“The quickest way to get to where you want to go is to accept where you are.”
Dear Integral Meditators,
This week’s article looks at mindfulness around emotions, and working with emotional energy. If you enjoy it, we will be exploring these methods in both the weekday (Weds eve) and Saturday sessions this week. You are invited!
You might also consider the Inner smile & energy balls meditation workshop – Build health, confidence & energetic resilience in life.
Final call for this weekends Qi Gong for Improving your Health and Energy Levels & for Self-Healing!
In the spirit of inner recycling,
Toby
Accepting & recycling your difficult emotions
In last week’s article on ‘Your emotions as horses’ I led with this quote:
“The emotions you currently think of as being the most useless in your life might just be the ones that you need to learn to ride better”
In this piece, I want to explore the theme of accepting and recycling difficult emotions, as well as the mental narrative and the bodily/somatic states that goes with them.
To recycle the energy of difficult emotions, they first need to be acknowledged and accepted. There is a Zen saying that goes “Pulling the weeds we give nourishment to the plant,” meaning that we can learn to be grateful to our inner difficulties, if we know how to use their energy, like pulling and then burying weeds next to a plant so that they can nourish it.
Our ‘normal’ approach to a difficult emotional state is to try and push it away, so that we can replaced it with a more ‘positive’ state. Another quote I often use in my trainings is:
“The quickest way to get to where you want to go is to accept where you are.”
What this points to is that, counter-intuitively, if you can accept and be at peace with a difficult emotional state, the state itself can change more rapidly to something more constructive. It is the accepting and not resisting that enables the transformation.
For example, if I am hurt or disappointed by someone’s behaviour, acknowledging that feeling of hurt or disappointment is a first step towards transforming it.
Smiling at it to accept and soften the energy
From acknowledgment I can then move onto acceptance. Even though we may understand intellectually the principle and benefit of accepting, it is not easy to do! The gateway to accepting a difficult emotion is often guarded by resistance. One technique I find helpful when in a state of resistance is to gently smile at my resistance, inviting it to soften its hard, rigid stance. Smiling and inviting our resistance to let go (and not being in a hurry about this) enables us to access the feeling of the emotion itself. Once we have this access, we can then use the smiling technique to work with the emotion. In my example of hurt and disappointment, I can smile inwardly to the part of me that feels this way, encouraging a softening of the emotion, making its energy more malleable. This opens up the emotional energy to the ‘recycling’ or transformational stage of the practice that I explain below.
Recycling emotional energy using the microcosmic orbit
I have talked about the microcosmic orbit in a previous articles this year. With emotional energy we raise its vibration by looping it up the back of the body, and re-directing it down the front, which is the basic pattern in all M-O meditations.
Imagine two points of light within your body, one at the bottom of your perineum, the second at the crown of your head. Now imagine a golden thread running up the back of your body, from perineum to the base of the spine, up the back of the body to the crown. It continues thru the crown to your third eye, and down the front of your body, through the belly and back down to the perineum (see diagram).
As you breathe in, feel the energy in your body flowing up the back of the golden thread to your crown, raising and purifying the vibration of the energy as it does so. As you breathe out, feel energy flowing down the front of the body, bringing the higher vibrational energy back down into the torso. As you do this, imagine that the energy of your difficult emotion is being ‘sucked’ into this loop, recycled up the back of the spine and returning down the front of the torso, as neutral/positive emotional energy, ready to be deployed by you in other directions.
Recycling rather than avoiding emotions is a great way to increase your energy levels and resilience in life. Initially the techniques can sound a bit eccentric, but once you try them a few times, the principles are not that complicated.
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