20 Jan 2018

Ahhhh can you feel it? Those soft hints of warmth sneaking through what is left of the cold season. New growth is appearing on the trees and shrubs, flowers are starting to bloom and the birds are busy building their nests. Beautiful. As these warmer days become more and more frequent, one starts to feel more revived, refreshed and ready to take on new projects but first there may be some stuff that needs a bit of a “spring clean”. This stuff I am referring to is emotions. Winter has allowed the time to hibernate, evaluate and reflect and now it is time to come out of the cave and start to plant new seeds for what we want to manifest over the coming months. Just like the cycle of the seasons, for a new dream to begin, one must end. Often in the ending of a dream there may be remnants that stand out and need attention before we can move forward without fear or regret.

We all hear about how important it is to de-clutter our homes, detoxify our body’s and have a good old spring clean but what do you do when it comes to cleaning out some of these emotions that we can’t seem to let go of? "Just let it go" you may hear yourself or others say. Sometimes it is easy to make that decision to not let something effect you anymore and then bam it’s gone. Awesome. But what about those times when as much as you may want to move on, these emotions, feelings and thoughts hang around and don’t budge. They creep in at the weirdest moments, raise their weary heads then either stick around for a while, or disappear, only to reappear just when you think you have a handle on things. Sometimes we are aware of them and sometimes not. Either way it seems the emotions have control over us instead of us being the ones in control. What if I asked you to consider that the control on either side of this equation may be an illusion?

As much as we may like to think we can have control over our emotions, I am going to offer an alternative point of view. There was never any control to begin with. Perhaps emotions are just e-motions = energy in motion. Different e-motions hold different energy and it moves and attracts other energies that vibrate at the same frequency. The more that energy moves and is held in a particular space, the more it may expand or retract depending on what it happening in that environment. For example – let’s look at the emotion of regret. Let’s say that you are feeling sadness and regret over not doing / saying something. There it is, sitting in the back of your mind just sitting there, waiting. You are faced with making a new decision and you don’t want to make the “wrong” decision because you don’t want to face the fall out if it doesn’t work out. "I should have done this"," I should have said that", "what if", blah, blah, blah... The more time goes on, the more fear and anxiety creeps in because you really regretted that last decision made, as well as the one before that, and the one 5 or even 20 years ago. It plays like a record all those wrong decisions in the past and in the meantime that emotion of regret is growing and growing as it attracts all those negative emotions that are vibrating at the same frequency. The emotion is getting larger and occupying more space however it is not necessarily in control. It is purely our perception that this emotion has control over us as it occupies so much of our thoughts and space in our mind.

Just because something takes up space, doesn’t mean it is controlling us – it’s more like clutter that becomes a blockage, gets in our way and trips us over if we don’t see it. If it continues to grow then of course we are going to focus on it because we can’t miss it however it is not controlling us. It is just there expanding or retracting depending on what is stimulating it in the environment. If the environmental conditions are not favourable then it may keep on moving to somewhere else or slowly disintegrate until there is nothing left.

Another way of looking at it is say you are in a room with an elephant (representing an emotion). The elephant is huge but does that give it control? You may feel overwhelmed by the size of it and back away because you may perceive it to be a huge threat or you may walk up to it calmly and reach out your hand to pat its trunk, feed it and acknowledge its existence. Perhaps a loud noise (or some kind of environmental stimuli) startles the elephant which sends it running towards you. Who is in control now? The elephant charging, you running and ducking for cover or neither of you? Perhaps it is just a matter of circumstances and neither of you had control of the situation to start off with. The elephant is just there occupying the space (much the same as you are) and depending on what is happening in the environment will depend if either of you become a threat to each other or not. It may also be the push required that gets one of you out of the space you are in.

So getting back to working out how you are going to let go of whatever emotion is blocking or tripping you up? First acknowledge that the emotion exists and then ask yourself: What does it feel like? Where does it sit in my body? Do I like it there or is it something I would like to move? What am I getting out of it being in my space and is this working for me? What has this emotion taught me about myself? After considering these questions, next recognise the emotion for what it is – energy in motion. Because its energy and can move, it doesn’t have to stay where it is. Perhaps what it needs is just a little change in the environment to send it on its way. You have the potential to influence the environment (yes this is the bit you do have some control over) by adding more of the same conditions that helps to expand the emotion and keep it in your space or you can choose to remove this emotion if you want to. This can be done by using a simple visualisation technique (perhaps imagine this particular emotion moving freely away from your body – you may like to see it as a colour, word or picture, whatever works for you) or another effective method may be the “write & burn” technique (see here). If you have attempted these and you still feel like there is some clutter that won’t budge, then speak to someone about it, ask for help, get yourself balanced (kinesiology works wonders ;-) ) because ultimately your mind and emotions exist within your environment and deserve a good old spring clean too!