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Sunday, July 24, 2022

Emotional Balance — By Robin Birch, Let’s Live Forever

 

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

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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