by Cenk Matalon from Vancouver, Canada
Friends, here’s the gist of what I’ve come to understand through experience:
We all have blockages (trauma, suppressed feelings, trapped energies) holding us from deeper and deeper freedom, peace, and joy in life. These are inevitable and are a totally natural part of living.
The way we deal with these depend on our capacity to understand how the mind-body phenomenon works. Guidance from loved ones who’ve been there/ done that can be invaluable so can the guidance of a therapist/ teacher/ guru.
Daily events bring things up, yet simple casual conversation with a friend about our problems can only provide simple casual solutions that won’t take us too deep.
Working with emotions and maintaining body awareness is a must for deep emotional healing. The depth of this work correlates directly with how much capacity we have for non-reactive witnessing (equanimity).
A blockage is life energy trapped (unconsciously suppressed) due to us not knowing how to contain it/ respond to it/ work with it when the event took place. If not processed naturally, this causes all kinds of psychological and physiological problems/ imbalances.
During therapy/ purification meditation, what was once too large/ too painful to contain is brought up to the person’s awareness to be fully felt. We literally become the feeling/ emotion for it to fully unfold and shower us with the totality of its gifts.
Through this process the event’s pain/ shock is lived through and learned from, leaving us a lot more capable of dealing with similar situations when they arise again in life. Frozen past becomes a part of our fluid present.
In a strange and beautiful way the body contains our emotional blockages. Deep stimulation of the body through yoga poses can be used to bring up emotions and related thoughts, feelings for processing using breath, body awareness, and witnessing.
In this way slow yoga with deep stretches, therapy including emotional intelligence and body awareness, and meditation can all be used together for deep, effective work on ourselves providing us with their unique and crucial gifts.
When we fully live, we fully feel and we fully learn. Then our actions in the world are more aligned with our deepest insights and we simply know we are doing our best.. compassion starts to flow more and more effortlessly, blaming others drops on its own, responsibility and purpose awaken along with spontaneous, creative strategies for dealing with whatever comes our way.
True creativity, flexibility, wisdom and compassion blossom and our lives become a Divine Celebration regardless of outer circumstances. Dualities start to fall away, ancient teachings become a living reality at least occasionally.
Getting somewhere no matter where we are headed (including becoming enlightened) becomes less important than wanting to live this moment fully with an open heart.
May we all keep on deepening on this journey towards becoming fully human.
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