Practical Tips: Does It Have a Direction?

I’ve been in a few workshops again recently, and it is very common to have one or two people having really intense internal issues.  The workshops often bring these issues out more intensely than in our normal life.  And this is a real gift.  Often the language used to describe working with this type of  experience is abstract or overly spiritual.  My plan is to do a few blog posts with simple practical tips for normal people in society going through some of these experiences.

Sometimes, the energy in our bodies seems really locked up.  We can’t figure out how to open ourselves up or process the energy.  We might feel frozen, paralyzed, desperate.  Maybe our ears ring.  Or we have trouble speaking.  There might be a location to this tension like the throat or the upper back.  Or initially it might be an overall feeling or mood.  The intensity might come from long lost trauma from our childhood.  It might have a big story.  Or we might not have any idea where it comes from.  It might be a holding pattern we’ve been flying around in for a long time.  We might feel like we don’t know what is up or down.  We have been wrestling with it for so long.  But this blog post is not about addressing the story.  It is a simple perspective to help us work with these intense feelings.  If the story is a ball of twine, we are not trying to unravel the twine. We are finding a practical way to work to dissolve the twine, or at least to diffuse the intensity of the situation so that we allow it to clarify.

So, just simply, does this traffic jam of electricity and emotion have a direction it is trying to go?  If we take a look at it, is it trying to do something that we are missing?  Maybe it is so intense or so unconscious for us that we can’t even let go of it enough to see what it is trying to do.  But if we can get really curious about it, with all of its power and confusion, if we can try to honestly face what is happening, we might find that if we take our foot off of the accelerator a bit trying to get rid of it, it might begin to reveal a way to sort itself out.  It might have a direction.

This direction it is trying to go might seem completely counter-intuitive to us.  It might seem counter to all that we have heard about spirituality or kundalini or biomechanics or psychology of the body. And once we begin to allow it to express itself, it might feel like we are going in the opposite direction we thought we were trying to go.  In trying to process energy in the past, perhaps we had an agenda.  Maybe we have heard that we should keep our energy in our belly.  Or that we should only breath into our bellies.  Or maybe we have tried complicated techniques to deal with this energy, only to have them backfire or just feel beside the point.  But if we listen to our internal world a bit, we might discover that we have mistakenly been closing down parts of our selves/bodies in an attempt to corral the energy and emotions into the right place.

Listening to our internal world feels very strange at first.  Where we normally try to control things with our minds, the body and energy in the body can’t be controlled in the same way.  Usually, we have to be open to listening to our bodies, the environment, the room, and that learning to listen is difficult at first.  It takes time.  We may feel like we are being turned inside out or that we are at once exploding and imploding at the same time.  Or that we’re being pulled into a dark cavern.  And sometimes we have trouble feeling it at first.  It is a good idea to take some time to just sit still and feel what is happening, without an agenda.  Give it time, begin to trust that we can align with ourselves and the universe.  It really is trying to happen.

So, what direction is it trying to go?  Maybe we are trying to push the door open but we need to pull.  Or maybe we are trying to go left and the energy wants to go right.  Or more likely, if we begin to let go into it, it is like a warm blanket which surrounds us, it permeates us.  We can’t tell what is happening.  Our internal world reorganizes, like some internal rubix cube, and it is as if our entire being begins to synchronize. Sometimes suddenly, other times gradually, we feel like we have encountered a great river flowing through us.  We see that we have been damming this river.  And we begin to feel great relief as we harmonize with it.  We feel like there is a possibility to be aligned with the field which surrounds us. Words like order, balance, harmony, and flow might come to mind.  Not as an idea, not from the brain down, but as an embodied experience.  Something that emerges from within.

Where once we tried to figure out how to let go of unwanted emotions, now, by finding a physical energetic ability to work with them, we are not so much a slave to these emotions.  Often doing this practical embodied work will dissolve the long standing trauma without need of understanding it.  We won’t feel so out of sorts internally, or feel like we are going in many directions at once.  Or stuck. Or mentally foggy.  We can begin to be full and taut in our efficient, flowing, vibrant selves.  We can be wide open, seeing that we don’t need to close down in fear.  And we can finally get going in one unified direction.  This is a tool we can use for the rest of our lives.  When our stuck places come up, we creatively release them more and more easily.  It will become second nature.  This is my experience.  You can do it.

Thank you for reading.  If you like this blog, please share it.  Good luck!