Understanding our own feelings and helping clients to understand their feelings too, is a wonderful, expansive, rewarding and empowering process for ourselves as well as them.
It’s a bit like teaching someone HOW to fish, rather than just giving them a fish – they get to understand more and more about their own unique way of experiencing their feelings – the meaning of them and how to live a life listening to their Inner Guidance system, instead of fighting against it.
Unfortunately, those of us who are trying to be the best that we can be, are often trying so hard to be serenity, sweetness and light, that we too often suppress the feelings that don’t feel good – not realizing that what we considered to be the “dark” side of our nature is simply part of our Inner Guidance system. So when we ignore those feelings, we’ve missed what our soul is trying to tell us – we’ve missed the messages AND as we’ve seen in that last lesson, we’ve caused our bodies harm at the same time.
So how can we change this burying of our feelings that has been making us sick?
We can be authentic with ALL our feelings – mental, emotional, physical, energetic and heart based feelings, ALL of them – and we can use them as the Inner Guidance system that they were designed to be. We can follow the good feelings to move through our change places with lightness of spirit (remember the diagram of dreams and change places from Lesson 11?) and we can use our crappy feelings when they are at the early warning stage (as much as possible), to figure out what we have to know or do, to move through those change places much more easily.
At the same time, we need to recognize that we Feel our connection to others in our own unique way and take action on all of those feelings too – figure out what it is that WE need to know or do, for or about that other person or animal. We can even feel our connection to land and the earth like this. (Just a little bombshell there for some people who are close to the earth!) 🙂
The more authentic we are, the more Present we become. The more Present we become, the more easily an expansive understanding flows. The more our understanding flows, the more we “see” and understand and Release from the past. The more we Release from the past, the easier it is to be Present and understand what’s happening now. Notice the circular, escalating nature of that?
… And the happier we feel and the more our bodies are able to heal the way they were designed.
… And the more we pause and appreciate and soak up each yummy feeling step of that process as it happens, the more good feeling stuff we attract. And the circulating, escalating way of feeling more and more mental, emotional and physical well-being, escalates even faster!
HOW Reiki can help
Being Authentic and being Present requires two things – allowing ourselves to feel the feelings and understanding them – whether they’re our feelings or whether we’re feeling someone else’s in that lovely connection to others that helps us and them on our journey. Apply your Reiki symbols and the Reiki energy to wherever you feel the feelings in your body and to your Third Eye for the understanding.
The same when you’re working with someone else. If they’re struggling to understand something, you may be drawn to apply the symbols and Reiki energy to their Third Eye or if they feel it as a stuck energy, or discomfort, or even pain in their body, then you may be drawn to apply the symbols and Reiki energy there.
It will depend on your unique sense of Feel (physical, mental, emotional, energetic, heart based) how you will uniquely Feel the resistance to your feelings, that is getting in the way of you being Authentic. And as we’ve seen, being Authentic is a path to being more Present, expanding your understanding and getting the healing to happen from all of that.
In my experience being Present has come in layers, although there have been people like Ekhart Tolley and Anita Moorjani who have blasted into it instantly. I’ll put an Amazon link to their books below. My personal favorite is Anita Moorjani’s book Dying to Be Me. I could barely put it down and it’s one of the rare books that I’ve read a number of times.
We’ve talked already in Lesson 13 about identifying that feeling of resistance and if it’s bigger than throwing a Cho Ku Rei on it and moving on, do a REIKI 2 session specifically on that feeling, with the intention of allowing the understanding to flow. i.e. You can do a specific session talking to your Third Eye like we talked about that you could talk directly to your knee in Lesson 8. Or you can do a specific session talking to where you’re feeling this message in your body.
And think about it – feeling crappy (whether mentally (worrying), emotionally, physically, energetically, heart based) for longer than it takes to recognize it and do something about it, means there IS some kind of resistance to our Inner Guidance system! Oh my goodness this is a VERY powerful thing to do and has brought enormous breakthroughs for me.
With the solution so easy, right now… Feel inside yourself in the way that suits you best and decide to notice that Resistance to your own Inner Guidance that is causing you “problems” right now.
Today’s part of this lovely Big Picture, is specifically about understanding emotions and the meaning of them – use your Reiki to help expand this understanding where you or your client experiences these emotions.
Here’s a summary of the different emotions and what they mean.
This summary is the most important part of explaining the emotions. There’s an expanded version below if you have time – you can come back to that some other time if you’re drawn to it. 🙂
Fear is a very important survival mechanism that warns us we are in danger OR when there’s something that we should be knowing or doing to support SOMEONE ELSE to feel safe.
Excitement and fear both run out of the adrenal glands and it can be hard to tell them apart – UNTIL you start using fear the way it was designed to make yourself (and support others) to be and feel safe – and then excitement changes your life by becoming exciting. 🙂
Anger is a powerful force for good when we’re Present and allowing the understanding of it to flow. It can give us a great deal of energy to protect ourselves and others and to set perfect boundaries. We also feel others’ anger when there’s something that we need to know or do for, or about someone else’s boundaries. Anger is also concerned with justice – not only for ourselves, but for others.
Shame & Guilt are our internal guidance system as to how we want to treat others. These feelings strengthen our ethics and our sense of personal honour. When we feel someone else’s shame and/or guilt in that connection to others that we’ve been talking about, remember – no matter what they’ve done, OUR answer will always, always, ALWAYS feel good. There’s a good link to a story about an extreme case of shame and guilt, in the expansion below.
Frustration is about the need to change something, to do do this thing differently in order to get the result that we’re looking for. Ahhh, so simple and yet WHAT to change and HOW? Your Reiki can help with this and understanding all the other emotions! 🙂 We also feel someone else’s frustration in that connection to others, when there’s something that WE need to know or do, for or about THEIR frustration.
Sadness in its purest form is a wonderful emotion that guides us to let go of what we’re about to lose. Listening to sadness often helps us let go of things that don’t work so that we can make room for things that do. When we feel someone else’s sadness, it’s because there’s something for us to know or do, to support them through this process.
Grief is really just love with no place to go. It’s about a loss or death that has already happened. The key message of grief is about feeling, exploring, thinking about and finding the expansive understanding of what you believe in – what you KNOW, all the way to your bones about this loved person, place or thing.
Depression is the stop sign of the soul. Stop here, go no further, you are not following your Inner Guidance system – so you are going the wrong way! Like all the other feelings, we can feel someone else’s depression so intensely that we think it’s our own and yet it is simply that there is something that we need to know or do, for or about them.
Suicidal urges are a whopping alarm bell that creates an urgency for people to get back on track. They are simply a culmination of a whole heap of suppressed, intense, maybe even explosively painful feelings from an Inner Guidance system that is not working.
When we work with people with big issues like suicidal urges and depression, it’s important that we have a clear knowing of what we believe in. If these feelings frighten us, then we should figure out what to know or do about THAT too. We can do some Reiki 2 work on ourselves to support ourselves to figure this out.
In the expansion of information below, you’ll also find a link to some physical causes of depression
Up Next or continue below for the expanded version:
You can keep reading for the expanded version below or skip on to the next lesson joyfully, or wait for your email. 🙂
Click here for some simple anatomy
Fear
Fear is a very important survival mechanism that warns us we are in danger. Simple. So what the heck are we doing when we try to ignore fear?
The danger can obviously be physical, but just as importantly, it can be emotional or spiritual danger.
If we ignore our fear and bury it, it intensifies in the future into panic and terror, confusion, maybe panic or anxiety attacks, a dulling of our senses into anxiety and dread, no sense of danger anymore, numbness or disconnection (it’s not happening), anger and even rage. Yep, if we bury enough fear, rage is the result.
So I don’t know about you, but it works best for me to figure out what I need to know or do to make myself safe, on the very early warning signs of fear, the little tingles that tell me that something is Not Quite Right – and not wait until it’s either terror or rage.
And given the way that we experience our connection to others, feeling fear (even intense fear) may mean that there’s something to know or do to help SOMEONE ELSE to be or feel safe. This is a big deal for horse people and other animal lovers!
When we get the right answer and take the right action, pfft! the fear is gone.
The role of our Reiki with buried feelings
When we have old fear buried in our bodies and it’s no longer about keeping ourselves safe NOW, our Reiki can support ourselves or others to get that expansion of understanding that will release that old emotional stress and physical tension from the body and have the mind /body/spirit in a state where they can start healing again in the amazing way that they were designed.
And you can reassure yourselves and the client that no matter how bad something was back when we buried our fear, that understanding always, always, ALWAYS, feels good.
This same process applies to ALL the emotions.
Excitement and Fear
Excitement and fear both run out of the adrenal glands and when we haven’t been listening to our fear and using it to make ourselves safe then they blur together and it’s difficult to tell them apart. The more you use your fear to both BE and FEEL safe – the more you use it to expand your understanding and take action on it – the easier it is to tell the difference between fear and excitement.
When you can tell them apart again, it’s easy to follow the excitement towards your goals and dreams and use the fear as the danger signal, as the warning signal that it is.
I experience fear and excitement as physical sensations in DIFFERENT parts of my body. That’s what helps me to get the difference between fear or excitement through to other people when I’m teaching. For me, I generally feel fear in my solar plexus and excitement lower down in my belly.
Anger
Anger is a powerful force for good when we’re Present and allowing the understanding of it to flow. It can give us a great deal of energy to protect ourselves and others and to set perfect boundaries. Anger is also concerned with justice – not only for ourselves, but for others.
Anger is only negative when we don’t understand it and suppress it and it’s intensified. I called anger my black beast, because I continually pushed it down ( I was taught very young that being angry was dangerous) and when my anger eventually erupted, I went off like a volcano. When anger is that intensified – when we have too much anger – that IS when it’s dangerous – to our own health if we suppress it or to others as we let it fly.
Like our other emotions, we often get opportunities to do something about our anger when it’s in the early warning stage, such as mild annoyance or even less than that, that feeling that I call “not quite right” – that gives us the opportunity to do less – and yet still make our boundary clear.
That’s an incredibly important point folks. If we pay attention to the early warning signal – the Not Quite Right – we don’t have to get so BIG about our boundaries – we get the opportunity to DO LESS and yet still be effective in setting our boundary. In fact it’s often more effective to set a boundary in a calmer state.
If we can’t understand and don’t resolve our anger, we get another opportunity to manage the explosive nature of it. We can choose to work it off physically – run until we drop, use a punching bag, dance, use music, belt a bean bag with a plastic baseball bat from the kids toy store, tear up old phone books, lie on the ground and kick and scream (hopefully where nobody else can see or hear us, cos’ we’ll look a bit silly!)
If we miss all those opportunities and still push it down, that’s when we bury it in our bodies where it does harm – particularly to the liver – with long held resentment damaging the gall bladder.
When I started to look at my anger I realized that I was angry at loved ones who were doing things that I had never even told them were not acceptable – I had never told them that what was happening was not OK.
In fact, I had never even thought about what was OK to me and what was not – let alone told my family. So I had set no boundaries at all and then I blamed them for coming through these unknown boundaries. Hmmm
We can also experience a lot of other emotions as anger and even rage, when they are suppressed and intensified.
Shame and Guilt
Untangling Guilt from Shame can be complicated because we have our own unique feelings attached to these words. The most important thing to remember is that these feelings can learn and strengthen our ethics and sense of personal honor.
When we listen to them, guilt and shame are simply our internal guidance system as to how we want to treat others.
I often see Shame experienced by people who have suffered at the hands of another and in these circumstances, the odds are … guess what? The odds are that it’s not your feeling! Click here for a story that demonstrates how this can happen.
Frustration
The message of frustration is so simple I can’t believe how often I haven’t seen it. This is what we feel when what we are doing IS NOT WORKING and we keep doing it anyway! If it’s not working, change it. If that change doesn’t work, thinkagain and change again.
Frustration builds up when we continue doing the same thing that isn’t working anyway. Duh!
The very definition of frustration is to keep doing the same thing over and over again, when it’s not working and expecting a different result. Sounds kind of silly when put like that doesn’t it? It’s also the definition of insanity…
Sadness
Sadness can sometimes be a part of grief or depression, but when we allow pure sadness to flow, it’s a wonderful part of our Inner Guidance System that helps us to let go of something we are about to lose.
Part of the sadness process is the expansive yumminess involved in coming out the other side into what IS working and what WILL work for our peace of mind and happiness.
Like all the other emotions that we would have called ‘negative’ in the past, the only thing “wrong” with sadness is getting stuck in it and missing that wonderful expansiveness that comes with it as we find the thing/s that DO work for us.
When we ignore or bury sadness, it intensifies into despair and a loss of heart and/or hope – even depression.
There’s some underlying physical causes that can be involved in a never ending loop of sadness. So, even if you think you have good cause to be sad, if it’s been happening for a long time, then please contact me. There’s some physical causes of depression that can have people stuck in that never ending loop.
Grief
In our society we do grief with so little understanding, that reams of work has been written about anger being part of the grief process – when in fact, anger is what happens when grief is suppressed and it doesn’t need to be part of the process at all.
Grief is about a loss or death that has already happened and the key message of grief is about feeling, exploring, thinking about and finding the expansive understanding of what you believe in – what you KNOW, all the way to your bones.
An unknown author wrote “Grief is really just love. It’s all the love you want to give but cannot. All of that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go.”
So where can that love flow?
What old griefs did we bury because we didn’t get to express our grief that is intensifying everything that we’re feeling now?
And in our beautiful connection that helps us to understand others, as we experience our own grief, whose else’s is it? And what do we need to know or do for or about them too?
Grief is not always about the death of a loved one. It can be the loss of something else. For example, it can be a relationship or a job, or a way of life (even when the change is positive and we’re looking forward to it.)
When we ignore grief or bury it, it intensifies into anger and even rage.
Depression
Depression is the stop sign of the soul. Say it again. “Depression is the stop sign of the soul.” Stop here, go no further, you are not following your Inner Guidance system – you are going the wrong way!
Depression often follows when we bury or suppress our feelings – ALL our feelings not just the emotions. Again, we haven’t been using our Inner Guidance system as it was designed to be used.
Depression is actually an ingenious survival mechanism when we are so “off our path” that our mind/body/spirit has no choice but to stop us from moving forward. It takes over and consumes us when what we are doing and where we are going in our life isn’t what we really want, when something that we are doing in our life does not reflect who we really are.
In fact, we can consider the loss of energy that is depression, as our emergency break.
The intensification of depression when masked or ignored and buried is loss of self; loss of life’s purpose; physical illness; suicidal urges.
In my experience there are a lot of buried feelings involved by the time we hit depression. Some of the messages are still important, some not.
Using the gentle power of Reiki to support people to find their own expansive understanding of their feelings, specially when they’re in depression, is a very empowering process. No matter what our opinions or experiences of anti-depressants, if a client wants to come off anti-depressants, they must, must MUST have the support of their doctor to come off them and the process should take place over a long period of time – a VERY long period of time.
One of my most successful cases had been medicated for over twenty years and came off them slowly over nearly two years – slowly unfolding the understanding that she needed to release the effects of the past and allowing her hormonal and feel good brain chemicals to re-balance at the same time.
Be aware that there are some powerful physical causes of depression too, that can affect our bodies and make it difficult, if not impossible, to attend to the emotional or situational causes of depression. Click here for more information on the physical causes of depression that I wrote for The Happiness program.
Suicidal urges
Suicidal urges are a whopping alarm bell that creates an urgency for people to get back on track. They are simply a culmination of a whole heap of suppressed, intense, maybe even explosively painful feelings from an Inner Guidance system that is either not working or being squashed.
Something we are doing in our lives – some way of living our life, some way of thinking, some belief – something – has us in urgent danger.
The feeling of pressure that we have, the feeling that we might explode from the pain of it all, is just the pressure of keeping the feelings buried and the messages are designed to save our lives when we allow the flow of understanding. Experiencing these thoughts simply means that we haven’t known how to follow our Inner Guidance system to find our way.
Like the stuck and buried feelings that intensify and cause that urgency for change, suicidal urges can be experienced in our connection to others when there is something to know or do, for or about them. And THAT explains how sometimes there are a rash of suicides in an area.
Urgency aside, the solution is the same – the more authentic we are, the more Present we become. The more Present we become, the more easily an expansive understanding flows. The more our understanding flows, the more we “see” and understand and Release from the past and the better we feel. The more we Release from the past, the easier it is to be Present and understand what’s happening now. It’s a lovely circular escalation of feeling more and more good, more and more happy, more and more joyful, more and more excited about what life can bring to us.
And the gentle power of Reiki can support that process perfectly.
Make sure that people talk to their doctors about suicidal urges – these thoughts can be the side effect of some medications. The doctor needs to know so that they can explore a change of medication. Once you’ve attended to your responsibility (send them urgently to a medical doctor – once in an urgent situation, I drove someone there myself), you intuit and draw your symbols, put your hands on and allow the energy to flow, turning the outcome over to God and them.
When we work with people with big issues like suicidal urges and depression, it’s important that we have a clear knowing of what we believe in. If these feelings frighten us, then we should figure out what to know or do about THAT too. We can do some Reiki 2 work on ourselves to support ourselves to figure this out.
Up Next:
You can shake that booty and skip on to the next lesson joyfully – or wait for your email. 🙂
Click here for some simple anatomy
Refresh the previous Lesson
Click here for How emotions physically affect the body