When doing Shadow Work, what is better? To sit with the emotion or ask questions?
Let’s explore the possibilities they each give.
When we sit with our emotions, we get to know how each of them truly makes us feel, how they begin, how to calm each of them down or balance them and how we can express the feelings that arise. It helps us understand the emotion itself and how it may affect us. We can release some of the attachment from the emotion and connect with the energy that contains each of them to better understand our surroundings and the people in it.
When we ask questions, we can find the root of each thing that makes us feel this or that emotion. We often learn more in the process of answering questions than what we can learn from the answer itself. When we keep asking why? Some way or another we will find the root of each trauma and remember who we were before all the indoctrination. It opens the pandora box into another reality, a reality that is shared and not separate. We can better understand our actions, reactions and insecurities, the behaviors of others and the reason of why certain things happened. We can find our destiny and reason to be, and we can help others do the same.
Even though reality is shared, we all perceive reality in our own unique way. The color blue looks different to all of us, even if we all know its blue. For a born blind person, blue is a smell, a sound or a specific sensation in the skin, for some male’s blue is just blue and for some women blue is turquoise, baby blue, navy blue, cobalt, cerulean, deep blue or any other blue like color. So, you see, reality is what we make of it. Is how our senses perceive the world around us but it its not what is truly there, so who knows what blue is or truly looks like? Well, nobody and all, opposites that are part of the same singularity. We all know what it means to us, but we would never truly know what it looks for others, what it really is or if blue even sees itself as blue (I know with color is hard to think that it may have perception of any kind but if everything that exist is energy, who’s to say that in blue "reality", blue cannot perceive its own energy?. This is the reason why asking questions is so important. Because our reality, even though is shared, it is still unique. We are all opposites of the same singularity. Meaning we all have the ability to see the world from our own perspective and from there understand our opposites as part of ourselves, but we cannot understand ourselves if we only see the world thru our opposites perspectives and this is exactly how the world is doing it and it has been like that for a long time now. We try to experience the world from the outside; what others think of me, what others think I should do, what society expects me to do, how my family wants me to be, what I have been teached, what and how others make me feel, and so on. This only creates more and more traumas in our lives. Trauma is everything and all that makes us split our consciousness in 2 parts: 1. who we are and what we need and desire / 2. what I must do, be and become so others love me or accept me. This is also part of the pressure society puts on us; the need to be someone "liked" by all. And we may know this is impossible and you may say you don’t care about what society says or expects but you get “angry” or “frustrated” when your anty and uncle ask you “when are you going to finally get pregnant or married” because, even if you don’t care what they think, you still get offended that they dare to meddle in your intimacy, so we can agree that even if we “don’t care” we are still affected by what society does and think. If we only deal with the emotion but forget to release the why’s, then every single time someone else ask or does or whatever, we will have the same reaction over and over and wonder why your "spiritual self", that has done so much and have sit for hours with each emotion, is not "working" of you feel like you are failing or there is no progress in your journey. When we ask ourselves why after why, we can release the attachment not only to the emotion but to the situations in particular, how or why it makes you feel the way it does, better understand the people who were part of each situation and why they reacted how they did or did whatever they did, you can truly understand what made you act or respond the way you did too, we can create different scenarios to better prepare ourselves for the future, we can truly let go of the resentment we attached to each emotion and learn to experience the emotion itself for what it is and we can clear our minds. We can even change the emotion itself and sometimes we can also change the experience even if they are part of our past, because after understanding the reasons behind our actions we can better understand the reasons behind the actions of others. Many of the repetitive thoughts that we have are from conversations we are still trying to figure out or arguments we are still trying to win. The others are from things we want, need, fear, hope but If we take a good look to those repetitive thoughts how many of them are happening at the present moment? Many think of what they are doing at the moment and their subconscious mind wonders to something that happened who knows when, even if the thought remains in the present. That’s a perfect moment to ask why? The probabilities are that you have an attachment to whatever is happening at the moment from a previous experience that may seem on the surface like it has nothing to do with the moment but for some reason you start thinking about that thing or situation, because the emotion takes you there no matter what, this is what clouds our senses and judgement and makes it so our reality is the only one we can perceive. When we release, we can accept and integrate our true self; with hindsight we see that the reactivity stops. This is because we are energy and even if we don’t know it or understand it, it has an effect on us all the time. Emotions are energy too and as such, you can be feeling all happy and excited and someone stands near you and says “I don’t like the color blue” and all of the sudden you feel attacked because you are wearing blue or you like blue, and how dare they say you look bad or you don't know anything. Who are they to say that? But did they actually say that? Or did you feel attacked because your mom use to criticized everything you wore, or you had an mean ex that use to hate the color blue, or you found out your best friend in bed with you boyfriend and they were only wearing blue socks...for whatever reason, it can be anything, the thing is you are reacting from your own perspective and whatever emotions you have attached to them are not the reality that its shared. You have all the right to feel how you feel about the color blue, but can you really blame others for not relating? Should others be obligated to live by your reality and not theirs? Or should we all understand that our individual reality is not the same we share, and take shared reality with its own rules and individual reality with a whole different set of rules; and since we live in both, we need to learn from the two and experience both in their own beauty, learn from them and understand them. The person who said “I don’t like blue” could be referring to a blue car that went by, or maybe they had their own bad experience too attached to the color. When we ask questions we can see the world from a 3rd perspective; the shared reality, which in turns helps us detached ourselves from the emotion, see the situation from a more objective perspective so we can then understand, release and get to know the person YOU are without what this or that situation created in you and all the emotional baggage that you carry without knowing.
There is a real need to understand that no matter our age, we have been condition by our environment and experiences to be and act the way we do (unless you are a new born); therefore to ask ourselves “who am I?” and why? Is one of the most important questions we could ask ourselves.
How would you answer that? With your name? profession? Hobbies? Interest? Passions? Traits? Thoughts? Personality? What of those things really describe who you truly are and not who you think you are, do you know?
To sit with the emotions is a helpful tool and as you sit with them, and any other time, don’t forget to always, ask why?
May this help someone
Blessed be,
Diana Chiques / Alchemist Eyes
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