| It would be useful to speak in more detail about the role of emotional work in terms of becoming spiritually awakened. Often spiritual work and emotional work are not linked together and have traditionally been separate fields of endeavor. It is important to know that there is a strong need for understanding of emotional conflicts when one is on a spiritual path. We speak of consciousness often in the spiritual world and expanding awareness or consciousness as a goal. But what does that mean in day-to-day life? In the modern western culture particularly the childhood has become more like a training ground for forgetting who you really are and learning to meet other people's needs or to do what others want you to do. The main goal of many traditional institutions appears to support a world view where there is not really room for creative individuality, but fitting in and being trained to put up with unsustainable lifestyles appears to be the main function. The way a person is convinced that their own internal desires, drives and guidance are wrong is through fear. We are taught that there is much to be afraid of in the world. We are also afraid of our parents' disapproval, which they do not fail to hold back when we act in a way that displeases them. Very rarely do we get positive affirmation for asserting our own desires and needs and so we learn to sublimate our desires, our creativity, our joy and our love. The only way to do this is to energetically shut down our awareness of those aspects of ourselves. We effectively push them into sub-consciousness or unconsciousness. By doing this we shrink our conscious awareness as more and more of our true self is pushed into the unconscious realm. We indeed forget who we are. All of that is still alive in us but it is below the level of our conscious awareness. Just the very fact of having to do this causes us to experience rage. When so little of our true selves is available to our conscious mind, it is very difficult for us to experience the deep spiritual connection. That is because we experience these deep spiritual connections through our hearts, through our deepest energetic selves, and that is the very part that we have pushed into unconsciousness. And so the work of becoming more and more conscious includes processing old emotional wounds, old fears and recurring rage and anger at what we do to ourselves every day. It is important to be aware of the fact that we are the ones repressing our true selves. Even though it is a largely unconscious process in the beginning, it is still us doing it to ourselves. The process of growing up in fear of expressing our true selves has caused us to forget how it feels to be truly connected and all that is left is the fear of people's reactions to our self-expression. So our greatest fear, in reality, is of our own beauty, light, love and creativity. Of course this is a simplistic statement, but, nevertheless, it is also true. We must keep in mind that our goal is to always deepen our connection with our deepest, truest selves, which is of course, Source Energy or God. Which means that the reason that we do emotional work is to deepen our connection. Simply doing emotional work without spiritual practice will not take us where we want to go. It will help and make us feel better to a certain degree, but our fullest and most complete expression of ourselves can only happen when we actively pursue our connection with God. |
