I thought I’d
like to write about what emotional balance means to me. As I mentioned in an earlier post Feelings Are There To Be Felt, I haven’t quite
got emotions “worked
out”. But I’ve needed to focus
on mine lots so I reckon I should
really be an expert by now.
Ha.
In my younger
days I was very withheld emotionally. No-one knew what I thought, or how I felt. I
didn’t know how I felt. At school I was very quiet and awkward, and
didn’t connect much. One time a group
of kids made a list of everyone in the class, with a brief description, to submit to the school
magazine. For me they put “Silent Brain”. I misread this and thought it said “Silent Drain”—I was extremely upset!
(inside) (It didn’t make the magazine.)
The only time I
felt love was for the cat. I remember when I had my first boyfriend for 9 months when I was
18, I didn’t feel anything
about him. I knew I liked him, I suppose, but I was totally out of touch with any
feelings of love or affection. He quite freely
expressed love for me,
but I was just an emotionless blob. The poor guy! I did feel upset after
he broke up with
me (after first finishing my exams), so I must have felt something.
I usually had
one or two “best friends” at any time, but no more boyfriends, and generally the trend of not being able to
connect, and feeling isolated, strange and different
continued until I found the alternative healing world just before my 33rd birthday (in 1986). Desperation drove me
to it—something was not right and I knew that
at the rate I was going I would NEVER be happy.
Emotions and Connection
I started having
rebirthing sessions, where you use breathing to allow feelings you didn’t know you had flow through you. These
days the process is often called breathwork or
conscious connected breathing, to avoid connotations of people trying to
re-live their birth (which I
didn’t ever—not in an obvious
way, anyway). I also started
doing
workshops that removed blocks
to feeling connected
to others, and between the two things,
I began to connect with other people
really well.
I started noticing and valuing
my emotions… Ah Hah! Here comes an EMOTION! I’m gonna let myself feel ANGRY! Or SAD! And I’m also
going to ASSERT MYSELF, because I
CAN!
This lead to a phase I think many people might go through (I read in a
book somewhere that they do,
anyway). That is… after learning to let some (or lots of) emotions express, we may go overboard with them for a while, before
coming into balance.
So at times I would stomp
around being angry,
or be very quick to yell at the driver
who had done me wrong on the
roads. From rebirthing I knew how to breathe through emotional episodes, so the emotion passes through pretty quickly
and it doesn’t become a wallowing session,
and you are left feeling
light and cleansed.
I’m so grateful I have that
skill up my sleeve, and I have used it lots. But I didn’t always do it… sometimes
I preferred to be emotional.
Astrology
Years later,
well into my 40s, I found myself
turning to astrology for understanding. I was living in a flat by myself, was not
working much, had little money, and had become
isolated again (except when I did see someone occasionally, I connected
with them really well, heh heh). I
should say here that I did some really good, creative, performance-type work in this period… it was more that I was
socially isolated. And I was also
very happy much of the time—but I knew there was more, and I had got to the point
where I was feeling
that being over-emotional wasn’t serving me.
I came across
Jan Spiller’s books ‘Astrology For The Soul’ and ‘Spiritual Astrology’. What amazing books!
I discovered that being over-emotional would indeed be my issue,
and they clearly
described how to deal
with all this in a way that made sense to
me.
This totally changed things
around for me—I had
the books out from the library and I
kept renewing
them and reading
them again and again. Probably
I had been so cut off from my emotions when I was young because
my emotions were so strong that I was scared to feel them.
In these books,
Jan discusses our past lives, and the path we are embarking on in this life to bring things into balance. For
example, according to this, I had lots of past lives being at home and sheltered from the big, wide world in some
way. My joy in this life would be to
get out into the world, and I would be successful when I did, but my inclination might be to go with my past life pattern
of staying at home. Also, people with this
pattern tend to be over-emotional… “These folks can be so overrun by their emotions
that they can’t think, they can’t function, and they don’t know why.”
She also
describes how things can look when we have got to the point of really integrating the energies and are functioning well. Something we can look forward to when
we have got things together. For my pattern
it reads, in part:
You sense that
your emotional fiber is actually not personal at all but rather your link with the universe. As you listen to your
emotional body, and allow it to be expressed
honestly and naturally, without censorship, in whatever environment you find yourself, you restore a healthy emotional balance for those around you.
Thus, giving your own feelings a
voice, expressing the subtle emotional undercurrents you sense going on around you, clears the emotional atmosphere
for everyone involved.
Sounds good!
Today I think
I’ve got the flow of emotions thing working pretty well. I can let myself feel them without being run by them. I’m still
avoiding some of them though, which I know because
I have been overeating over the long, cold winter we have just had here in Melbourne, with disastrous results for my
waistline. But these days I know I feel love for people and myself and
everything, and Frank and I freely say we love each other.
PS - for any astrology buffs
out there, I have Mars in Cancer,
the moon’s North
Node in
the 10th house and my pre-natal
lunar eclipse in Leo
in the 4th.
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