Let love flow
April 2013
by Chitra Jha
When you learn to experience and express your emotions, love will gush forth for love is who we are, says Chitra Jha
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Ever since I was a child, I realized that certain emotions must never be expressed, if one were to lead a ‘safe’ life. The culprit emotions carried the potential of getting one into trouble. Examples were exuberant shouting, uncontrolled laughter, loud crying, anger expressed through yelling, using swear words, answering back or hitting others, fears, and love. Yes, love too was something that wasn’t supposed to be expressed. Forget about loving others, even loving yourself was considered improper. This four-letter word was as taboo as the other more notorious one, and I remained completely unaware of both, until the hormones began to rage.
Who can ever suppress nature? Whether the adults approve of it or not, whether one is comfortable with it or not, the anatomy and the physiology begin to alter, and all the taboo words along with some resultant emotions begin to surface under the ‘naughty’ influence of some unseen hormones. I remember trying my best to act innocent by hiding my emotions, sometimes trying to hide parts of my body as well.
Whether one expresses one’s emotions or not, every person experiences some hues of all emotions, some time in their lives before they reach adulthood. Some of the emotions, especially the ones that find approval in society, are easily expressed and assimilated, but a large majority of them, especially the ones that must not even be named, lie buried under the surface.
The problem with this burial is that their ghosts keep raising their ugly heads at the most inopportune moments and to our horror, we ‘see’ ourselves feeling, saying, and doing the unthinkable!
Why does this happen and what does it do to us? This question does not have an answer that fits all situations and suits all individuals, but one common casualty of our suppressed emotions is Love. Yet, anyone who has ever suppressed any emotion and that includes all of us, cannot truly experience and express love, until the toxicity of suppressed emotions is cleansed.
Good, bad and ugly
Like most other people, I too was a master at suppressing my emotions, until one fine day in 2005, when I was shaken out of my reverie. My husband was down with UTI, which had become a recurrent phenomenon for some reason (now I know that he was ‘pissed off’ about certain stuff). A very dear friend called up to inquire about him and as usual, I started with a tirade of complaints. I was speaking louder than usual because I wanted my husband to hear all that I directly could not tell him. As I put the phone down, he said, “How much venom is stored inside you?” Those were magical words. They shook me up. Wasn’t it true that I was actually spewing out venom just a few minutes ago? Where did it originate? Where was I storing it?
These questions became my guiding light. For the first time, I acknowledged that the problem lay within me. I couldn’t love either him or myself until I cleared myself of all the poison that was stored inside me. And I was responsible for doing this dirty job.
It took me seven long years to empty myself completely. Various books, workshops, and healing modalities came my way and I used them in all earnestness. If I can sum up my nature in just one word, it would be ‘conscientious,’ and I conscientiously used all my time and energy in the past seven years, for cleansing myself of every bit of the dross that was collected over lifetimes. Today, I carry a clear understanding on this subject as love flows freely in my life, in all directions.
Pandora’s Box
As an ‘energy healer,’ who uses various modalities, I understand that in every form of ‘energy healing,’ one is primarily working with blocked or suppressed emotions. In a typical session, a therapist helps the client ‘access’ some suppressed emotions, which ride upon cellular memories. As the client touches his base emotions, and begins to express them, the therapist knows that the Pandora’s Box has been opened. This is when the therapist takes a deep breath, knowing fully well that the ‘process’ of healing has begun. In successive sessions more layers open up, more feelings come to the surface and more healing happens.
After working with hundreds of clients I had my ‘aha’ moment when I realized that what I, and my fellow therapists, are doing through ‘healing sessions,’ has already been factored in each individual’s life by Nature itself. Yes, life is the key to healing and loving.
Our life situations and circumstances are our 24 X 7 healing sessions, a long unending workshop. Exactly what happens in a therapy session occurs in our life in the here and now. Some situation is created, some of our buttons are pressed, and a few of our suppressed emotions come to the fore. The only difference is that it either takes us towards love, or towards further accumulation of venom.
The important difference lies in what we do after the feelings have come to the surface. If we are still in our old conditioning, we suppress most of these feelings, and continue to swallow our hurts, pride, tears, anger, envy, jealousy, fears, irritation, resistance, disgust, and rejection. Sometimes, we express our true feelings, and vitiate the environment around us. At other times, we get into the revenge and tit-for-tat mode, fanning our own negativity, and increasing it manifold. All these reactions, which are nothing but ‘learnt emotional responses,’ do nothing to help us, and we lose the golden opportunity offered to us by our own life to move towards love.
Three miracle tools
In therapy, a healer always ends a session by bringing in the miracle tools of forgiveness, gratitude, and love. When feelings come to the surface, the therapist encourages the client to name each emotion and completely feel it. Once the tide ebbs, the person is encouraged to be grateful to whoever has helped bring the emotion to the surface, forgive that person, and send love to him/her. The healer also encourages the client to forgive and love one’s self in gratefulness. These three tools never fail to bring about healing and ensure a flow of love. No wonder most clients end up loving their therapist, a wonderful side-effect of therapy.
Now, if we were to use the very same tools of gratitude, forgiveness, and love in our own life therapy sessions after the emotions have come to surface, we would feel the emotions fully, preferably after moving into solitude. After the feelings have been completely processed, we would begin feeling grateful to the person who triggered our feelings in the first place, knowing fully well that the person was only helping us with our emotional cleansing. We could also choose to forgive the person for causing pain in the process. Simultaneously, we could choose to forgive ourselves for carrying so many blocked emotions inside us and express gratitude for choosing to cleanse self.
When we do this over and over again (and life continues to offer us ample opportunities one after the other), it becomes an automatic process, and over a period of time we realize that there is far more love in our life. Gradually, we become less reactive and more responsive; and begin creating our own paradise on earth.
As I am currently in that phase, enjoying each moment to the fullest, it dawns on me that it was preposterous of me to ever doubt (or not know) that our Father-Mother-God, who has carefully thought over each and every aspect of our being, would have overlooked factoring in the flow of unconditional love in our lives. After all, we are embodiments of Love. Now I understand that our e-motions, the energy in motion, or the Shakti energies, were created to help us access our true nature, the energy at rest, or the Shiva energies, by peeling through the layers and revealing love, which lies at the core of our being. That’s the amrit/nectar, which can be drunk only after the venom has been partaken.
Is it the alchemy of immortality? I don’t really know; all I know is that when it rains, it pours. When love flows, it overflows and fills everything that comes in its path. So, if you desire the overflow of love in your life, use your life as a workshop for your emotional cleansing, and don’t forget to employ forgiveness and gratitude, the two true companions of Love.
That’s not all. Once one truly understands and experiences the ‘automatic’ flow of love, surrender happens. The surrender makes us take life as it is, with all its hues and colors, in gratitude and love. Isn’t it beautiful?