Category Archives: Emotions

No words, just a handle

Words are difficult for some of us, especially those of us who were badly traumatized. So we feel perplexed by words. We don’t know how to express what we feel. Is what we feel “panic” or “anxiety”? Is it “fear” or terror” or “horror” or “dread” or “regret”? We don’t know the exact words to use. But there is a very simple way to get at what we need to get at.

Forget about words and focus on the uncomfortable bodily sensations that comes up for you when you think about the issue. Where in your body are they located? Can you compare them to something you are familiar with? Is what you feel similar to having a heavy weight on your chest? Or is it more like a searing pain in your back? This is everything you need to do the work you came here to do.

The body is the subconscious and all trauma is stored in it. The sensations you feel are what you are here to heal, to release. A tension, a tightness, a contraction, a pain – these are the ‘feelings’ you are looking for.

Once you have a handle on a feeling, a sensation, then perhaps words might come: “it’s kinda like…” An entire story might come. If words don’t come, that’s ok. Just feel the feeling and, knowing you are safe here and now, allow yourself to breathe fully, freely and deeply.

Start today to release tensions now to reclaim your health and happiness. It works!

Love & Fear

All healing is essentially the release from fear.

To make our healing work very simple, it helps to think of the light switch on the wall that is either on or off. If we agree to call our inner emotional states by two terms, either love or fear, then our progress will be rapid.

Just as one is never just a “little” pregnant — you are also neither a “little” in love or fear. You are either relaxed and happy and aware of love — or not. You could think of the inner human state simply as, “love on” or “love off” — and we call “love off”, for want of a better term, fear. Continue reading Love & Fear

You are only as sick as your secrets

Sometimes secrets are intentionally kept. On birthdays we don’t want our friends to know what we are giving them because we want them to be surprised.

Sometimes wonderful, velvet memories are kept secret because they are intensely private and personal. We do not care to share what they are because they might be misunderstood and not cherished by others as we cherish them ourselves.

But then there are the prickly or even stabbing secrets that hurt us then and continue to hurt us now. Those secrets are best aired and released. Continue reading You are only as sick as your secrets

The emotional scars of Cesarean birth

by Nicette Jukelevics, author of
Understanding the Dangers of Cesarean Birth:
Making Informed Decisions

at www.DangersOfCesareanBirth.com

For years researchers have largely focused on the technical aspects and “appropriate” rate of cesarean section: the surgical procedure. However, birth by cesarean can have powerful psychological effects on women and their ability to adjust to motherhood.

A woman’s experience of her cesarean birth and her perceptions of the event, are influenced by multiple complex factors: The reason for which the cesarean was performed, her cultural values, her beliefs and anticipations of the birth, possible traumatic events in her life, available social support, and her personal sense of control, are only a few (Cummings, 1988; Cranley, 1983; Marut and Mercer, 1979; Sheppard-McLain1985).

Many women recover fully physically and emotionally from a cesarean birth, others do not. Little attention has been paid to the psychological impact that a surgical birth may have on women’s emotional well being. Their personal experiences have been at times trivialized, misunderstood, or ignored by the medical community.

That birth by cesarean can have an adverse psychological impact on some mothers was already a concern in the early 1980’s as the cesarean rate in the United States was climbing rapidly (Lipson and Tilden, 1980). Anecdotal reports and personal testimonies have helped to increase awareness of the negative psychological repercussions that some women experience following a cesarean birth. (Baptisti-Richards 1988; Madsen, 1994;Pertson and Mehl, 1985; Wainer-Cohen and Estner 1983).

Research suggests that the negative psychosocial effects of cesareans can be significant and far-reaching for some women (Mutryn, 1993). Several reports also indicate that a cesarean birth, especially one that was not anticipated, can put some women at increased risk for depression and post-traumatic stress. Continue reading The emotional scars of Cesarean birth

Circumcision & Human Behavior

The emotional & behavioral effects of circumcision
by George Hill

Psychologists now recognize that male circumcision affects emotions and behavior. This article discusses the impact of male circumcision on human behavior.

Introduction

Medical doctors adopted male circumcision from religious practice into medical practice in England in the 1860s and in the United States in the 1870s. No thought was given to the possible behavioral effects of painful operations that excise important protective erogenous tissue from the male phallus. For example, Gairdner (1949) and Wright (1967), both critics of male neonatal non-therapeutic circumcision, made no mention of any behavioral effects of neonatal circumcision.[1] [2]

The awakening

Other doctors, however, were beginning to express concern about the behavioral effects of male circumcision. Continue reading Circumcision & Human Behavior

Hypnosis or de-hypnosis?

All healing is essentially the release from fear.
ACIM

Hypnosis can be a powerful tool for good — or for ill. Hypnotic suggestions program your mind, which is essentially the hard drive of your body computer. We have all been programmed to believe what we believe, to see ourselves and the world as we do.

Some love the color red; others hate it. Some love dogs; others fear them. When we came from the womb, we were simply open and receptive; life’s adventures and misadventures have hypnotized and imprinted us all with a wide, wild array of preferences and repulsions.

Fear is an especially effective means of hypnosis. A trained hypnotist might suddenly push you off balance or clap loudly next to your head… for he has learned that fear puts the subject into a trance of shock. Once in trance, suggestions can be made that will go deep into the mind.

Someone may be an excellent hypnotist and have the best of intentions, yet not know what you personally need. Only you know. Only that part of you that is below the conscious mind knows what you have been through and what you need to heal your unique set of past fears and traumas.


This is why I recommend de-hypnosis. We need to be de-hypnotized, freed from all the trauma, pain and suffering we have known — from our origin, our creation, until the present. We need to file the past in the draw labeled “Past” and realize that the past is gone, along with all its fears and tears. Once we let go of the past, we are restored to our original state: peace of mind, joy and unconditional love.

When you are very relaxed, your own inner wisdom can show or tell you what you need to know to heal your life. It works every time. It is very efficient. It never harms. Find someone you can trust to help you find your way back to your peace of mind. It’s all about undoing the past, relaxing, releasing fear, letting go, choosing peace. You deserve it.

The Importance of Feeling Good

Don’t do anything that you don’t really want to do.
Keep yourself in a place of feeling good.
Reach for the thought that feels better —
and watch what happens.
Abraham*

According to Abraham-Hicks, it is in the place of “feeling good” where grace occurs. A Course In Miracles would say that we have only two emotions: love and fear — and that love would be the place of “feeling good” and fear would be feeling less than love, anything less than comfortable.

Pain is inevitable but suffering is optional.

To have a human body means you will encounter pain — you will stub your toe or bump your head or experience any number of things that distract you from feeling good. But to dwell on the pain and remain in the pain, to bring yourself back to the pain over and over again in your mind, to rehearse the pain and to dwell on it, is abusive to your self. And that is not what we really want. What we really want is to  feel good.

So now we can decide — coming back to the quote at the top of this post — to not do those things we don’t want to do or to not feel the feelings we don’t like to feel. Knowing we have an option, we may become determined to learn to release, let go, feel good in any circumstance. We learn to surf the waves of emotion, to walk on water, so to speak.

Imagine the implication for our world. Nobody would be following in the footsteps of Job… yet everyone would be helpful, because that is the nature of love. The world as we know it would change in a twinkling.

The importance of reclaiming the feeling that feels good jives with everything I’ve learned and have personally experienced. A Course In Miracles calls it love or forgiveness or releasing fear, Dr. Hew Len of ho’oponopono calls it cleaning. He makes it clear that cleaning is an ongoing activity. Mary Baker Eddy says, “God is Love… God is the work of eternity, and demands absolute consecration of thought, energy, and desire.” Our real job, our real work, is to reclaim our fundamental nature, which is pure, unconditional love.

Observing the judgmental voice between the ears, clearing, releasing, letting it go… getting back to “zero” or “neutral” or “feeling good”… that is our work and that is our fate, because since only love truly exists forever, our return to it is inevitable. Something called Knowledge is the “know how” of how to go directly to the love that we are.

*From the workshop in Boston, MA on Sunday, October 10th, 1999 #563. This quote and much more at Abraham-Hicks Publications

Depression is not irrational – Suicide is not a solution

I was depressed from an early age. As a child, I always wanted to be dead. Life didn’t seem worth living. One night, when my parents were asleep, I went to the kitchen to get a knife to cut out my heart, but I was too small to reach the sharp knives – I didn’t even know where they were kept.

When I went back to my bed that night, I heard a voice say, “What makes you think it would be any different if you were to die?”

I had to admit I had no guarantee. But I saw the implication was that I would have to live through those early childhood years again – no way! – and so I have stayed. My teen years and early twenties were no better. But after that, each year my heart has grown more full and rich and happy. I have no external possessions to brag about, but peace of mind and joy are my priceless treasures.

Depression is not irrational, it is an accumulation of legitimate, yet unreleased fears, angers and sorrows. Much of our society does not allow grieving and does not offer anything much better than “You are born. Life is for suffering. Technology advances. And then you die.”.

Religion often makes life on earth sound like a prison sentence, a valley of tears, after which – if you are perfect (and who among us could claim that?) – at any rate, if you are perfect, you get to go to “heaven” and experience something that might or might not be all that much better than what you have known on earth… but there are no guarantees and there are many hoops to jump through.

What finally brought me out of my depression was the discovery that when I was very very quiet, I could feel my heart.

In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer… no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back. ― Albert Camus

Another way to say that is, “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.” It is! And it can be known NOW. But only one thing can exist in one place at one time, so as long as we hold on to negative feelings from the past, we do not feel that beauty that already exists in our own hearts.

I came to understand that I had something important to do here on planet earth. Until I released all that old baggage, until I released everything that was blocking me from feeling my heart, I might just have to come back over and over and do it all again. What a horrible thought that was! And so I began to do my work and began to let go of that old and ugly fear, sorrow, anger… and am still engaged in that process.

We are fortunate in this age to have lots of help – from people and healing systems like Jed Diamond, Byron Katie’s “The Work”, Gary Craig’s “EFT – Emotional Freedom Technique”, Hale Dwoskin’s “The Sedona Method”, and many others. It’s all about healing – letting go of fear/anger/sorrow. It’s why we’re here and why “stuff happens” – so that we feel the old stuff and release the past – to “forgive”, which is “for giving ourselves peace of mind, joy and health.” Feelings got stuck when we held our breath in fear. So whatever feelings come up, breathe into them… that’s how we tell ourselves that we’re safe here and now.

Release one little fear, tension, today, here and now. You will be so glad you did. Then move to another… and let it go… until all the fear is gone and only love remains.