Fear and doubt are old friends of mine. I am feeling the fear that I am in more these days by practicing the Presence Process. According to Michael Brown, fear, anger or sadness/ grief are the three emotional charges that we carry and get triggered in us on a day to day basis. If you have been like me and had several very dangerous accidents fear also tends to get embedded in your tissues. I woke up and drove my car to work one day and the accident happened then, so waking up and getting moving is a big trigger for me. The fear is not always conscious but I am beginning to realise it is there with a slow hum underneath the surface. I fear being invaded or broken into by something or someone more powerful because in the car that is what happened, the front engine came into the car and pieces of it went into my legs and then my chest was crushed on the steering wheel, my lung punctured with a broken rib and my arm cut, my teeth forced out and my tongue slashed right through the middle. The later accident also involved a serious head injury.
Today I am going to spend some time with the fear. I am working to practice unconditional presence for myself. It is something Michael talks about a lot in his book The Presence Process. I am not going to feed the fear any more fuel but just talk lovingly to my child and inner self about it. I am also very scared today due to waiting news about the contract for sale in my property. I am feeling guilt for stuffing the owner around but the agent invited this by pushing me and I got triggered then and didn’t hold my ground and this week I have had to deal with anger that has triggered about other times I got forced or pushed by authorities or bullies in the past. I am learning some major lessons from this.
I look back now and see how I got captured for years by unconscious feelings of anger, fear or sadness not really knowing that was happening. It was just a gluggy soup of anxiety and depression with a powerful change and mix of years and years of unintegrated feelings inside.
Today I am growing aware that this emotional charge is what lives inside us. It is what causes PTSD and Complex PTSD. We cannot drug it away, we cannot run it away, we cannot read it away (though reading things that help us and encourage us to face and feel the charge DO help!), we cannot get someone else to give us enough love to love it away. Only we can do that for us.
How do we do it? By simply being present with ourselves! By listening into our hearts and our feelings and releasing them. By listening in to other people’s hearts in presence….. to all the things they are not saying under their reactions to us which may have more to do with the unhealed charged of their own fear, sadness and anger they are often not willing to face (most especially if we are getting a hard time for feeling ours). Once we have faced our own we WILL feel it.
Once we allow the fear, the anger and the sadness and see them not as enemies but as friends, as guests in Rumi’s words that have taken residence in the room of our bodies and our hearts. We can return to all the love, purity and innocence as well as the joy of who we really are and what we feel inside letting go of the shame and the blame of not accepting and understanding the old powerful charges inside. We will get felt insights into our past if we look deeply enough and find the answers for our present lives as to why we were triggered or felt the way we do. From this place we can learn to react less and less and respond more lovingly to ourselves and others, no longer allowing unintegrated fear, anger and sadness to keep affecting us and others in negative limiting ways.
Emerging From The Dark Night 