The Emotional Core

Are you over-complicating your healing?

So often our healing turns into a long and windy road where the destination is shrouded in fog and we keep finding ourselves on ground we’ve already covered.

What’s happening here? Is this a hard fact of life or are we delaying matters or getting in our own way?

Well, I’ve seen healing happen quickly and powerfully and stick.

When we let it, the unconscious mind knows how to heal itself in the same way your body knows how to heal from a wound.

The main reason for the slow road, in my humble opinion, is that our guardians don’t want to give up power, they take over the healing project in order to keep power, or they delay matters in the lower courts.

For example, our intellectualizer becomes an expert in psychology, while we continue to neglect basic self-care, or our people-pleaser wins over our therapist, while we hold back vital information, or we spend 10,000 hours meditating on love while continuing to avoid intimacy with others.

None of this is intentional. Our guardians don’t know any better. They are doing what they learned to do in order to keep us safe. They are frozen at a young age when we truly couldn’t handle whatever it was. They still think we can’t handle whatever is bottled up down there. Perhaps most of all, they have become habitual. “That’s just the way we are.” They persuade us against testing whether the genie could come out of the bottle now.

So the question is? What is it that guardians work so hard to protect that could accelerate our healing?

This rhetorical question will mystify poets for centuries to come.

Only kidding, there actually is a simple answer in my framework: the Emotional Core.

Guardians like to think that they are our whole identity but they are actually just a thin protective film over a much deeper feeling identity that comes online when we hold space for it and drop in to our full embodied resonance.

When our guardians relax, our emotional core kicks in. Often the first thing we need to feel is sadness or emotional pain. We are finally recognizing the hurt that we had to bottle up. We may be sad to have lost contact with ourselves or to have missed opportunities if we had only done this sooner. We may need to recognize the severity of what happened to us or what has been lost. As we grieve through the sadness, the full range of emotions reappears. Rumi commands us to weep that we may laugh.

We may also feel RAGE at the conditions of our childhood that we just accepted at the time or pointed back at ourselves. This new feeling points toward the rightful culprit.

These new feelings are an important step in our development that can depressurize our guardians and free up survival energy that has been bound up in the nervous system.

It should be noted that some people have quieter emotional systems so that when they connect to the emotional core, their expressions may be slight, or even invisible and take place almost instantaneously. These subtle shifts can be just as transformational in bringing this kind of nervous system back into deeper resonance and dynamic health.

Once online, the emotional core keeps us company and provides a sense of fullness and flow. It becomes our guidance system that helps us to navigate life and stand up for our needs. We now have robust vulnerability and people can feel our depth and resilience. We are no longer imposterish husks or empty suits of armor.

In summary, the quicker we relax our guardians and feel whatever needs to be felt, the sooner we heal and become our true selves. It is not complicated, just uncomfortable.