Reflections - Trust the decent

“The full experience of a negative emotion is the funeral pyre of that emotion” – Stanislav Grof

I’ve experienced the truth of this powerful sentence many times, i.e. being with the healing power of deep diving into the unconscious, of sitting in the fire of some shadow hiding and suppressing a negative emotion and some old fear lurking deep within the many layers of my psyche. And if it’s there, it is also in the psychophysical body and the energetic reality of my being. We know that the unconscious governs to a large degree our lives, therefore getting to these layers is a prerequisite when seeking holistic wholeness and expansion of our consciousness. 

Here are a few examples from my own life.

In the mid 90-ties I did several Holotropic Breath Work sessions with a psychiatrist in Finland. They were all extraordinarily powerful and life-changing. In one of them I re-lived a near drowning experience I had had at the age of 4 which then led me in the same session to experience my own birth, getting in touch with the panic and pain of pushing through the birth channel, the all-encompassing experience of leaving the safety of the womb. During the session my body went into total contraction, excruciating pain, breathing became very shallow and it felt like I was breathing like a fish with gilds. Somewhere in the midst of the pain my consciousness, it’s witnessing awareness, was present with what I was doing, what I had consented to and the willingness to go on this inner journey into the depths of my psyche. I knew I was lying on a mattress, hearing powerful music, hyper-ventilating to help open the portals, which are like ventilation valves between the conscious, sub-conscious and un-conscious layers – I felt the safety of the hand of my partner in crime on my solar plexus and heard the voice of the psychiatrist guiding the process. Even though the pain was unbelievably strong a part of me just said “go with it, go deeper”.  As I had the courage to do so, my loving witnessing presence held me and my body started releasing enormous amounts of energy. That day I incarnated a bit more into my being, more energy of my greater self became available.

The “cloud nine”, the sense of release I drifted into after these sessions lasted for months and was beautiful, elevated and uplifting. Somewhat to my surprise worry had vanished – I mean vanished forever. That was the end of WORRY, its funeral pyre!

Another healing journey took me deeper. This came as part of a yearlong Cellular Energetic Healing training I did some years ago in Scotland. A training which teaches the Barbara Brennan concepts of defences mechanisms we all have. We develop these defences in our early childhood and take in, absorb traumas defending ourselves against whatever life throws at us before we can really have a conscious understanding about much anything. The first seven years of our lives we are like wet sponges, our senses absorbing everything directly into our psychophysical and energetic make-up.

As part of the training we had to do our own psycho-therapy and I had fortunately found a therapist/healer who worked also directly on the energetic level. In one session, in which I had started to talk about my mother, I got in touch with pain in my lower belly and lower back. My therapist invited me to go deeper into the pain and I plunged into a semi-altered state where I experienced myself as just an embryo in my mother’s tummy. There was so much fear in this state, my consciousness wanted to leave, i.e. disassociate and go numb, but the therapist kept repeating, her eyes locked on me: “stay with it Micaela, don’t leave your body”. For what seemed like a long time I sat there wiggling my legs to help stay with it and just experiencing the pain. The fear started releasing from my kidneys, lower back and legs. I went into a state of panic and close to passing out, but the therapist held her gaze and the safety of the space. Cold sweat was running all over the body as the fear let go. Afterwards I could hardly walk, I was so exhausted. The nervous system took days to re-calibrate itself to a new more expanded presence of my energy. Again, I had incarnated more, my tendency to go numb at any threat released and FEAR had at least a small funeral pyre. Not sure if it’s all gone.

When my mother was pregnant with me she had serious lower back problems and needed surgery just after I was born. She had been through a difficult time, a lot of emotional upheaval and distress, all of which the little embryo which was to become me absorbed already in the womb. Now-a-days we have thankfully a much greater understanding of how the pre-birth and early childhood environments affect us.

More recently another suppressed negative emotion knocked on the door of my conscious awareness. A deep grief I had tucked away 40 years ago made itself known and demanded attention. In my 20ties my primary family spiralled into years of crisis which dissolved and destroyed the family as a unit of safety and care. At the time I went into survival mode, caring for my then suicidal and depressed mother and my 9 years younger little sister. There was no opportunity, nor awareness by those around me at the time to help process the grief we all probably plunged into, thus the grief got relegated into my unconscious and my shadow and has lived a life of its own, to some extent directing life-events ever since. What you hide from yourself will eventually try and make itself known to you through other people or life-events; we repeat unresolved negative emotions and patterns in order to heal them by attracting similar experience over and over again. They come disguised through what we attract and or repulse in our lives.

When trauma occurs, something happens which we are unable to digest, the energy around this becomes frozen in space and time. In this sense every trauma has a cosmic address. But life moves on and the creativity of life within the pattern tries to the best of its ability to deal with whatever was going on. Yet part of the energy got frozen and now clearly, I got the opportunity 40 years later to unfreeze this part.

Here it was! A protected shield broke and a dam of tears burst open. This shield had protected my sacral center, solar plexus and heart centre all these years. I could no longer avoid or push it away. Instead I opened up to it, allowed it and grieved for months and months, to the extent that I had tears in my eyes upon waking up in the morning before a conscious thought could enter. At the time it felt like an endless river of tears, a quiet emptying of the accumulated grief but eventually I started feeling better and the heavy burden lifted.

At the time I needed a sick-note from a doctor in order to allow the process to unfold in its own timing. I was a bit nervous going to the National Health Service, thinking how do I explain to a young doctor that I am grieving something which happened 40 years ago? But I was lucky and met an understanding doctor, not until the third visit - this process did take time - did he offer to prescribe some anti-depressants, but I stayed resolute and said “no thank you, I’m just grieving, I’m not depressed; it will pass”. And it did, but not until I had emptied myself fully and seen the subtle workings this shadow of grief had caused in my life. Full awareness needed to come in together with reconciliation and forgiveness. In the end a beautiful process really, although painful at the beginning when I just needed to stay with it, feeling the feelings without trying to explain them too much.  

I had carried these frozen unresolved energies in my sacral centre, solar plexus, my heart, lymphatic system, shoulders and neck. During the process, in addition to welling tears, my lymph’s especially under my armpits released energy which came out as terrible rashes and my lungs and lymph’s produced so much mucus, so I was literally spitting out my grief. I had pain in my shoulders and my heart was aching. Yet, by the end of it I felt so much lighter, my whole rib-cage had expanded, my shoulders moved back a bit and my solar plexus felt softer. My posture had changed. The heart centre opened more, melted into a greater understanding and the throat centre was able to express more. The grieving process eventually took me to a place of greater TRUTH and AUTHENTICITY in myself. Again I had re-claimed a part of myself, a part that got lost many moons ago.

Prior to this grief process I had recognized an ancestral pattern which I could call the “absent father” and I had prayed with my soul to help me do my bit of releasing this pattern as I did not want it to pass on to my son. He grew up without his father, my father left our family, his father died when my father was only 2 and the men before that were mostly in the military; therefore likely not very present with their families either. So I knew I was dealing with a pattern that was unresolved in the family line and inherited in the epigenetic markers of our genes and healing it would bring ripple effects throughout the family, those who have been and those yet to come.

In hindsight all happened in “perfect timing”, pushed by the impending death of my father, my wish to clear the pattern and my son’s wish to create a family. A graceful reconciliation with my father unfolded, I finally had context, could understand his life more and the unknown ghost in the field lifted. My heart opened in compassion towards all involved. Since then my father has passed away and my son and his partner have welcomed their beautiful daughter into their lives. All is well!

From my 30 years of conscious inner spiritual work I know that my soul transmutes and purifies larger fields and that everything which shows up in my life is my own karmic appearances, soul-contracts, old habits of entangled ancestral fields of many lifetimes, therefore mine to deal with in this present time. Only that which is brought into awareness can be healed and as the esoteric philosophy postulates “all illness and disease (not at ease) is inhibition of soul life”. When the soul is able to fully incarnate into all corners of my Universe health, wholeness, balance, harmony and peace can arise. Who wouldn’t want this! Yet the journey there takes us through the shadow-land of ourselves, our ancestors and fields of energy our soul has gathered and chosen to work with.

We have to recognize the quantitative and the qualitative, the physical and the psychic and embrace both of these two sides of our reality simultaneously. Work with the inner and the outer, physics and psyche, matter and mind – all complementary aspects of the same reality.

My advice though is not to do this kind of work alone, unless you are hundred percent sure you can stay with your witnessing awareness and your soul. Most of us need a safe holding place to go to these layers of our being, be it a good therapist/healer or a safe group setting. It is good to have a respect and an honouring of the defences we keep as they were life-saving at the time we took them on and we will not let them go until there is actually a readiness to do so.