I had the intuitive message to get to the bookshop today. It was one of those cold sunless morning in which the desire to walk was totally absent and Jasper seemed reluctant to follow me out into the wintery day. I had seen a book of poetry I wanted to buy (as I like to support writers… God knows it is hard enough to get published let alone sell books of poetry with so much poetry published online these days.) At the same time in the bookshop whilst browsing I came across a book on letting go which just struck me as a case of pure synchronicity because last night I got some bad news and I started to get stressed and upset as I noticed I was in resistance. And its is interesting because in the book Letting Go : The Pathway of Surrender, David Hawkins speaks of how much suppressed and projected emotion drives our culture and flight into attack, defence, conquest or war.
Hawkins claims letting emotions out isn’t necessarily the best way forward, either as a lot of the time if it just magnifies the feelings and discourages us from letting them go or moving through them or even acknowledging their deeper roots which would, in the long run, be far more beneficial for our life, health, sanity and relationships.
I had felt that letting go shift and change of perception move through me last night when I began to laugh at the situation going on between Scott and I. Its been just over a year now of trying to meet and being blocked in some way and I have constantly had to fight demons of doubt and belief along the way to the point now all I feel I can really do for peace of mind is to surrender. We have met yet another block and last night I started to get stressed again as I noticed I was in resistance. Being able to have a good laugh about it made me feel a lot better and then I realised I could just let go to find peace. PHEW!!!
Hawkins has an interesting take on stress which he claims is influenced by the degree of accumulated pressure we feel personally from our repressed or suppressed feelings. So someone carrying a lot of anger is going to get triggered into frustration a lot, someone full of fear will react fearfully to events and much of these reactions will be driven by core beliefs, and the stories or meanings we make of things (along with the backlog of suppressed or repressed emotion) and that’s definitely not saying anything new that anyone here does not already know, however we can often lose sight of this when we get trapped in the midst of a trigger reaction.
According to Hawkins doing exercises or meditation to release muscles already tight from stress or trigger reactions often misses the point, in that we are then dealing with the symptom or result of stress rather than what caused us to react in the first place, the repressed feelings of anger, fear, guilt, shame or other negative beliefs that got provoked in the circumstance.
Reading this book today has reminded me that I am only just lately getting some kind of insight into the suppressed feelings that underlie my own reactions to things. Guilt and fear are two of the repressed emotions driving reactions that I have been becoming more aware of lately. And reacting on repressed feelings we haven’t been able to admit to, understand, acknowledge or contain often ends badly for us. Not to mention that the majority of the world doesn’t care what happened to us in the past and probably doesn’t deserve to be dumped with what we are on the run from or have repressed or suppressed inside ourselves and may then tend to project unconsciously.
According to Hawking the rationalising mind is well versed in projecting true causes outside of ourselves onto others. It personally doesn’t feel great when this happens to us and we may not be fully aware ourselves when we are doing it. I was listening to a programme on the power of apology today and it said a true apology doesn’t contain the word ‘but’. I am really sorry I hit you ‘but’.. I was having a bad day, got hit a lot as a child, cant contain my frustration, fear and anger very well.
And its not only so called ‘negative’ or challenging feelings we repress, according to Hawkins repression of love that may want to move forward may be the cause of more heart attacks than we realise. Fear of loss which drives love can lead us too, to extreme reactions and difficulty with letting our loved one go, something I know I have done a lot of in my own life before I became more aware of old losses that have been driving me along with their associated feelings.
We also tend to project what we experience. I got a bit of a shock last night to realise how much sadness and melancholy I actually project on current situations and so it was helpful today to read the following :
The person with a lot of repressed grief will unconsciously create sad events in life, the fearful person precipitates frightening experiences, the angry person becomes surrounded by infuriating circumstance, and the prideful person is constantly being insulted.
And according to Hawkins the vibrational charge of feelings is emitted by our aura and can be felt by those who are sensitive, emotion is stored as emotional charge in cells something I have experienced multiple times on awakening when stored shock/fear/guilt/trauma or grief energy has been activated the previous day. Add to this that traumatic events keep us wired up with vibrational charge and we in the end can become both receptive transmitters and absorbers of similar energies. Thus trauma sadly often attracts yet more trauma towards us if we don’t practice emotional vibration release work.
Because emotions emit a vibrational energy field, they affect and determine the people who are in our lives. Life events become influenced by our repressed and suppressed emotions on the psychic level. ..(anger attracts anger, just as) “love promotes love.”
Letting go involves being aware of a feeling, letting it come up, staying with it and letting it run its course without wanting to make it different or do anything about it. It means simply to let the feeling be there and to focus on letting out the energy behind it. The first step is to allow yourself to have the feeling without resisting it, venting it, fearing it, condemning ir, or moralising about it. It means to drop judgement and to see that it is just a feeling. The technique is to be with the feeling and surrender all efforts to modify it in any way. Let go of wanting to resist the feeling. It is resistance that keeps the feeling going. When you give up resisting or trying to modify the feeling, it will shift to the next feeling and be accompanied by a lighter sensation. A feeling that is not resisted will disappear so the energy behind it dissipates.
It is important as we practice letting go of feelings or moving through them via this process that we also notice and ignore associated thoughts.
Thoughts are endless and self reinforcing and they only breed more thoughts. Thoughts are merely rationalisations of the mind to try and explain the presence of the feeling. The real reason for the feeling is the accumulated pressure behind feelings that is forcing it… into the present moment. The thoughts or external events are only excuses made up by the mind.
Letting the thoughts go and just allowing the feelings to move leads to a state of surrender…..
To be surrendered means to have no strong emotions about a thing. “It’s okay if it happens, and it’s okay if it doesn’t.” When we are free, there is a letting go of attachments. We can enjoy a thing, but we don’t have need of it for our happiness. There is a progressive diminishing of all dependence upon anything or anyone outside of ourselves (we can then) “be in the world, but not of it.”
Feelings may continue to arise as we begin to process them since we may have stored so many over such a long period, but in time we become aware that we have feeling but there is a basic part of us that is not our feeling, we can learn to watch feelings arise and pass away just like storm clouds, we become more aware of ‘the changeless witness’ rather than identifying and remaining so strongly bound to experience. We come close to the real Self too, that lies behind feelings, less a ‘victim’ or ‘hostage’ to feelings, we become progressively less identified with the passing feelings and thoughts and more in tune with our underlying Self that witnesses the ongoing dance and movement of feeling/thoughts.
