The article title is not advice for inclement
weather, but for times when life brings inner storms into our experience. It’s
advice to keep in mind for good reason.
A character in the PBS program “Call the Midwife”
was a former prisoner of war and was talking with a midwife who’d been put into
an internment camp when she was nine years old and had to watch her mother and
sister die gradually of various abuses and starvation. He realized the midwife
was harboring ghosts of her past in her present, and told her that his mother
always opened the front and back doors of their home when it stormed. The
reasoning she’d given him when he was a child was that this way, any misery
from the storm couldn’t find a home there. It would blow through.
This made me think of how much debris from prior
and current negative emotional experiences we hold onto, mostly because we
aren’t taught to open both “doors” so the debris doesn’t find a home inside of
us, by others who also never learned this or never figured it out for
themselves. Because of this, we tend to let these negative- or
traumatic-emotion squatters take up residence within us. We harbor them like
the criminals they are. We feed them as though they are paying visitors rather
than the intruders they are on our joy and peace. We’re the ones who pay for
letting them stay.
Most of us are familiar with the quote “This too
shall pass,” but we usually consider this to mean the experience will end
eventually. We can enhance this and decide to let it also mean we are to allow
our negative attachment to the experience pass through us as well. Otherwise,
the experience doesn’t really end for us, does it? We keep it alive. We repeat
the story of it to ourselves and others, perhaps over and over. We dredge it up
or it rises to the surface whenever we’re triggered in a particular way, as
though a thought we have rushes to a filing system to call up supporting
evidence for why we have a right to feel as we do, when in fact, what it means is
that there is a wound that needs to be healed.
How we treat ourselves as a result is we don’t
love and approve of ourselves as fully as we ought to. We feed low self-esteem
or false arrogance and or behaviors that don’t serve us or bring us joy or peace
or fulfillment. We feel less, so expect less. We don’t feel whole. We wear our
past like a garment—we brush our teeth with it—rather than embrace our present
and anticipate our future from a positive perspective, mindset, and state of
being.
How we treat others as a result is often with an
undercurrent of anger, frustration, or fear. We react to them more often,
perhaps, than we engage and make real connection with them. We don’t trust
ourselves, which we project onto them. We don’t trust them, because they
project ourselves back to us, whether we realize this and are discomforted by
the mirrored image or we don’t realize it and we blame them for how we continue
to feel, sometimes long after a negative experience has happened.
How we respond to life as a result is we don’t
trust life. We don’t believe or allow ourselves to believe that life loves and
supports us, and this mindset prevents life from fully reflecting love and
support back to us as our experience. We don’t or we hesitate to take
calculated risks and stretch ourselves so we can learn and grow and expand our
consciousness and our experiences. We hold ourselves back from our authenticity
and fulfillment.
In Dave Markowitz’s book Self-Care for the Self-Aware: A Guide for Highly Sensitive People,
Empaths, Intuitives, and Healers, which, by the way is an excellent book
for anyone who needs to deal with grief and negativity, he includes a technique
called the Keyhole. It’s a technique akin to the prisoner-of-war character’s
open-both-doors philosophy. Dave realized that when we find ourselves in the
midst of negative energy, or know we will, the energy will enter us
energetically (he explains why energy shields are not as effective as we’d like
or expect). That energy then gets trapped inside us.
This is not far-fetched. Just think of the last
time you were with someone negative and how you felt during and after that
interaction, possibly for a long while. Their negativity was absorbed and
carried around by you, unless you used an effective technique to prevent this
or to release it. Dave even states it’s important to not let the negative
energy touch the sides of the Keyhole—that is, touch you in any way. The
negative storm moves through your Keyhole without touching you, without any of
it glomming onto you. That’s an image that’s valuable.
In life, “Pain is inevitable; suffering is
optional.” So many around us practiced holding onto and allowing emotional
suffering to take them over that we couldn’t help but to absorb this as a
natural way to be and behave. We feel bad about ourselves or feel we’ll be
judged a bad person if we don’t do life this way, until of course, we learn
better.
Perhaps this image may assist you. Do this the
next time you’re triggered, or you might deliberately choose some emotional
energy you want to be rid of now. Imagine that emotional energy as a bit or
pile of debris on the floor in the hallway that connects to the front and back
doors of your home (your inner self). You go to the back door and open it. You
go to the front door and open it, standing aside. You invite the Great Breath
of Source to blow every bit of that debris out through the back door and up
into the ethers, which Source is delighted to do for you as an act of total
love and support for you. Every bit of that hallway is now sparkling clean and
fresh. Your ideal experience, and maybe it will take more than one such
cleaning, is for what once triggered you or held you back to be a mere memory
that no longer holds your attention for more than a brief second, if that.
I realize that this is good advice but not
necessarily easy to practice, especially if you’ve had a life-long habit of
taking negativity in and not knowing exactly how to deal with it. It’s
especially challenging to remember when you’re in the midst of an emotional
storm. But, just as it’s a good idea to remove clutter from your living and
work spaces, it’s a good idea to remove clutter from your inner home, so that
you can move around in there with the same ease and grace and constructive,
productive function you desire from your physical spaces. Such openness leads
to inspired ideas and an inspired life.
And when you know a storm is coming, or suddenly
find yourself in one, if you can remember to open both doors within your
energy, do so. If you don’t happen to remember this at the time, remember to
use a technique as soon as you can or it feels appropriate for you, to clear
any residual negative energy so that you return your inner home to its true
beauty, joy, and peace. It may take time, patience, and practice. But… It’s a
good practice, one you’ll appreciate.
Practice makes progress.
© Joyce Shafer
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