Dismantle the wall

Emotions are energy in motion. Negative emotions are trapped energy. That’s why they don’t feel good. Building on a metaphor from a previous post, holding on to negative emotions is like holding onto a bird that wants to fly free.

Your freedom lies in your ability to recognize your emotional response, take a moment to feel it and notice what it seems to be related to, and to feel your willingness to release fear.

While it may seem that situations outside of you cause your emotions, the truth of the matter is much different. When you experience a negative reaction, you are always looking toward the past and the self you have made out of your reactions to it.

By being willing to feel your emotions and to escort them to the light by turning away from fear and toward love, you are dismantling the stone barricade of your separate self, rock by rock. Here’s what truly happens when you experience a negative emotion:

Something apparently outside you happens, but that’s impossible because all experience unfolds within the completely safe space of your consciousness. Waking up is about realizing that you are actually safe and held in love at all times, despite the experiences you are creating within consciousness.

You believe you experience a negative emotion because of the person, circumstance or event you are experiencing now, but it’s actually a very different situation. The person, circumstance or event you are experiencing right now is shining a light directly on a past negative emotion. This experience you are having is showing you stress, tension, anxiety, disgust, a sense of being blocked–something you have felt in your past and taken on as your own identity. Picture a kind soul shining a flashlight directly on the key to your freedom.

What do you do with these so-called negative experiences? Take them for the gifts that they are. See where the light is shining. What comes up? Are you anxious about a social interaction? Angry about being cut off in traffic?

Whatever you feel, that is surfacing from within your sense of separate self, not from outside of you. If you are ready to willingly dismantle that sense of separate self, stone by stone, you will emerge into unity consciousness. Each time you remove a stone from the structure of your separate self, inspiration and a sense of well-being rushes into the space you have opened up.

You learn, more and more, to let control go. Control belongs to the separate and vulnerable self. You let inspiration run everything. Inspiration belongs to the Whole, the All, the force that brings everything and everyone into harmony. It feels much better than control.

If you want to toggle over from control to inspiration, thank the circumstances in your life that cause contracted, negative emotion to surface. When it surfaces, you can blame it on outside circumstances and preserve and strengthen your sense of separate self, but you’ll notice that it doesn’t feel good.

You can also feel the emotion, recognize it as a piece of the separate self that has presented itself for release, and feel your willingness to release what doesn’t feel good in order to allow inspiration and peace to flow into your experience.

I am aware that I feel [emotion] related to [person, circumstance or event]
I am willing to feel [emotion]
I feel my willingness to release fear in all its forms

When you become aware that you feel a painful emotion, you are noticing an opportunity. When you affirm your willingness to feel the emotion (which only takes a moment when you are used to the practice), you are very kindly taking the hand of a lost child as you turn from fear toward love. When you feel that you are ready to let what doesn’t feel good out of your experience, you are releasing the child back to the light, back to its mother, back Home.

Now you are facing the light. Now your sense of separate self is lighter, more porous. Now the light shines through.

If you are reading the Love’s Beginning book, here is the next post:
5.2 Echoes of the past