Emotions and negative thinking make us sick and unhappy. Fortunately,
most all of this emotional garbage is based on the past or future -
and that hold is something we can change!
When we can't release stress, our muscles and
bones become more fixed, our tissue more rigid. We become resistant to
love, success and other things that make life wonderful. As
resentments and injustices build in our heads through negative
self-talk, we start avoiding our emotions and tuning them out. We also
learn how toxic other people's emotions can be when they are coming at
us, so we avoid those too. Strong emotions that come from trauma feel
overwhelming, so we suppress them. The more negative and emotionally
suppressive we are, the more toxic we become. Unprocessed emotions
accumulate and make us uncomfortable and over-reactive. No one likes
emotional toxicity. It pays in happiness to work on your
"stuff" and stay out of other people's garbage too.
Unfortunately, a large number of people don't
know they have emotional garbage or that their "stuff" is
doing them in. We can act out mental and emotional negativity in our
lives unconsciously. Negative emotions and attitudes create toxic
chemical reactions and sit in our body as anxiety and states of
over-reaction, causing disturbances that affect our health in many
adverse ways.
Emotional garbage is always a source of
toxicity. When we begin to heal emotionally and let toxic feelings go,
we become lighter, more carefree and conscious.
We live in disturbing times: unstable
economies, worldwide terrorism, random violence, shaky political
systems. Let's face it: life on planet earth is stressful. Another
word for stress is fear. Fear triggers are everywhere - from people's
conversations to news casts of disasters - keeping us in a state of
anxiety. But we can't keep using our addictions of food, drugs and
abuse as outlets for stress.
Many of us were raised in less-than-desirable
family situations (divorce, missing parents, abandonment, neglect,
abuse, etc.) and a variety of disturbing emotions and emotional
decisions are the result. Emotional energy accumulates. In trying to
cope and not knowing how to process these tumultuous emotions, the
subconscious suppresses them deeply into the body, where they produce
havoc. This, combined with a prevalent junk food diet, is why disease
rate among American children is climbing at a very rapid rate.
Even under the very best of home and childhood
circumstances, we all pick up emotional garbage and beliefs that do
not serve us well. School and medical trauma are often overlooked as
sources of stress. As children we did not have the maturity of
perceiving situations correctly and so we were vulnerable to
misunderstanding - thus locking these incorrect emotionally-charged
beliefs into our bodies. On top of that are inherited negative
emotional beliefs, bad attitudes and negative conditioning. And don't
forget the ones we add on a daily basis if we have not yet learned how
to appropriately process and release our emotions.
Included in our emotional garbage are the
defense mechanisms we have built up against ourselves, others and the
world.
Dr. Bradley Nelson, author of the book Emotion
Code, describes it this way, "The Heart-Wall has been called 'the
most important discovery in the history of energetic medicine.' The
heart is actually the core of our being; it is the center of our soul,
the seat of the subconscious mind, and the seat of all our creativity.
Sometimes we experience pain in the heart area when someone is hurting
us, or when we are feeling deeply grieved. This physical sensation,
which we refer to as heartache, is caused when this deepest part of
our being is assaulted in some way. If you feel this deep heartache
more than a couple of times the subconscious mind will begin to put up
a wall of energy around the heart. This 'wall of energy' is literally
made from the energy of trapped emotions. Releasing the heart-wall has
allowed those who could not find love to find it; it has allowed those
who could not find success to find it; it has changed the lives of
those who were suicidal or suffering from severe depression, sometimes
literally overnight; it has changed the lives of those suffering from
PTSD, and has allowed them to finally find peace."
Defense mechanisms are rooted in early
childhood emotional experiences and immature reasoning processes. They
really aren't necessary any more. Yet they form the basis of our
behavior in relationship and can destroy intimacy. Most of our
negative behavior has its foundation in our emotional garbage.
Why do we avoid healing emotionally?
Ask any wife who has tried to get her husband
to go to a counselor how easy it was to get him there. There are
several reasons why we might not want to heal emotionally. The biggest
reason is simply that we don't want to face our past. We don't want to
face it because:
