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“On the ego level, anxiety can certainly continue to exist, rage can torment us, but we discover that our real being lies farm more deeply beneath the surface.  We learn to have feelings and to admit we have them without being taken over or blocked by them.  Finally, we simply let be these movements of our psyche, rather than try to repress them.  Still, letting them be doesn’t’ mean we want to get rid of them.

“Which brings us to the actual problem.  If we want to get rid of certain emotions, we tend to think that repressing them will help.  But when we repress emotions like sadness, hopelessness, rage, and anger, however, we only succeed in getting caught up in them further.  At best these emotions will bury themselves deep in the unconsciousness where it’s hard to get at them, and where, eventually, they will exert their disruptive influence.  We are utterly at their mercy.

“We should repress nothing.  What is there is there. Look at it, accept it, let it come!  Make friends with your fear and your rage. They belong to you. After all you don’t cut off your toe if it hurts.  Try this some time with sadness: accept it bot don’t wallow in it.  Don’t make a big deal about it.  Look at it; and then go back you your exercise.  Sadness can be a good point of departure for the exercise.

“Let’s consider the same with anxiety. So many of us are plagued by anxiety, but we don’t know why.  We don’t know were it comes from or where it hides itself.  We can say “yes” to anxiety.  We can say, “Yes, I am afraid.”  We can take it into our exercise.  When we repress anxiety or sadness, these emotions will disguise themselves and hide in some corner of our psyche. Then , when they pop up, they appear with a totally different face, perhaps as aggression, pride, or even virtue, which can deceive us even further.

“If we don’t want to fall victim to this subtle trick, we have to realize that sadness, jealousy, aggression, and so on, belong to the psychic energy of our personality structure and hence to our life, and that ultimately they are as much expressions of the Divine as joy, peace, and harmony.  Everything we let be has the tendency to change into something pleasant.  But the things we fight grab on to us.

“We practice pure observations, pure attentiveness, without any evaluation or preoccupation.  Emotions must be lived –even welcomed—steadfastly and imperturbably. No commentary, no getting swept away, no distorting.  Feeling is like a cloud that moves across the blue sky; it may darken the sky, but it never stays.

Ken Wilber summarizes this:

Here we’re interested only in observing our specific troubles, simply and harmlessly becoming aware of them, without condemning them, avoiding them, dramatizing, processing them or justifying them.  If a feeling or a tendency arises, we take note of it.  If hatred of this feeling emerges, we’re aware of it.  If hatred arises against the hatred, we observe that.  There’s nothing to do, but if an actions arises, we take cognizance of it and remain a ‘non-preferential consciousness’ amid all the troubles.  This is possible only if we understand that none of these represent our real self.  So long as we are bound up with them, there will be an effort, however subtle, to manipulate the troubles.  If we understand that they are not the center of the self, we won’t curse our troubles; we won’t scream at them, won’t let them disgust us, won’t try to reject them or surrender to them.  Every measure that we take to get rid of a trouble simply strengthens the illusion that we are the plague in question.  So in the end, the attempt to avoid the trouble merely guarantees that it will endure.  What is so upsetting is not the trouble itself but our connection to it.  We identify with it, and that alone is the real difficulty.  Instead of attacking a trouble, we adopt the guilelessness of a distanced nonpartisanship toward it.  The mystics and sages like to compare this condition of registering to a witness with a mirror.  We simply mirror all sensations or thoughts that arise without clinging to them or throwing them away, just as a mirror reflects with perfect impartiality whatever goes on in front of it.  Ken Wilber,  Wege Zum Selbst [No Boundary], Munich, 1984, 1.74-75 cited in Jager...pp. 142-3]

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The practices of meditation, contemplation and Emotional Freedom Technique take us deeper into the practical possibility of living fully in the present, of saying YES, and allowing our Life Force to fully express itself.  Please see the pages on Emotional Freedom Technique by clicking HERE.

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Two other  books that I highly recommend for anyone in any spiritual tradition are:

1) Entering the Castle by Carolyn Myss.  It leads the reader down his/her own journey into “the castle”  –ones’s own soul– based on the work of the mystic St. Teresa d Avila, Interior Castle.  It is a book that leads one on a journey of great healing and insight.

2) Soul, Mind, Body Medicine by Dr. Zhi Gang Sha.  This book teaches you how to be in tune with each aspect of your being and use many ancient healing techniques for specific conditions.  

For more information or to set up an appointment  Call 573-256-1331

“You can outdistance that which is running after you, but not what is running inside you.”

----proverb

The sacred journey which is life includes many aspects of healing in the realm of our personal and social psychology.

The following text is taken from a book called Search for the Meaning of Life: Essays and Reflections on the Mystical Experience by Willigis Jäger (Liguori, Missouri: Triumph Books, 1995).  They are from the chapter called, Psychological Aspects of the Inner Path.”

I include them here because of their importance for dealing with all crises in our lives, especially severe health crises.  The practice about which Jäger speaks can be incorporated with any spiritual belief or philosophy.

Psychological Aspects of saying YES! To life

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