When spiritual beliefs stop you from feeling what you feel…

The other day I met with a friend of mine. She said that she has been seeing a homeopath to help her build inner strength. She received her treatment and the suggestion to allow more mental ease into her life. My friend, initially, was not sure how to take the advise and how it related to what she felt she was lacking. 

A few days after the treatment she met with her brother who shared his worries about the health of their mother. The moment, my friend heard herself lecturing her brother that worry is not helpful, she realised what the homeopath had been hinting at. While her brother simply voiced his genuine feelings, she immediately jumped to ‘spiritual’ conclusions. 

Certainly, nourishing your worry personality with whatever threatening issues at hand is not supporting you. There is always more to worry about which can stop us from embracing life to the fullest. Simply getting caught up in unresolved separation energy. 

Jumping to spiritual conclusions

Have we not learned that worrying is useless? A waste of energy. Because what we worry about has nothing to do with reality. Mostly things do not turn out as badly as we originally thought they would. Or they manifest in a way we could never have imagined – for better or for worth, that is. Who would have thought that a pandemic would be our biggest worry in 2020? And then again, some people would argue, that we’ve got our priorities wrong. Environmental pollution and power abuse deserve more of our worries than a virus. So what to make of all that? We could leave it here and simply dismiss all worries as a distraction. They are relative in nature and infinite in form. Expressions of our minds running wild. 

And yet, what if there was something for you to discover in the very worry you feel? I am putting the question out there to all longterm spiritual seekers. And the reason I am putting it out there is that recently many (spiritual) healing encounters I am having turn around that very subject. Finding ourselves in a place where we negate what we feel because we should know better. The all too common gesture of replacing ‘worldly’ beliefs with ‘spiritual’ beliefs which have not been verified as experiential truth. 

We negate what we feel because we should know better

And here we are. Liberation time again. But from what exactly? We’ve shed our ‘spiritual’ skin, demystified our gurus, proclaimed our freedom. But what is it we need to liberate ourselves from? Maybe the very fact that we’ve become our own project of spiritual embetterment, splitting ourselves in half, into the ‘lacking’ one we perceive ourselves to be, and the one we strive to become? Judging what we feel instead of letting our feelings inform our practice. No, not to drown in them. But to follow their lead to the places where flow, healing and a deeper understanding are ready to emerge. Feelings that persevere until we allow something that may not match our personal desires but is here to show us something more meaningful about our journey. 

I understand. The stakes can be high. You’ve been on the path for long and many of these ‘truisms’ have served you well to initially break with ‘ordinary’ life and years, if not life times, of conditioning. They’ve offered a new perspective, a way through and a way out of the narratives that made life small, painful and worrisome. In that sense they have been a saving grace. We knew which direction to face and where to step next. Ever onwards, practicing, and then practicing some more…but not necessarily feeling what was happening for us. So much hope to eventually become a better version of ourselves has created layers upon layers of repressed energy that want to be acknowledged and released.

Radical creative expression is necessary

Truth must be realised. It cannot be instilled. Feelings are a doorway, the sensory system of our souls. The more we develop a subtle sensitivity to our being, the more they  help us bring two halves together into the wholeness which has always been there in the realm of potential. To ultimately refine our inner relations into a sense of completeness where energies that have been bound in trauma and repression will be available for radical self-expression as co-creator beings.