Goodbye, Hurt & Pain. Deborah Sandella

usual habit to medicate, he focuses on the pain, and there comes a subtle lessening of the physical pressure. As he moves his awareness into this painful area, the discomfort gradually dissolves, and he feels a sense of calm.

      As he practices moving into the pain and listening during several monthly sessions, John notices that spontaneous insights sometimes pop up: “I need to slow down. I'm doing too much,” or “I'm angry with my wife. She hurt my feelings when she said I wasn't trying to lose weight. How can I talk with her about it and say it so she'll hear me instead of getting defensive?”

      When he is not constantly trying to get rid of the pain, John begins to respect it as a message from his body. As he starts to value his true feelings, he notices a corresponding change in his medication use: he doesn't need it the same way. In fact he goes from using analgesics 24/7 to one to two times a week, primarily when he's excessively tired.

      Over time, these insights cause John to change other habits as well. He begins to eat healthier foods and to communicate more honestly when there is a conflict with family members or employees. He speaks up instead of avoiding issues and thus begins to feel a sense of personal power for the first time in his life.

      As John continues a collaborative relationship with the pain, he grows happier, healthier, thinner, and better able to navigate relationships. He quits trying to stop the pain and sees it as an expression of his hidden, authentic feelings. John has freed himself from the oppression of illness. Instead, he receives the symptoms as helpful feedback guiding him to live a healthier and happier life. His story demonstrates how welcoming emotions hidden in physical pain brings helpful insights and lessens physical discomfort. Our bodies naturally give a voice to those things within that need our attention. We merely have to listen and heed the messages.

      NANCY'S STORY: HOW OUR FEELINGS HELP KEEP US SAFE

      We've all known people who genuinely sense and authentically share their emotions without hesitation, freely expressing what they feel. Nancy is one of these people. What you see is what you get. She doesn't beat around the bush. Having known Nancy over many years, I can tell you that the outcome of her way of being is evident.

      For example, when she was a young psychotherapist at a community mental health center, she volunteered for a research project that paired difficult teens with therapists to climb and rappel nearby mountains weekly for six weeks. The project was going very well, and Nancy enjoyed this unique way of interacting with her young clients. She also discovered she loved rappelling! No wallflower here, Nancy enjoyed thrill-seeking.

      On one of the group's outings, she stood on the top of a cliff looking down into a narrow canyon between two steep mountains. When it was her turn to descend, she just couldn't do it, even though she had done so gleefully in the past. In her honest and natural style, she expressed her fear to the climbing guides—her body was refusing to go. They decided to check her equipment and found a disconnected rope—the rope that would have suspended her body, in fact. If she had gone over the edge, she might have fallen to her death.

      Nancy is a beautiful example of how the intelligence of our organic, body-centered emotion knows more than our intellectual mind. When we pay attention and listen instead of denying, suppressing, fearing, or disliking our spontaneous feelings, we gain great access to our natural intuition (knowing something without understanding how we know it). Nancy's experience demonstrates how our inherent feelings help keep us safe in spite of what the logical mind thinks. It's wonderful to know the power we possess!

      HOW IT WORKS—PRACTICALLY AND SCIENTIFICALLY

      We frequently speak of our feelings as if we are them. You hear it in our patterns of speech: “I am angry,” as if to say, “I am anger.” However, feelings naturally arise as passing states of awareness and are not part of us. Rather, they give feedback and then expire. Think of it as similar to how a thermometer measures our internal body temperature at 9:00 a.m. at a healthy 98.6 and, three hours later when we are getting the flu, it registers 101.5. The feedback that we have a fever allows us to make an informed decision about whether to take fever-reducing meds, call the doctor, or go to bed and wait it out. A feverish reading is temporary and will change. In the same way, our emotional temperature fluctuates depending on external and internal events and our reaction to them. Looking back at Kris's real-life story, we see how her bike accident and life-threatening allergic reaction created intense emotions that would have been temporary if she had not gotten stuck.

      The origin of the word emotion is the 1570–80 Middle French word esmotion from movoir or motion; thus, esmovoir means “to set in motion or move the feelings.”¹ The essential function of feelings is to provide feedback and pass through us organically like water flows in a river. In the same way water moves through the atmosphere, in and out of oceans, over and under land, human feelings continuously precipitate, go underground, rise to the surface, and evaporate through our awareness.

      Trying to control our feelings through resistance and avoidance is like damming a river to stop the flow. An emotional dam pools feelings. This reservoir of avoided emotion remains in the body until we release it. In other words, the feelings we tried to avoid get held inside us instead. We hold on to what we are trying to avoid. Life constantly challenges us; it's not personal, just the natural process of growth and evolution. The stories of John and Kris demonstrate how easy it is to build emotional dams. Many times the process happens without us realizing it—until a symptom or illness gets our attention.

      What emotional dams do you have in place? Distrust after a divorce? Shutting down emotionally after a job loss? Doubting yourself after a personal or professional rejection? Obsessing about safety after an accident? Let's explore the source of some emotional dams to gain more insight into how they operate in our lives.

      Emotions Flow Naturally

      A range of feeling from the highest high to the lowest low is a normal aspect of our organic emotional system. Each passing feeling arises spontaneously, brings valuable information, and then evaporates. When we allow and recognize this flow, we activate self-recovery. Since everyone's emotional state directly influences success in relationships, work, and health, we gain an ability to produce desired outcomes by allowing our feelings to expire naturally without damming or flooding. Looking through a metaphoric lens, we are the riverbank, and the water flowing through us is emotion. We are stable and solid, while the feelings moving through us are constantly changing. We are emotionally dynamic beings. Sometimes emotion is gentle, like rain feeding the river to nourish life; sometimes it explodes like a rainstorm whose floodwaters wipe out bridges and homes.

      You don't have to try to feel your emotions; they have their own momentum. Think of the lyrics in Jennifer Love Hewitt's Don't Push the River. On the other hand, when you build dams, the natural emotional flow toward expiration is blocked. Remember you can always choose to stop building dams so that your emotional flow expires as it was meant to.

      Whether you dam up your feelings or allow them to run freely is your choice. But make no mistake: how you manage the flow has consequences. When you learn to recognize and understand the nature of your undesirable feelings, you can allow their safe expiration and devise floodgates to discharge intense ones in safe ways that prevent emotional flooding.

      Our Three Primal Feelings: Curiosity, Comfort, and Discomfort

      We are born with three primal emotional states: curiosity, comfort, and discomfort. You can easily observe them in infants even though they cannot understand or verbalize their internal experience or thoughts. We come programmed with these neurological receptors.

      Take curiosity, for example. Researcher Hildy Ross at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, found that a group of twelve-month-olds consistently preferred new toys to familiar ones and spent more time manipulating the complex array of toys rather than the simple ones.² These findings suggest that we come into the world as explorers. That makes sense when we see how determined