside get registered in your energy field, your nervous system, and they even nestle down into your physical tissues (this is what is behind Rolfing as a type of massage....it pushes that material out of your tissues). All of this is connected. Each body, from the energy body to the nerve body to the flesh body system, all are connected and deal with the load of this junk in their own ways.  But its there. Its why movement is so important in healing energetic problems.  It is why I cover it in my book as part of knowing how to alleviate these old problems.  Chi Gong helps, massage can help, and even acupuncture can have an effect.  But so can exercise.

Movement helps the body to find a way to dispense with these old issues recorded in our bodies. The violence of anger can also be the raging storm that cleanses the energy field and body when it is not directed on another person. You can let its powerful force move through you and clear out all the tension that has been built up. I would even say that movement that is akin to throwing a fit could very well be a fast and effective way to clear the energy lines in your body and all its represents as it reaches down through the vibratory frequency of the denser dimension of the physical body.  The trick is to let your body move along with your feelings. You might need to go outside for this.  Be careful; you don't want to break anything or be destructive.

So be angry. Get mad as hell, but admit that you are mad because you are unhappy with how your life has gone, not because you are some victim.  If you keep the victim energy out of it and you keep others out of it, anger can be the flame that can burn in a cleansing way. We are often afraid to even FEEL anger, but it can serve a very useful purpose if we do not focus it outwardly towards another.  Many fear anger as a force that can help to clear away stuck emotion.  Many eschew anger because they have been taught it is to be avoided. By confronting your anger, in letting it flow in the most natural of ways without pushing it down or denying it, you face it and you flow with it.  Let the energy be spent.  Burn away the fuel that resides in you, let it burn itself out.  Once this has been done, look and listen quietly within yourself for what remains.  What lies beneath it?  This is the promise that this path offers.  It is a path you do not need to trod often.  Do not make it a habit.  Be honest with yourself and let the anger flow, do not bottle it up.  When you bottle anger, it can devolve into depression. Like anything else, you can choose to utilize this force wisely or not wisely. Be natural.  Admit how you feel.  Go into the feeling not to marinate in it, but to learn to master yourself.  There is a difference between letting anger control you and letting anger out.  I know intimately what happens when anger is bottled up and allowed to vent.  It is a slow burning fire that causes the container to bubble over.....over and over.  I have known people who have put a lid on all of this without dealing with the source of the anger and this merely became a pot that would explode ever few weeks. This is going on even now as far as I know.....until its root cause is dealt with.  To get behind the anger, you must confront the anger.  Anger is a tiger that looks ten feet tall.  It is a lynx that is only a fifth of that.

There is a great old method that feels pretty good to me that I think is rooted in my connection to the Native American path.  In the old days people would dig a hole and they would then put all of their anger into that hole. They would just sit and yell and scream, letting all that energy bleed out into the earth. You might think that this might create a repository of anger into the earth that is not good for the earth.  Ah, now that might make sense at first blush, but when you get into the energy that is Gaia, you will perhaps see how the consciousness of the earth is built on an energy of transformation. In her earthly core, she is molten.  Her molten state creates a field of electromagnetic energy that penetrates through every living thing on the planet.  And while yes, your anger is moved through those lines of force, it is also transmuted. Also, anger itself is not a bad thing. It is a very intense energy, yes, and it can be a hard emotion when we focus it on others, but when it is not focused on others, it is more like the molten eruption of a volcano. Stand back because it can hurt you, but if you watch what grows from a volcano, you will see it also has important life giving properties.  A volcano while a force of destruction is also a force of creation also.

So let your inner volcano out.  Imagine it like a pure flow of fire.  Feel it flow out of your mouth as you scream.  Let its lava flows move out from you, not AT anyone.  Let its fire flow out into the very natural world around you.  Let your own frustration and anger move out of you because if you do, this can lead to a place in you where the flowers can grow.At the foot of each volcano is an incredibly verdant slope.  Just like real volcanos, our own inner volcano can leave room for new growth.   The earth knows what anger is, for she erupts in the same way in violent forms from storms to volcanic eruptions, land slides, earthquakes and tsunamis.  All of these things seem destructive, but are also at their heart creative.  The difference here is that every time you have an issue, you don't immediately move to anger because that can become a crutch and can also be just destructive.  Destroy, year down yourself if you must, but only you are the one being so reordered.  Neither destroy out of self loathing or hatred of the self.  Anger can help you to see that what you were angry about was merely inside of you.  Anger will help you to eject all the pent up energy that you need to get out that wont ever be gotten out with matras and gentle songs.  It wont. Here, you are destroyer, but a sacred destroyer.  Let the vast force of earth move through you for a higher purpose.  Shake off your shell, slip out of that constraining skin.  Let anger work in the most positive of ways.

This might seem foreign to you.  Scary even.  I ask you, then to think about this a little differently.  Think about how you feel when you are really hungry.  Once you get food, you chew it up sometimes in an action that can only be termed violent.  Eating could be seen this way, yes.  It must destroy in order to create.  We do not eat dirt, we eat living things.  This is a fact, and no amount of vegetarianism will change the reality that we must eat living things in order to survive. So even the once alive plants must give up their existence so that we may have ours.  Anger can be much like this, except instead of chewing up the world, destroying the world, we are eating those things inside of us that no longer serve us, that annoy us, that hurt and harm us.  We are the snake that sheds and then eats its skin.

Another way you can relate to this is how you might feel when you are exerting yourself in a very physical way.  Working out in a sustained way will most often bring about a state of anger, something that might be called body anger.  We push through the pain and the fatigue in order to achieve some new physical goal.  Maybe its topping a difficult hill running or on a bike.  Maybe its 60 push ups.  Maybe its lifting an extra 40 pounds on weight equipment. Maybe its hoeing a row of dirt in making the garden.  We push through the difficulty in order to reach the goal.  And this is in some ways how anger is.  We push through it.  We exert, we allow the body to burn and in so doing, we begin releasing pent up anxiety, fear, and all sorts of other things that are unique to each person.  Anger is an increase in your spiritual metabolism for a very specific purpose.  As in nature, very few events like this last for long.  It is a violent action that serves to establish equilibrium.

The goal in this, though, is to remove the issue that is embedded in you. If you do not do this, you have only trimmed the bush, you have not dug it up.  It will continue to grow.  This is important because there are plenty of people who use anger as a relief valve without ever emptying the cask of its contents and starting anew.  Because of this, the cask continues to build up pressure periodically and the valve is opened through a burst of anger that most often is directed at other people.  This is not the productive way of dealing with this. If you are merely reacting, you are not learning to create in a new more productive way.  Use anger, do not let anger use you. If you do this, you fall into the trap of suddenly being the victim.  You are not the victim, remember?  You are here to master this.  Let anger be your ally in a controlled burst of emotion and then let it cleanse you.

I am not big on methods. I create my own sometimes on the spot in an intuitive way and they work very well for me.  There is no magic in others' methods unless you ascribe that magic to them. Sometimes a method is very good at helping you to relate to a certain feeling, and in this way someone else's method could work very well. I know we like to have them from others when we think they will work for us.  What I would like to explain is that your consciousness is naturally creative.  If you can realize that any method that helps you to tap deep into emotion will naturally be effective.  The way to fashion your own method is to find what works for you.  What images help you to relate to anger?  How can you imagine that anger erupting from you.  Is it a volcano? A giant storm with thunder and lightening?  Is it strong enough to break out the weaker branches in the trees of your awareness?  Can this image help to sweep away al the dead wood of your being and bring you a feeling of freshness and cleansing?  Or does a tsunami suit you better?  Do you imagine it rushing up onto land, clearing the decks entirely and taking everything in its path back out to sea?  Can you imagine this force in you so purely that you do not need images?  If you can relate to the feeling in a full way, it is very likely to work more deeply.

Okay.  So you let the anger out.  Sometimes this will work all on its own.  I am going to suggest that you also try after the storm has passed to become very calm and quiet.  Sit quietly and ask yourself how you feel.  Reflect into yourself now that the storm has passed.  Can you feel something different now inside of yourself?  With that layer of anger removed for the time being, can you peer quietly like looking into a crystal gazing pool more clearly?  I want you to pretend that you are looking at a pond or pool or ocean depths after moving through this anger.  Quiet and calm, reflect on what you see.  What you see, though, will be what you feel. Beyond simply feeling spent, what have your found deeper still?  Do you suddenly realize that what was making you angry was because of how you had allowed yourself to get yourself into situations that weren't good for you?  Did you WANT to make someone else responsible for hurting you?  Or maybe you do not understand why something happened that made you angry.  Sitting still, asking yourself what the answer is, can you see anything float up into your awareness that shows itself?  If you take time to pause and reflect, this can be a productive time to see some issues in a new light. But don't worry if you don't.  Trust feeling. It sometimes offers answers not on our expected schedule but in its own time.

Now that I have said all of this, I hope that it helps you to see anger in a new light.  By honoring it, letting it flow, you do not become a slave to it because its purpose is to cleanse you.  Let it do its work.  Maybe you do this with some physical activity.  Perhaps you go out and find old dead branches in the woods and take an axe to them, chopping them up, letting your anger flow down into the earth. Do not be destructive in the old way, but harness the power for your own transformation. Sometimes yelling at no one in particular does the trick.  And the trick is in not focusing it on another. In the movie Network, the character played by Peter Finch tells everyone to go to the window and yell "I'm as mad as hell and I am not going to take it anymore!"  It turned out, the whole world had all this pent up anger about the way things were.  In the clip below you might get a chuckle but also a view into how we can use anger in a productive way....

Healing Karma

The act of healing karma is the single most powerful act you can be involved in.  It is an act of love, compassion, and truth to your higher self.  Being able to heal karma, though, can seem to be akin to sending yourself to the moon with a slingshot. It just doesn't seem possible. 

So lets look at what happens inside of you that serves to create karma.  I am not going to look at positive karma but the type of karma that is the result of attachment to certain feelings, most often hurtful ones. It isn't that positive karma is of little concern, it isn't.  Positive karma is a very good thing, and cultivating it is just as important as knowing how to root out negative karma; they go hand in hand and as you root out negative karma, it makes it much easier to build a more positive framework for your life and what you attract.  The issue with negative karma is how much it can hang us up, making us do what we do not want to do and keeping us from doing what we want to do.

Ego is a largely unemotional part of you, and yet it can cause all kinds of emotions to fire off in you as a result of a sense that it has, based on a judgement it is making about what it THINKS it sees, as being the reality of a situation in life.  Because of how ego works, it often identifies with things having to do with past hurts and laches on to details that are then used as the filters for experience going forward.  What this does is it keeps us from seeing things as they ARE.  We can often have these distortions running inside of us for lifetimes, and they can wear deep grooves in who we are, creating a kind of recursive effect to our feeling and reactions.  It governs what we do, how we create, how we think and respond to the world around us. Dealing with this aspect of ourselves is the single most productive thing available to us in reaching a better place.  It can win freedom for you from a range of rough feelings and ways to seeing and responding to the world. In a very real way, ego keeps us from seeing the larger picture because that old hurt was just too important to it than what they truth might be.

The thing about ego is its been given a much broader place than it should have had in the psyche.  We have allowed this important filter in our being to really go overboard. Because the ego is always comparing and dividing things out, its almost always seeing differences between what one person gets and another.  Your sister gets a differently sized piece of cake, and you notice this, note it, and then wait for it to happen again.  There is karma in this. Suddenly, your ego decides the the world is just out to get you.  Because you believe this, you attract it.  That is how the Law of Attraction works. But because you are so convinced that the world is out to get you, you don't consider for five seconds that it could just be your belief system, your bias or prejudice, that is causing all of this.  As you refuse to see the truth, you dig a still deeper hole for yourself. This is a big loop and it loops round and round ad infinitum if you let it.  How does it feel to let go of a karma?  Its freedom.  Its a very simple, sweet moment of letting something go, of effectively snipping the string of a looped piece of behavior or belief in your being that has eluded you for a long time.  But no matter how long this has turned around in you, looping and waiting for the right set of circumstances that activate it, you can at any time snip the loop and watch as it simply falls away as though it had never been.

The way out of karma is not by using ego.  To do this means letting the ego slip backwards within you.  It can be a gradual process for some.  Those who are most mental will have the hardest time.  This is much easier for those people who can handle a little mystery, who don't need to control every little thing and who are happy with not always knowing what is going to happen next.  By realizing that your egoic self is but a small subset of a still larger self that is huge, you can realize that your egoic self is like a small child being led by an infinite self, almost invisibly, yet always there. Just because you cannot see where you are going does not mean that where you are being led isn't a good place.  Its a perfect place for where you are not, but this takes some trust.  If you realize that your belief fuels your experience, then you can probably appreciate that if you do not trust the world or the universe to bring you the right things, then most likely it wont.  However, if you open yourself to not needing to know every detail, and consider that while you may not see results immediately, but can trust that you are being led out of the harder parts of your life, you open up to the universe in a whole new way.  You make room in your belief that the universe isn't just out to get you but that you COULD have been influencing the universe all along.  Taking the leap, you open a door that may have been closed previously.  If you wish it, all of it can change toward something more aligned with your core being.  To do this means removing those beliefs and unresolved issues that are in truth attachments to hurt, negative karma, and once you do this, your landscape will begin to change.  Healing karma is instantaneous, and either you do or you don't, so there is no in between.  Its not a gradual thing but instead happens in a twinkling.  And once you DO heal something its amazing how it will change how you feel and react to all of the things that used to cause you to react.  But how does one achieve this kind of healing?

First, you have to feel safe about doing it.  I think you have to realize that life will be better without it turning in your life.  This can be subtle.  Sometimes I think we almost need to be at the end of our rope in order to reach that place of surrender.  Not all of us are like this, but I think its something about human beings that keep us involved, holding on, unsure of what this letting go is all about. Second, I think that the presence of a part of yourself that some call the Observer can often play a critical role in helping you gain some perspective on the drama that you wind up feeling as a result of the karma.  This portion of yourself, in the midst of a very emotionally tied up time, is critical it seems in allowing the self to feel differently by offering a different solution to how to feel. You see, most negative karma makes us feel crappy.  What the Observer does, is it removes all of that investment in feeling away.  This is a remarkable change that can take place and it is mirrored in the brain where we take our emotional centers and balance them with portions within the neocortex, the prefrontal lobes which provide us with the ability to step aside from our emotional issues and look at the impact some emotional response will have on others as well as our own selves.  Its a unique part of us, and is the next wrinkle in our development....For as much as I go on about feeling and how important it is, this part of the Observer self is just as useful and important also.  Without it, we can often get so tied up in our problems that we have a hard time seeing a way out, or where we are.  The Observer is like a neutral party that enters the scene and then asks "And just what is the problem here?"

By bringing in the Observer, the Observer can calmly teach you how to feel different in the midst of much turmoil.  It may also lead to releasing any old material that you had been hanging onto.  The Observer shows you how to BE different.  While it is calm and unemotional, it seems important for these times when we are shedding those layers. It has been in my experience that the Observer state has most often been the most use when my emotions were the highest.  I cannot speak for others, only for myself, but I suspect that there may be triggers in our brain as well as our own consciousness that bring on this aspect of our being during times of stress.  People often describe feeling an amazing sense of calm in the midst of very chaotic and even scary events.  Think of the man whose car goes down an embankment and with his child trapped in the back seat, he very calmly breaks open a window and gets the child out.  A son sees his father trapped under a car that fell off the jack and lifts the car off him. All describe a feeling of immense calm overtaking them.  They feel as though something inside of them took over but not in an emotional way.  I often wonder how we can learn to cultivate this Observer in ourselves during day to day experience.  It may be that its always there, but its presence is more obvious when we are upset.  Perhaps it seems more calm in comparison to how we felt before.  It may be a coping mechanism, even a survival mechanism.  It seems that by getting to a point where you realize all the old things you have tried have not turned up any results, you simply call on the universe to take on the problem, and you ask for help.

Consider that it may be possible that you do not know HOW to fix a problem, but if you remain open to the idea that there is a way through it that is above your own "pay grade" then you give yourself an out.  There is real merit in giving it all to God, or to some sense of a larger being, self, or universe.  If you are very process oriented, maybe you imagine that you are putting all your problems into a trunk and giving it to the universe to sort.  Consider that you are putting your deepest secrets in it, entrusting your most fragile thoughts and feelings in there for the universe to take care of.  Ask for help from a higher power.  So often, people are healed in just such a way.

Now, for the cutting of the loop. Even if you feel invested in an old hurt, tell yourself daily that you are working on cutting the loop of the karma. Imagine a pair of scissors cutting a loop of string inside of you that is this karma, and then watch how the string just drops away.  Now tell yourself that this is what you want to be able to do with the karma.  You may not know how you will do this, but consider that there is a way that you yourself may not know of just yet but that is within you to do (you just don't know it yet). Consider also that the feelings that keep you invested in the karma might be built on misunderstanding.....and that the reason why things are hard for you and another person caught up in this same karma is the result of just not seeing eye to eye.  You THINK you know that this person only wanted to hurt you, or maybe they did something so hard and difficult that its hard to get past.  For the most part, this is the thing that keeps a karma active, which is the inability to forgive someone.  When you are able to step back and use that Observer, sometimes you can gain perspective. In one case it took going back to a past life to see events and how they had happened to another person to understand WHY they always responded the way they did to me.  In one case, a child had died....and that person wound up having a common karma with their family members that resolved around the fear of losing a child, the fear that someone would not pay enough attention and they would lose the child....which had actually happened.  As a result of this, this person and their family line had reinforced this common karma.  What this meant was that these people would wind up with people who would mirror the behavior that this person had who was around when the child died.  This was replayed over and over until the karma was healed.  Until then, though, the people would respond in a very exaggerated way to events. Small things would become big.  It would SEEM as though the world was out to kill the child....and sure enough, events would happen in such a way that it seemed this was so, even though in truth, no one was dying.....they were just playing and replaying that old hurt over and over and it had its effects on everyone around them.  Being able to see that they were responding because of THEIR karma helped to lessen the reaction to MY karma in this regard. It helped me to see and understand that it really wasn't personal, and in many ways, it really wasn't about me....even though I have managed to become inculcated because of my OWN karma which had nothing to do with having a child die. What held me to them, though, was my inability to forgive myself for things I had done earlier in life, and it was the similarity of this hurt that bound me to them.  The release of the karma lay in my being able to see things for how they were, instead of taking a defensive posture.  By doing this, I was able to reach into a place of understanding.  I was able to have compassion for how much of a hurt this might have caused.  I was able to look upon my own qualities that led to our being attracted and realized that this was just the universe working in its usual way, which wasn't to punish, but to be the mirror that it had always been.  So what was the way out of this tangle of feelings?

The answer is forgiveness.  In this forgiveness, there is a willingness to let it all just go. Analysis in this moment stops, working through the details stops.  Finding a way to forgive stops.  Being ready to make that change, being willing to JUST let it go begins to move and turn, and its in this movement, this willingness to feel differently, that we do.  And as we do, we can feel how freeing this is for us.  Its simple, though, much like how a child can forgive so easily, and let bygones be bygones.  The forgiveness is made for the people who seemed to have created this mess to begin with (in the mind of the ego) but it spreads until you realize, no, I must forgive myself.....for in that moment, perhaps you realize that you had a hand in creating this and the deepest forgiveness must be within YOU.  And its this that binds you to the world of effects and phenomenon of a particular kind.  You see?  Without being entirely aware of it, your inability to let go of an old hurt kept it fresh and vibrant in your life so that the world simply formed itself around that hurt since like attracts like.

Want to be free?  Forgive.  Forgive yourself.  If its easier to do it by forgiving others, then do so.  Its good for them.  But I think you may find that this will lead to forgiving yourself.  Its letting it go, allowing it to go. You may well find that the feeling was there because you weren't able to forgive yourself of some past hurt or trauma, and the very act of holding on to it served to bring all these people who had been hurt by others as a result of similar actions you had been involved in merely served to bring you into the realm of this same drama. Like attracting like.  Again, the way through it, the scissors that cut the chord, is forgiveness.  Forgiveness allows for the old cord to go. 'Fessing up and forgiving takes all the power out of the karma and it drops away.  Its a nonissue from that moment onward and you can feel it dropping away as you realize you have quite literally a new lease on life.  Sometimes just feeling exhausted over this mystery of why things keep cycling over and over is enough to make you throw up your hands and cry help.  And this is the best place to be in.  HAVE no resolution!  HAVE no answer!  Its when you have not rational way around all of this that you actually find the one thing that will work.  And, again, this is why handing your problems over to God or to some higher power whatever that might be, is a powerful way of doing the same thing.  In it is the trust that whatever this higher power is, it is infinitely more capable of taking care of it.  Its enough to get the problem off your back, and when you can do this, you have sprung from the clutches of a very worrisome karma.  Yes, we are little, yes we are limited, yes we are like children.  Some things, are simply above our pay grade.  Don't TRY to solve the problem.  Let it go.  Free your mind, free your heart, because its only in this place that you can feel the rush of love that is the universe.  By punishing yourself, you literally cut yourself off from the love that IS the universe.....that you ARE....that we ALL ARE!

The way that you reach this self is by grace.  Grace allows it to happen.  It means that compassion is more important that one-upmanship, that love is the divine pulse for all life.  When you awaken to this, you will not just know it, you will feel it running all through you. By lightening your load, you literally provide more space for the divine to live within....and I promise that what this divine thing is, is beyond any religious teaching on this earth....for the experience has been so rare an event that most are guessing about its transformative power sometimes.  And yet, you can make this room in your life for it.

I will add in parting that my awakening was fueled by a choice to "work through" an old issue that I had been carrying around for years.  I thought I had a problem to somehow solve, but in the midst of trying to solve it, I found that my problem was about solving what I thought I had to solve or understand (like some math problem or riddle of the universe).  What I most needed to do was to JUST get that old burden off my back!  In Christianity, we see this as a confessional.  We have this way of getting things off our backs that have been bothering us, and when we do, we feel lighter.  When I spoke to the man who listened to my story for the first time in an understanding way, I realized I hadn't come to him for some kind of advice, I came to be heard....to confess in a sense.  When I did this, I magically felt a hundred pounds lighter.  I had not realized just how burdened I had been previously.  In being lighter, I made way for something even more powerful to come into my life.  I can't say that this will work for everyone, but it certainly catalyzed a big shift in my own experienced and launched me onto the path I am on now.

So I hope that this has helped.  I hope that it may serve as a tool that you can use in working through your own stuff, in finding that place where you can simply give it up and let it go.  When you do, you do yourself the biggest favor.  Trust me on this.  Some things are simply above our pay grade!

Nemasté

Catharsis

When working through the difficult things within, one important aspect of this is the ability to find catharsis.  Sometimes I think we want to think that catharsis should be some kind of deep quiet realization, or profound moment.  It could be that, but often if you look back on the cathartic moments in your life, I will bet that there was some kind of intense emotion or punching of pillows or pedaling on a bike or running like mad involved.  Maybe yelling, screaming, or some other kind of movement.  We quite intuitively know what will make us feel better.  The problem, for me, is that a momentary "venting" might loosen some material, but may not release all that needs to be released in order to feel like there is more of a permanent effect achieved.  This suggests to me that being able to bring movement into your life in a regular way can be of benefit to you and anything that has been repressed so that it has put a burden upon you in life. 

There is an important linkage between spirit and body.  They are not separate, but intimately connected.  Body springs from the vast consciousness and its infinite ability to create and form.  Sounds like cosmic talk, eh?  By allowing yourself the freedom to MOVE you can clear blockages in your body.  Many traditions utilize movement as a way of freeing the spirit and thus body of these issues or problems.  When we have repressed feelings, they can cause all kinds of problems.  Pushing them down further doesn't work.  Pushing them out will.  Movement can help facilitate change.

The turning point for me in many ways was when I was told that I needed to find the man who would help me do energy work.  Whoever this man was, I was told, would help me with the blocks that I had in my energy field, what felt like my body, and what I had grown largely numb to. Turns out that the following day after being told this that I was told by a friend how she was going to a Qi Gong class led by a man who knew about all kinds of energy work and was something of an expert in his field (he wrote a reference book on similar subjects).  Turns out Qi Gong means "energy work" and is a way of moving the body that is supposed to move the energy field, to loosen it up and allow knots and issues to fall away.  When I came away from that first session, I didn't feel better.  I felt clammy and weird.  I began having anxiety.  And then I began to feel things fall away.  Often I didn't even know what these things were, but they were dropping in a pretty significant way.  The first thing this did was to attune me to all the other garbage that needed to be swept out of me.  All my own stuff, all needed to go in order to be clearer.  I did this through movement.  This turning point did not happen all at once nor in a very short period, but came with a regimen that I set for myself. I would go to Qi Gung twice a week for months at a time. Sometimes I would practice certain movements outside of the class.  But by keeping at this over a period of time I was able to begin the process of loosening up the junk lodged in my field.

I have found that work, good movement, as well as letting my frustration be vented can all be very healthy ways for catharsis.  Forget if you don't think whether behaving that way isn't spiritual.  You ARE spiritual. You can't help it. Its what you are!  Letting yourself be free enough to make whatever sound will move through you that feels like it needs to be expressed can be a very useful endeavor because what this does is it can help put you in touch with your feelings.  The feeling side of yourself is that part which connects with the divine.  Its certainly not your mind or ego, so the better able you are to relate to this part of your nature, the better able you are to relate to your own divine reality or being.  It might sound too simplistic, but it is true.

Your feeling side is not just a place of repressed emotion and raw hurt.  We talk of the subconscious the same way, and yet if we simply say "okay, so I have skeletons in my closet; let's clear them out to see what this closet holds."  Once we get the unresolved out of the way what we have is a portal that can be used to access our most holy of holies. Sound grandiose?  Maybe you should try it.  Perhaps we have not felt terribly spiritual for the simple reason that so much lay in the way....in the very channel where our most significant and powerful connection with the universe lay.  YOU are this universe.  And it is love. Movement can be one aspect in a panoply of tools in your toolbox that can help you in moving forward.

The thing about movement is that you can't force it.  By forcing it, you are only riding on the surface of change.  By letting go and being as uninhibited as possible, you stop controlling and you begin to flow.  Then the catharsis can move through you deeply and perfectly.  Sometimes this can be achieved through crying, sometimes, for the reason that it often involves a form of surrender. Crying can be cathartic and this can be combined with movement and other "venting" methods that helps to move energy and the old stuff out of its place.  Sometimes, too, it means strong body movement.  Don't be afraid of what you might feel.  Just let it all flow through you and see if you can let the observer or watcher in you watch everything as it passes.  By being a little detached, you might find you are less invested in an outcome.  Might be also that you simply move into it like a hot bath.....do whatever feels right to you. 

Have you ever heard about the Shakers that lived in America?  These people, who were of Germanic descent, were a simple people, but also very devout to simple practice of their faith and way of living a simple life.  As a creative person, I have some issues with their spare furniture style, but they had something that sprang out of a very intuitive understanding of what body movement is all about.  The Shakers shook.  The Shakers were a group that came originally from the Quakers, a group who believed in finding the truth within, to seek without intermediaries the divine. While the shaking of the Shakers had to do with their receiving the Holy Spirit, intuition tells me that their ecstatic movements helped them to access these clearer states of being. The literature is steeped in the language of the time, about letting go of lust, which I very much see as letting go of attachment to repressed emotion and hurt.  Its when we do that, I think, that we begin to touch upon the divine.  It isn't that sexuality is itself lust, but how sexuality is turned through repressed emotion.  When you have unresolved issues, these cloud the energy and cause it to turn raw instead of divine.  And less than throwing of the intensity of our sexuality in the midst of spiritual ecstasy, we learn to live with it, become partners in a way that is different from what went before.  So the shaking may have helped to shift the energy some.

You do not need a system  to adhere to.  You can make it up simply by doing what feels good.  Or what works.  Your intuition can guide you, and its not complicated.  By moving out of mind, we can move into feeling, and strong physical movement that gets the body pumping blood can be a very good way of leaving behind the mind.  I can remember running across campus as a college student, late for class (almost) and had to run all the way across campus to get to class in time.  I was totally focused on giving my body what it needed in order for it to get me where I needed to go.  While I had a lot of anxiety through this, I also got there on time and all that uncertainty dropped away. What I noticed was how focused I was in my body.  I was gasping for breath. I felt as though every cell in my body was doing everything it could just to get itself oxygenated.  There was no room for too much thinking.  When I sat down in class, I noticed that I was seeing auras around my teacher and classmates.  Something in me had shifted, had opened, and a very natural ability that I had was allowed to come through all of the mentalizing and inner chatter.  This was not complicated at all.  I reached an energetic pitch within that catalyzed the awareness that I had always had.  Something broke free in a sense.  There was a form of catharsis, even though I wasn't dealing with a lot of emotional material.  But for a time, my field was freed up just long enough to simply BE.  So no wonder, then, that movement and body work can be such an important and valuable tool.

Perhaps it might help to study some established methods.  Maybe watch Qi Gung (also spelled "Gong") and follow along on a video.  Maybe a run might help, or some ecstatic movement that you just make up on the spot.  Remember, though, that some traditions can be very old, and while they can be tried and true, not all systems that are thousands of years old can always serve the modern woman or man.  We live in a very different culture now, and we have changed from when some of these methods were created.  So take what works and consider that you might need a more physical method for catharsis.  This process seems to work best when you loosen up on the inside as much as you do on the outside, whatever form it takes.  Some forms of movement might work best when you really push yourself, the same way I had to do so many years ago....really going to the edge of what you can handle.

I suspect that due to the nature of consciousness, we tend to forge alliances with other forms of consciousness(think about all the cells in your body and how each one is itself its own form of awareness working together to create the wave of awareness upon which your own being rides).  Think about how your own individuality is part of a still larger form of awareness, yet another "I" or Oversoul.  When you have energy that is unresolved, it can also mean that you attract etherically  that you might not even be aware are around you, those lower forms of consciousness whose own energy matches the unresolved in you and which when they associate with you on the subconscious level, also serve to reinforce in your physiology and psychology those states that serve to keep you in less than resolved places.  Through movement, our energy field actually gets shaken up so that its hard for these beings to remain attached. 

So I hope that you can find a way to incorporate the power that catharsis has in your life by letting your body move and "shake off" all those things that might be unresolved.  Ultimately, this is about growing up within our spiritual selves, and once we are able to divest ourselves of all of the dross, the way we can wind up feeling is so much better than anything that went before.

In the process of thinking about how movement can help us, I looked up the Shakers and also came across a video by Osho that was recommended by a yoga site.  The video led to this page which might be a helpful way of getting started!