Your Freedom and Your Feelings are related.
Do You want more Freedom?
My life was being pinched off. I felt it but I didn’t know just how much it was metaphorically drowning me. Before I was cracked open, my feelings, or rather my avoidance of certain feelings, was literally pinching my life out of me. My life was getting smaller and smaller.
We all have our comfort zones. A way of life that we prefer. I get it. I mean, who doesn’t want what they prefer? Honing a clarity about what we prefer is a very powerful modality of creating the life that you want. Right? The clearer you get about what you prefer, the more your life moves into what you want it to be.
But that will only get you so far. And that may be far enough for you. Not my call.
When we find our lives settling into a corridor of preferences, we can lose a sense of exhilaration. We can lose a sense of freedom. Our preferences keep us from feeling those things that we don’t prefer. I know what I am talking about can seem a little contradictory. But bear with me.
So, say you are in a relationship, and you know that you prefer feeling loved. Well, it’s love, right? What could be “wrong” with that? Nothing. You have free will. Do as you choose. But, if you want to feel love, really feel love, you might want to clear out your psyche of everything that inhibits you from feeling (more) love.
You can pray to the big guy, “God, please show me how I can experience more love.”
And the next day, someone gets into an argument with you. They belittle you without mercy. And you feel a welling up of anger in your psyche. Kind of like how road rage has a lot more anger or rage than the event that triggered it. You find yourself really mad. “God? I asked for LOVE, not this anger. What the hell?” God smiles and has shown you an element of yourself that keeps the true potentials of love at bay. In other words, your unresolved anger within you has kept the love you experience tame or suppressed. When we have arenas of feelings we just won’t allow ourselves to feel, we wall off aspects of our life. We fence in the range of experiences we allow ourselves to feel. And we do this at a price.
I had “installed” a mechanism within me, as a child, to avoid the feeling of anger. Fast forward to the realm of an adult, and it was clear as a bell that I didn’t feel good at all, feeling the feeling of anger. I don’t prefer THAT. This I know, without a shadow of a doubt. But that anger was growing in my psyche. Not in a conscious way, but rather in a way that was making my life smaller and smaller. My body was shutting down. I was starting to get ulcers. I was having digestive tract problems and they were getting worse. This put me “on the couch.” I started seeing a psychiatrist. Which would eventually lead me to cracking myself open. That day when I felt that which I had been avoiding. That day when so much anger came pouring out of me. That day when my health improved considerably in a single moment. That day that changed my life forever.
Had I kept my anger at bay, I know that my health would have deteriorated more and more. Perhaps I would have died by now, as that was almost three decades ago. I know my avoidance of my feelings was having a very negative effect on my health. And a few decades more of that, and who knows what would have happened.
I guess what I am saying is that by facing the feelings that I didn’t prefer, I was able to open myself up. It opened me up more than I could have imagined at the time. The path to freedom is the path to healing our relationships with our feelings. Even the ones we don’t prefer.
When we posture with a feeling, where we avoid it at all cost, we stall our spiritual growth. If we keep posturing with said emotion(s), we can even regress our spiritual growth.
Often we had good reasons to set up an avoidance or posture with particular emotions. Perhaps it was a survival tactic at the time. Perhaps it helped keep us safe. But over time, when we posture with our emotions we are collapsing our freedom. We are pinching off our life. We are building walls that keep us trapped in a smaller and smaller experience. It will be healing our relationship with our emotions that will truly set ourselves free. When we heal our relationship with the emotions with which we have been subconsciously posturing, we shift from our lives getting smaller and smaller, to where our life starts expanding. Expanding more and more … the very trademark of freedom.
Set yourself free.
Love You!
Les
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