So... I'm sitting at my laptop, with inspirational music playing in the background. Why? Because I know I need to write something. I need to express myself.
We all 'bottle it up', storing things in our mind that really have no place there. These little things all sit there, quietly oozing their negativity and slowly lowering our overall mood - our 'vibe'. Eventually, any hidden issues will have caused enough trouble in our subconscious that a huge dark cloud has formed, and this distorts our perception of reality, affects how we see other people, influences our behaviour, causes physical symptoms such as stress, sleeplessness, muscle pains.... Hidden issues can really ruin a life.
In childhood (don't worry, I'm not going to launch into a Freudian discussion about loving your mother), we spend all our time learning. From the moment we are born, we are learning. That, apart from the survival instinct, is the strongest instinct we have. Everything that happens in our lives is stored. Either as memories, or as part of our belief system that forms our personality. Everything leaves its trace, its mark.
The problem with this is that we never stop learning.
Not saying that learning is a bad thing. Not in the slightest. I'm fascinated by the world around me. If something sparks my interest, I will spend hours researching, reading about and exploring it. What I'm saying is that this instinct can't be turned off.
The more we focus on something, and the more 'head-time' we give it, the better we learn. If we want to learn something, we must practice it, and repeat it.
'So? What's that got to do with hidden issues?' I hear you cry. Well, I'm about to explain... Let me get my head ready for this...
To understand, we need to appreciate the human as a whole system. We have a body and a mind (and a soul, but that's not involved this time). The mind and the body are interconnected in every way possible. The physical and the mental are truly one.
What I mean by 'hidden issues' is anything that has emotion still attached to it. So, that means good and bad emotions, useful and destructive, I mean all emotions. If you think about anything from your past and you experience a feeling either in your body or an emotion in your mind, then I am defining it as an 'hidden issue'.
Let's use a better word - stuff (Thank You Lynne Oliver, my Yoga teacher and good friend).
So, we have 'good stuff' and 'bad stuff'. It's really easy to tell the difference. If it makes you feel good, then it's 'good stuff'. If it makes you feel bad, then it's 'bad stuff'. It really doesn't take years of self-reflection.
So, what's the problem? An emotion is a product of the Limbic System, a part of the brain. For the geeks (like me): 'The limbic system is a convenient way of describing several functionally and anatomically interconnected nuclei and cortical structures that are located in the telencephalon and diencephalon... They regulate autonomic and endocrine function, particularly in response to emotional stimuli... It has been described as the 'feeling and reacting brain'.' (Review of Clinical and Functional Neuroscience - Swenson).
I'm not going to start explaining neuroscience, but suffice to say, the limbic system uses chemicals, hormones and electrical signals to produce changes in the body. It is also closely connected to our senses. This part of the brain is our survival department, our internal guidance system. It uses the input it receives to make emotions that produce changes that influence the way we think and behave. This bit is the one that makes us run away from tigers. This is the bit that goes quiet when we meditate.
It's also the one that is the most overused. The good and bad stuff we have floating around is in this part of the brain. If a memory is a good one, the limbic system produces happiness. Try it! Close your eyes and think of a truly happy moment in your life. Did you notice changes in your body? Your mood? The same happens with bad memories.
That's all very well, but emotions are designed for the present moment. If you are being chased by a tiger, a happy emotion isn't going to help you. Because they influence our
behaviour and decision-making process, emotions that do not belong in the current situation can lead us in completely the wrong direction. That's why they say 'leave your problems at home', and 'don't mix business with pleasure'.
So all this stuff is there, with its associated emotional randomness. Good and bad, all this stuff is literally making up most of our life. The way we see the world, the way way we feel the world sees us, the way we behave, the way we think, react and respond to people and situations, the list just goes on.
Back to the point. Expression is the only way we can consciously deal with an emotion. Whether it's grabbing a pillow and screaming your head off or painting. Expression is how we release emotions. Biologically, the limbic system prepares the body to express the emotion by adjusting things like heartbeat, hormone levels, blood flow and a hundred other things... Whatever the body wants to do when the emotion is experienced, is what will release the emotion.
The trouble is, we've gone to the trouble of getting ready for this, but then we convince ourselves not to express it. A favourite of mine is 'real men don't cry'. Real men, actually, choose whether to cry or not - but here it is - and they are comfortable doing either.
Another one - the dreaded household bill. We are taught to live in fear of what will happen if we don't pay it. Prison, financial problems, the consequences. So, we are scared. Because we are taught to be fearless, we call it stress.
The limbic system, because it is the emotional centre, can't (just cannot) look at things logically. That becomes a real problem because it controls our input/output system.
When situations repeat themselves, we produce the same associated emotions because that's what we are used to. Remember what I said about repetition? Well, and this is where it all comes together, because we don't fully express our emotions ever, we learn, through repetition, to automatically store it and repress it. This creates an association with the physical and emotional state of the person at the time, and stores it exactly like that.
So... This all sounds great in theory, but let's have an example of exactly what I'm talking about. When someone breaks up with someone, it's a very emotional time. The usual path that people take after a breakup is one of self-imposed 'discipline', 'strength' and 'pride' among many others. They might cry for a while, but then a teeny voice says 'you'll be ok', 'be strong', 'they're not worth your tears', 'they were useless anyway' and other stuff like that. Well, this is the result of being accustomed to not fully expressing ourselves.
Because we are taught to 'get a grip', 'get over it' and we are expected to have rock-hard self-control, we cut off so-called 'bad' emotions mid-flow and then congratulate ourselves on our powers of self-mastery. True, it makes us feel good and gains the admiration of friends and people who care, but we're then wandering around with all these chemicals, hormones and bodily states that don't fit with what's happening.
When we cut off an emotion, we are stopping the body from doing its job. An emotion needs to be expressed for the limbic system to relax again - the hormones need to be used up, the chemicals need to be dispersed, and the body needs to calm down. If it doesn't we have leftover stuff that is interfering with our life.
Ok, so maybe we did cry about our ex, and maybe we don't feel the need to cry any more. We feel empty, emotionless and beaten. So we think we've dealt with it. We think we've cried all we can. But what about the other stuff related to that person that we didn't deal with? They're all still there, eating away. The thing is, even if we become completely empty towards that person, the association is still there through a hundred other seemingly unrelated things.
If they cheated, part of us believes that our next partner will cheat. Our memory works in tandem with our limbic system to produce emotional reactions in order for us to use experience to react quicker in the present moment. If we allow the concept of relationships to be tainted by unresolved stuff, then we are in the wrong state automatically.
This then sets off a chain reaction that will create the perfect environment for the stuff to repeat itself, because we are expecting it. We can completely misunderstand someone right from the start based on unresolved stuff that has absolutely nothing to do with them. We will apply others' stuff to that person, and both our perception of them and the way we treat them will be based on a false assumption.
That's just one example, used because most people can relate to the situation - what I'm really saying is that we have to be selective about what we learn.
We all have an enormous amount of stuff floating around, and expression is one way of dealing with it. Instead of trying to repress all these emotions, and as a result making emotional time-bombs in our memories, we need to let them out. We can do this at the time, fully experiencing the emotion before moving on, thus being able to apply our rational mind to the situation objectively and store the memory as information, or we can put it by to deal with later. If we don't deal with it, it will go into hiding and secretly work its magic.
Mindfulness is a very effective tool for dealing with stuff, and can be a very easy practice to learn. More about that another time, but for now I have some homework for you:
When you are in a situation and an emotion arises (however weak), ask yourself if it is appropriate to the situation. Ask yourself if there is any reason you should be feeling the way you feel and ask yourself if what you are feeling is actually helping. This is a very basic exercise that gets easier with practice, and is a good introduction to mindfulness.
I am a Reiki Master Practitioner and Teacher, adept at several different types of traditional and non-traditional Reiki. I also practice Chios Energy Healing, and heal intuitively, I am a hypnotherapist, psychologist and life coach and my mission to 'heal as many people as possible'.
If you would like to have a chat about healing or any of the work I do, please get in touch:
+34 603 79 88 82 (WhatsApp available)
blue.spirit.wellness@gmail.com
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