Emotional Alchemy
Unravel Ingrained Emotional Patterns
4/22/23
In the first newsletter of my newsletter series “Beyond Psychedelics” I want to share an extraordinarily powerful healing principle with you:
Every negative experience that includes a dysfunctional pattern, contains two polarized emotions. They generate an emotional dynamic that keeps you tied to this old pattern and to a false identity.
The first emotion in this dynamic is one you are afraid of and try very hard not to feel.
The second emotion is one you crave or long for.
There is often a superficial feeling that covers up the deeper emotion underneath it on both sides. And both emotions are also tied to an ultimately false story about yourself.
Identifying these two emotions will deliver the key to unlocking the old pattern.
Once you have identified the two emotions, there is a fairly simple exercise I describe below. Using it will create a profound emotional alchemy that will begin to dissolve the old pattern you want to let go of.
An example:
Let’s say you often worry about money.
You might first notice that the emotion you are trying to avoid around money issues is stress. Probing for the feeling beneath the stress, you might discover a deeper emotion, one you are even more afraid to encounter. Perhaps it’s feeling ashamed. That would be your first polarized emotion.
Next you search for the emotion you long for. The surface emotion might seem to be relief, but going deeper, you might realize that what you really crave is to belong. Or to feel special. This would be your second polarized emotion.
Now you are ready to use this transformational exercise:
The Emotional Alchemy Exercise
You start by allowing yourself to fully feel the first, resisted emotion. In this example you would allow yourself to feel ashamed. You might need to imagine a dreaded worst-case scenario of money troubles in order to feel the full depth of the shame. As you keep feeling the emotion, breathe deeply. Just feel every bit of your resisted emotion. And… pay attention to what your body feels like.
Next remember your craved emotion. Allow yourself to transition into that feeling. In this example you would bring up the feeling of belonging. Again, if it is helpful, imagine a scenario that allows you to fully feel this emotion. Notice your body. Breathe deeply!
Now it’s time to use the magic of emotional alchemy: You breathe into both emotions at the same time! It may sound paradoxical, but you can feel two opposing emotions simultaneously. Start with the resisted emotion, then add the craved one. Initially it might feel like you are switching back and forth between the two. Just keep holding and breathing into both emotions… and as you do, sense into your heart space… until you feel a slight (or big) shift. (This could be an opening or softening, a dissolving or burning away, or an unraveling that releases old bits of memory.)
Let your awareness embrace and follow the flow of this shift until it feels complete. Remember to keep breathing! All of it might take anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes. Feel what is here. Feel being yourself.
This exercise will bring you closer to your true center, where your more authentic and truer self resides. It will begin to permanently burn away the duality of an old pattern that had locked you into a false identity.
How did that false identity take hold to begin with?
It all started with an early traumatic or painful experience. Typically it was a parent, family member or authority figure who either hurt, shamed, abandoned or abused you. As a child you had no way of comprehending that this adult was driven by their own needs and unresolved pain, nor how they projected the source of their pain onto you. At the time you assumed that you must have deserved to be treated that way. Even though this person you loved and trusted violated or injured who you are, you concluded there must be something wrong with you to have caused it!
And in that moment you began to believe a warped story about yourself, which created the first fragment of a false identity.
Since this false identity was attached to the first painful emotion, feeling that emotion became frightening. It seemed to confirm that you were this flawed, broken or unwanted self. And so you needed to make every possible effort to avoid it.
Of course, once you put effort into avoiding an something, two other natural phenomena start working against you:
What you resist, persists.
Every suppressed emotion gets locked into the cells of your body.
So the harder you worked to distance yourself from this adopted identity, the more it asserted itself. And the more often you tried not to feel the painful emotion it triggered, the more deeply it became embedded in your cellular memory.
In your child’s mind the only way to escape this unhappy reality was trying to prove that you were someone quite the opposite. But since you had already bought into your false identity, you depended on other people to validate your desired, opposite image over and over again. In this sad dance the craved emotion became the longed-for proof that you could escape the painful identity you yourself had adopted. But it was a strategy doomed to fail. No human being, no matter how powerful or revered, can ever fill your inner void of not knowing who you truly are. In the end you are the only one who has the power to reclaim your own truth.
The surprising truth is that your true self lives at neither end of this old polarity.
Your true self resides somewhere in the center, in a much more neutral, fluidly alive and self-loving space. And that is what you come home to when you continue to work with the immensely effective exercise of Emotional Alchemy.
I hope you try it out!
Let me know what you discover!
Tomma
To learn more about my work, visit: www.thefreesoul.com