By Gayle North, Positive Change Coach
When you heal your past, your ability to accept and even delight in your present moment experience is the gift you enjoy as a reward for doing your clearing work. If you thought there was nothing you could do to get relief from memories that cause you pain every time they come to mind, read on.
Memories are ”packaged” in the subconscious with all the sights, sounds, feelings, tastes and smells associated with the original incident. This is why certain smells or music can transport you back to another time and place. You suddenly remember what you saw, felt and heard – and you are essentially there again in your mind. The smell or the music opened up the whole “packaged” memory.
You can use this phenomenon to your advantage. When you pay attention to an unpleasant feeling in your body – a sinking feeling in your stomach or tightness in your chest for instance, without attempting to escape from it, you can let the feeling lead you to a healing experience. Those feelings are a sign that something is ready to be noticed and cleared.
Feelings are not just an “idea” in the brain. They are chemically produced body sensations. Your thought or re-membrance of an event produces feelings almost instantaneously.
Think of your feelings as messengers letting you know that something needs to be healed or cleared up. When you begin to explore the physical sensations with curiosity accepting all of your feelings without needing to judge them as “good” or “bad”, you allow them to fulfill their purpose.
To heal or “clear” the emotional blocks, a certain level of awareness is required. Many people avoid awareness by habitually reaching out for their favorite medicine (chocolate, shopping, cigarettes, or alcohol). These and similar options are only substitutes for the authentic peace and joy they seek. These destructive habits help you to by-pass your emotional/mental clearing work and also keep you stuck in the suffering of being blocked from your potential.
You will find it easier to leave your compulsive behaviors behind once you dissolve the self-criticism and feelings of rejection, guilt and shame related to painful past experiences.
You can use either your behaviors or your feelings as the starting point for healing. Either way, the clearing process can be comparatively painless using a number of techniques that didn’t even exist twenty years ago.
When you are ready to explore the idea of releasing yourself from your unwanted emotional or behavioral patterns for good, you will find assistance from a competent coach or counselor useful. Find someone who can facilitate your process with an effective combination of proven empowerment techniques. A skillful practitioner can help you to get results easier and faster than you may have thought possible.
From then on and for the rest of your life, it will feel almost as if the original experience happened to someone else – not you – because you don’t feel the discomfort anymore when you think about it. With the old automatic program effectively cleared from your deeper mind, you can be free from the self-sabotage of the past.
Hypnosis and related empowerment techniques can then help you replace the old programs with new ones that you choose for yourself. You will then be free to respond in a way that supports you to Living Your Best Life rather than repeating old robotic responses.