It seemed important to stay within the lines when we learned to color and draw as a child. With increasing age and control, we maneuvered the edges and managed to color inside the lines, yet so careful in case any color or markings crossed over. Regrettably, society has taught us to rein in our emotions, holding on to our feelings so that they don’t leak out across the boundary lines in our bodies and in our relationships. A very unfortunate outcome of this societal expecation is that as a human race, we face the potential of unrelenting physical, emotional, energetic and spiritual havoc. Eventually, our feelings may find ways to leak out of us. Our defense mechanisms and the ways in which we attempt to protect ourselves may point to the feelings that reside underneath the surface of our external veneer. Our compliance with coloring inside the lines concerning our emotions hasn’t proven helpful or healthy. With our long-lived attempts to negate and stuff our emotions, a walled fortress of sorts may now reside inside of us, prompting us to feel captive, stuck, vulnerable, guarded, and shut-down in life, negatively impacting our wellbeing and sense of self.

One of the greatest gifts one can offer oneself concerning one’s emotions, is the gently-paced freedom to find safe ways in which to color outside the lines. This process may potentially feel overwhelming if walking this journey alone; thus, finding a faithful friend or better yet, a licensed professional, to walk alongside and be with may be an important resource. Especially when feeling so alone in one’s pain, utilizing the available resources along the way in an effort to feel grounded, may be a critical piece in one’s healing. Helping one find a sense of safety and empowerment deep within can grant one permission to share the back stories about life, relationships, thoughts and feelings – gifting freedom to color outside the lines and choose to live life fully rather than feel shut down and immobilized.

Pema Chodron, a buddhist nun, says it this way: “Generally speaking, we regard discomfort in any form as bad news.   …for people who have a certain hunger to know what is true – feelings like disappointment, embarrassment, irritation, resentment, anger, jealousy, and fear, instead of being bad news, are actually very clear moments that teach us where it is that we’re holding back. They teach us to perk up and lean in when we feel we’d rather collapse and back away. They’re like messengers that show us, with terrifying clarity, exactly where we’re stuck. This very moment is the perfect teacher, and lucky for us, it’s with us whereever we are.   …Each day, we’re given many opportunities to open up or shut down.” (When Things Fall Apart, Pema Chodron)

It’s when we honor our feelings, access them in our body, and allow them to be expressed in safe ways, that our body’s system may begin to relax in ways that offer true emotional and physical relaxation, healing and health-ease (as opposed to dis-ease). This is not about dumping our feelings on those around us, or placing blame. When parents find ways to safely express their emotions, and not dump them on others, they energetically pave the way for their children to find ways to safely express their emotions, and in doing so, find the healing from their woundings. One of the many great gifts we can offer children (and any individual of any age, for that matter) is to experience early-on. the freedom to express one’s feelings, to color outside the lines when it comes to one’s emotional system, to open up, rather than shut down.

We have within us amazing inner resources, one of which is our healthy, nurturing parent/adult that resides deep inside of us. Each of us has such a resource deep within.  We may discover that we may never/rarely access this healthy, nurturing parent part of us. The part of us that has experienced the many woundings of our lifetime is our young child part (and prenate part of us). When we dump our feelings onto another, blame and experience life from the victim role, our kid part is center stage and is living at the effect of the earlier woundings. The truth of the matter is: the wounding is what happened to us, but we are not the wounding. The wounding attached to us and we, when in our wounded-child state of being, falsely believe we were/are the wounding and tend to live at the effect of the wounding.

When we breathe into our bodies, drink water, and breathe our way such that we may access our healthy, nurturing parent/adult within us, our perspective and patterns of living drastically shift. When in our parent/adult state of being, we may likely feel empowered as opposed to victimized; we are not attached to the wounding that happened to us because we know we are not the wounding; we have a clearer perspective of who we are: good and worthy of all that is good. When we access our parent/adult part, we are better equipped to increase our self care because we, as the healthy, nurturing parent/adult, are meeting the needs of our wounded child who resides within. We are actually reparenting our younger wounded self. There is no one better who can care for this younger part of us than our own parent/adult part of us. We may think that other people and external things will fill the emptiness and aloneness that we, as the wounded child part of us, may feel, but no one can fill us better than the parent/adult part of us who resides deep inside of us.  No one other than our parent/adult self is with us 24 hours, 7 days a week.  Learning to access this older part of ourselves is a developmental process that takes time, and great care is necessary as we nurture this younger part of ourselves that has needed nurturing for so so long. If we grew up in a family where loving support and unconditional nurturing was absent or, at best, minimal, we may likely need faithful, compassionate mentors who offer support and guidance as we journey this profound learning curve.

Feelings are not wrong in any way, whether it be our sads, mads, or afraids. It’s what we do – or don’t do – with them that matters. They guide us back to our woundings if we allow them to do what they are meant to do. They are to be expressed in safe ways so as to not create damage to ourselves and to those around us. One’s current wound from the present day is connected to previous woundings from earlier times, if we will but follow the connections backward, and allow ourselves to have our feelings around each situation/wounding. Finding safe ways to access one’s feelings and then express them are essential ingredients for our wellbeing and healing. Having a licensed professional be a faithful resource who offers safe containment for all that is being accessed and released is an important element of support that is not to be minimized. It’s all powerful coloring of sorts that extends across all kinds of lines and may lead us to rediscover who we are (without the wounding that attached to us):  good and worthy of all that is good.  The Sufi mystic poet, Rumi, reminds us that the wound is the healer.  As we lean in, the coloring process is all about living and discovering the freedom for which we long.  It is available to us.  Blessings.

Video: A small wise sage shares about who we are

23 Sep This entry was published on September 23, 2014 at 4:58 PM. It’s filed under counseling, health, mental health, therapy, wellness and tagged breathing, healing, resources, safety, wounding. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.