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Lesson 2: Step One of Inner Bonding
Choose to be aware of your feelings. Be willing to take responsibility for the ways in which you may be causing your own pain, and accept responsibility for creating your own peace and joy. Make use of somatic (body-based) therapies to access your feelings.
You cannot begin a journey without the willingness to do so. Without the willingness to do whatever it takes to heal from your wounded self, you will not begin the journey of healing and evolving your soul. .Doing whatever it takes. means that you are ready and willing to feel, understand and take full responsibility for the whole range of yourfeelings - from fear, anger, hurt, shame, depression and loneliness to safety, worth, lovability and joy. Willingness also means that you are ready to see how you are responsible for many of your own feelings by becoming aware of creating them with your thoughts, beliefs and actions.
Willingness means that you have decided to face your fears, your demons, the shadow side of yourself you hide from everyone. It also means you are ready to stop hiding from yourself, in other words, to stop being in denial about the pain you are in. Willingness means being ready to learn tolove rather than ignore or judge the wounded parts of yourself that carry your painful feelings. Willingness means that you are ready toask for help from your higher Guidance - and from others who can bring Divine love through to you - to help you heal. It means that you have admitted to yourself that you cannot find the safety you seek without spiritual guidance, that you are ready to invite Spirit into your heartto nurture and guide you. It means that you have embraced the journey, the sacred privilege of learning about love.
When we tell people that they need to be willing to feel their pain,they often say to us, .What.s the big deal about that? I feel my pain all the time.. But there is a world of difference between feeling pain and having the willingness to feel it in order to learn from it. Thereis no healing in just feeling and expressing your pain. You can cry and rage forever, but if you are not willing to take responsibility for your pain, you will be stuck with it forever.
Sometimes people respond with, .Why? Why feel my pain? What.s the point?. They believe that feeling pain - especially the pain ofchildhood - is a waste of time. .Why cry over spilled milk?. they argue. .Why can.t we just try to find our joy and skip the pain?. The answer is: because your pain is telling you that you are off track inyour thinking and behavior - that you are going the wrong way on thefreeway of life. In addition, joy and pain are in the same box. When you put a lid on your pain and stuff it back inside, you put a lid on your joy. You choose to live an emotionally stunted life.
Pain is how your Inner Child lets you know that you are behaving in ways that are not in your highest good. Pain is also your teacher inother ways. For example, if you are sawing a piece of wood and you accidentally slice into your finger, the physical pain you experiencetells you to stop sawing! The same is true of your emotional pain; it tells you to stop thinking or doing the thing that is causing you pain. If you do not pay attention to your emotional pain, you will go on thinking and acting in ways that cause you pain. What.s more, you will develop unhealthy, even harmful, mechanisms for not feeling your emotional pain: addictions to substances, people, manipulations, activities and things.
Ask yourself this. When you want to binge, eat sugar, drink alcohol, usedrugs, smoke, blame, hit, appease or resist someone, run away, turn onthe TV, gamble, shop, masturbate with pornography, demand sex from your partner or compulsively act out in any way, what are you feeling? Anxious, fearful, angry, depressed, shamed, guilty, hurt, alone, rejected, helpless, lonely, sad, unworthy? Are you turning to your addictions to distract you from your painful feelings? Are you willing to open to learning from these feelings instead of blocking them with addictive behavior?
The idea offeeling your long-suppressed emotional pain may be very scary to you.The truth is, you can handle it when you learn how, which is a majorpart of the Inner Bonding process. Your fear of those feelings is basedon beliefs about pain that you acquired in childhood, beliefs that arefalse now that you are an adult. Let.s take a look at some of them.
False Beliefs about Pain
When we were very small, we could not handle our pain alone. Our little bodies were too small to endure the huge energy of physical and emotional pain, so unless we had loving parents to help us when we were in pain, we learned various ways to numb out and endure it. As adults with grown-up bodies, we can now handle the big energy of emotional pain, once we learn how to do it. Most of us don.t realize this. Nor do we realize that we are no longer victims. We now have choices we didn.thave when we were young. We can learn to notice our thoughts and behavior that may be creating our pain and access the truth. We can leave a painful situation, call a friend or therapist for help, and learn to bring through Divine Love, all things we could not do for ourselves when we were small.
What beliefs do you have about your pain? See if any of these rings a bell.
- I can't handle my pain. It.s too much for me. I.ll go crazy or explode into a million pieces and die from it.
- If I open to my pain, it will be unending, a bottomless pit with no way out. Better to keep a lid on it.
- There is no point in feeling my pain.
- No one wants to hear my pain. If I open to my pain, I will end up alone.
- Feeling and showing my pain is a sign of weakness and will lead to my being rejected.
- Feeling my pain makes me too vulnerable to being controlled by others.
To move beyond these false beliefs, you must be willing to test them, to prove them false. And to test them, you must resist the urge to blunt your pain with addictions (which includes controlling behavior). You see, until you stop numbing out in the face of your pain, you will never know that you can feel your pain without going crazy or dying, that your pain is not endless, and that it can actually be a source of information and strength rather than weakness.
In all the years we have been working with people in pain, we have never had anyone die, explode or go crazy from opening to their pain. We have never met anyone whose pain was unending. Nor do people kill themselves from feeling their pain when they are willing to learn how to heal it,and when they reach out for the appropriate help. It is not opening to pain and learning how to manage it lovingly that causes suicidal feelings; it is sitting in pain with no inner and outer help that causes a person to take his or her own life. Suicide may be how the wounded self avoids taking responsibility for being the cause of most emotional pain. A loving Adult would never think of killing a child, which is what some acts of suicide are - killing the Inner Child who carries the pain. When you open to feeling, learning about and healing your pain, and learn how to manage and release deep pain, there is no longer a need to avoid it.
Some people have such deep pain from childhood abuse that they will not be able to endure opening to it until they have a solid, loving, spiritually connected Adult inplace. Inner Bonding is a powerful process for developing this Adult.It is not advisable to attempt to open to the pain of severe abuse on your own. If you suspect that you may have deep buried pain or if you have not succeeded in feeling your pain despite a genuine willingnessto do so, it is imperative that you receive therapeutic help while practicing the Six Steps of Inner Bonding. While Inner Bonding is a self-help process, this does not mean that you have to do it alone. Part of being a loving Adult is asking for help when help is needed.
Once again, do the exercise you did at the end of Chapter 1. Focus inside your body, attending to the physical sensations inside. Breathe into any painful feelings, embracing them with deep compassion. Is there any tension, tightness, fluttering, emptiness? Sit and keep your feelings company while moving on the next aspect of Step One.
Wanting Responsibility for Your Feelings
We all have two kinds of painful feelings - our wounded feelings thatwe are causing with our thoughts and actions, and our existential feelings, which are the result of life.
Feelings such as anger, anxiety, stress, depression, hurt, guilt, shame, frustration, emptiness and aloneness are wounded-self feelings coming from our own thoughts and actions. Painful feelings such as loneliness, helplessness over others, grief, sorrow over people hurting other people, or outrage over injustice are core-self feelings. We do the Six Steps of InnerBonding when there are wounded-self feelings, and we nurture ourselves when there are core-self painful feelings.
Do you want to take full 100% responsibility for learning how you are creating your wounded-self feelings and for learning how to nurture your core-self feelings? If you do, then you can move on to Step Two of Inner Bonding. If you don't, then you might want to explore what is keeping you from wanting this responsibility. Are you deeply devoted to someone else taking away your pain and making you happy, believing that someone elsecan do it better than you? Are you afraid that you can't do it - that you are inadequate and can't learn to access your guidance and learn totake loving action? These are just two of the many false beliefs that might keep you stuck in being a victim.
For the sake ofthis course, you might want to decide that you are willing to take temporary responsibility, just as an experiment!
The next lesson which starts tomorrow, will help you start to understand how to learn from your feelings. |
