Resolving Our Past

Resolving Our Past

by | Mar 10, 2017 | Cultural Creativity

We need to resolve our past, so we can expose our truth and move forward with our lives. We are drowning in our unresolved emotions. Unrecognized, they weigh us down. Depressed by them, we unknowingly hide and mask them.

So often we think our uncomfortable emotions away, doing everything we can not to feel the truth of them. Our rationalizations become what is real to us, and what we feel. What is not comfortable we do not acknowledge.

Disconnected from the truth of our emotions, we become unaware of what we truly value and love, and we find ourselves investing in things that are not right for us. Not acknowledging what we feel, we look to others to validate how we ‘should’ feel, using them to rationalize what we want to feel into ‘reality’.

We need to resolve our past and what is uncomfortable to us, so we can fully live our lives. To do this, we need to be vulnerable with ourselves and with others. This begins with accepting our fear of vulnerability, of intimacy, of our defenses being breached. It’s okay it feels more safe to feel in control and to remain hidden, it’s okay to believe then scary things won’t happen that we can’t handle.

While it is nice to feel we can make predictable our feelings and their magnitude, we simply cannot. At some point, we must surrender to our lack of control. We must hand over the tightly held and relinquish the guarded. Despite what we fear, our hearts will not break, we will not be in mortal danger. We can peer deeply in. We can feel our hurt and survive. We don’t need to protect ourselves from the truth of our feelings. What we need is to drop the mask and to reclaim our vulnerability.

When we don’t explore the emotions we find so uncomfortable, we create conditions that support others in avoiding theirs. Yet when we face our past and our truth, we make it easier for others to the same. There are always reasons why not to feel something, why not to be something, why not to do something. In helping our self take the risk of vulnerability, we release our self from our past and allow our self to move forward with our life. Being what we truly are, we support others in being the same.

Emotional Self-Abandonment

Emotional Self-Abandonment

by | Nov 11, 2015 | Self/Business Growth

photo credit: gingher

We, as humans, have a tendency to use our mind to negate our emotions. We use our mind as a tool to abandon how we feel.

I know, personally, I often use my mind to abandon my negative feelings, especially when they are directed at someone I love. In these moments, I’d rather pretend the feelings aren’t there… than explore why they are. The result of doing this, of locking up my sensitives in my logical mind, is that I disown my feelings and my emotional needs.

For some of us, we negate our feelings or emotional needs because we feel the expression of them is dangerous. Our emotions feel too vulnerable and the sharing of them feels to risky. Rightfully, risks are present when we share our most vulnerable self — but hiding our feelings from others is far more dangerous. For it leads us to mask our feelings, not only for others, but from our self. Rather than feel what we feel, we learn to abandon ourselves emotionally. We learn to negate what we feel and to lock it up in our mind. This lack of emotional self-awareness, and this mental overemphasis, further disconnects us from our self — and others.

We owe it to our emotional self to break our cycle of self-abandonment.

Emotional self-abandonment may feel safer — but it is no less painful than our own emotional truth — and it is all the more detrimental. For in not being present to our selves, we become slightly lost.

However, by acknowledging our logical desire to negate our feelings, we begin to break this cycle. Simply in seeing our abandonment, we cease our pattern of turning our back on our feelings. For recognizing our neglect enables us to be present to our emotional self once again, and within this awareness, we find we no longer need to leave any part of ourselves out again.

photo credit: gingher