Emotional Alchemy

Posted on August 2, 2013 by mcallister

by Alan McAllister, CCHt PhD-phys

Many years ago I was struggling with a fear that manifested as a tension in the back of my left shoulder. A good friend reminded me that all emotions are an aspect of life force, of love. Imagining the tension to be like ice that melts when you shine the light of loving awareness on it has helped me ever since. This is the essence of emotional alchemy.

The yogic creation story is not very different from the Big Bang theory, except that it starts with consciousness, which then becomes energy and finally matter as it expands into space. Like other forms of energy your emotions are all rooted in a level of Being we call love, no matter how unloving they may feel, because that is the energy of life force, of consciousness, which is the foundation of everything.

Several years ago I went through a period of deep grieving, mixed after a while with anger and fear. During this period I was given experiences of how all these so called negative emotions are forms of love. Lying in bed one morning, in that sweet half awake, but very relaxed space, I was feeling into fear and tension in my body. I noticed that I was mentally labeling this as bad, as something to fight or run away from. When I released that label, it became simply a feeling, a physical experience, like being hungry; a form of life force.

I lay there and felt that life force in my body, without resistance and with some curiosity. This is what fear feels like. I’m still breathing, still alive, perhaps even a little energized, but its not really hurting me. Slowly I notice the second layer of label, the one that says this particular energy is fear. I release that and the feeling changes. I am now experiencing pure life force in my space, almost joyful, very alive, and some part of me knows that I can now use this any way I want to.

To feel into an emotion, to hold it with curiosity, releasing labels and reactions, will allow it to transform. You are simply owning a bit of your own life force and helping it relax back to its original state. This experience is spoken of in different ways through all the traditions. I think of it now as emotional alchemy, which can be done in the vessel of your body, or an external energetic container.

There is really not much to do, except releasing the mental labeling, the binding form. In quantum terms you allow the form to dissolve back into the void from which the pure life force can emerge with a new flavor. All energies inherently move and will release a constraining form when allowed to, just as solar magnetic fields expand and simplify as soon as they emerge from the solar surface. Of course this can release stored energy, as solar flares, or as emotional experience. The trick is to hold the container with loving awareness, allowing the emotions to just be energy and then reclaim it creatively. The unpacking process happens naturally.

Later that day I was sitting in my kitchen when I felt waves of joy pouring over me. I was startled but very grateful and knew that spirit was filling me back in after releasing in the morning. I was being shown what energies were available when I could stop labeling things as bad emotions that I needed to resist and be scared of, and that I was supported in allowing the transformation to happen.

At other times I have had similar experiences with other emotions. All are indeed forms of love and can go back to that basic state. We can do this for ourselves and hold space for others to do it as well.

Along with curiosity I find breathing to be excellent and also a sense of humor. Knowing its possible and practicing makes it easier. The result is more space for joy and aliveness, more space for You.

(© 8/2013)

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Questions and Answers

Posted on July 16, 2013 by mcallister

Recently I was sitting in a council circle. As I started my check-in on recent events and experiences, I saw/felt my intuitive guidance linking several ideas together. I am used to having this happen when I work with my clients, or even thinking to myself. This was a new level of letting the question resonate in my mind as I formulated the answer, and having new input show up in response.

I have learned over the years, when searching for answers, the key is to pause my cognitive processes, long enough for inspiration to show up from other levels. Pausing creates a space, an invitation, into which spirit can manifest insight. This is true when conversing with a friend as much as when asking something of your guides or of your soul.

In our society we value goals over process and answers over questions. While goals and answers do have value, process and questions are also important. Until you ask a question it is hard to get an answer. Moreover, in science you learn, that asking the right question is the key to getting a useful answer. Of many possible answers, which ones are useful and even relatively true for your specific situation and circumstances? Anyone who uses search engines on the web knows there is an art to framing a query that will yield the answers you want or need.

I have been thinking about questions a lot lately, because it is part of what I have always done. Sometimes for myself, sometimes for others, sometimes on purpose and sometimes unconsciously. I like to ask questions. But then I have to pause. If I have asked you a question, I need to pause so an answer can arise in you. The question is an invocation of your wisdom and knowing, perhaps unconscious, or superconscious, until my asking guides your attention there.

Sometimes I do this with myself. Often I’m just wondering about something. True curiosity is invaluable. When I create that space of wonder, and sit in it, ideas, images, thoughts can drop in. However you experience your answers, a question focuses your attention on something, creating space for your Self or Spirit to gift with a response.

In my speaking to the circle, what dropped in was a teaching about questions. I had been speaking about birthing and creative processes, how I sometimes get stuck in the middle of manifesting something, feezing half way across a single log bridge when the body fear kicks in. This echoes my own birth experience.

In the circle my guidance said, let the question be your vehicle!

Rather than fearing the place of not knowing and getting stuck there, let it be expansive and joyous, full of curiosity and possibility. Your question becomes the vehicle that will carry you through, or across. It opens the space for creation, transformation and rebirth, for the answers that are better than you could have figured out of imagined to show up directly from Self and Spirit.

View the question as a vehicle rather than an obstruction. A vehicle that runs on curiosity and wonder, trust and openness. It will help you birth the full glory of your Self and of Spirit into your life, and into the world.

(© 7/2013)

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The Flow of Dreams

Posted on July 1, 2013 by mcallister

In the high mountains above Boulder, lush with new growth and bright flowers, the streams are running full with snow melt and summer rain. Watching the water rush downhill with a great joyful exuberance, I think the flow of the mind, of our thoughts. Sometimes clear and directed, sometimes slower and spreading out, or going round and round in pools or eddies.

Several weeks ago, when the snows were lower on the mountains, I saw something new to me. Many little streams and draws were on the surface, but some water was flowing below ground, under huge embedded boulders, through the earth, surfacing in places from nowhere to flow above ground awhile and then vanish again under the surface. Like water flowing under ice and snow in the winter.

Consider now the flow of the dreaming mind. We talk of having a dream, as if it is something that comes and goes. Whether you have lots of dreams or very few, most of us know that we dream more often than we remember. In any case we believe that dreams are intermittent. But have you ever fallen half asleep in a class or a meeting, experiencing bits of dream that come and go? It often seems to me as if the dream is ongoing, like a TV program that I get pieces of every time I slip back into sleep. Like a broadcast, that dream seems to be going on whether my conscious self is paying attention or not. If I wake up for a while, it goes on underneath, until I drift back asleep and catch up with it a little later on in the story.

Have you ever had this experience?

Perhaps the fact that we are usually awake for long periods of time, so that the dream story or program has completely changed, means we don’t usually notice this dream state continuity. We think that it is only our waking self that has continuity, while the dream level only exists for isolated periods when we are asleep. I wonder, however, if the dream level is also continuous, though often under the surface and out of awareness, like the snow melt. Perhaps its always there, weaving its own level of story, by its own rules.

It has long seemed to me likely that there are higher levels of awareness and Self that we tap into occasionally, or even regularly, during meditation, or other peak experiences, that are none the less always present and ongoing. Or conscious attention and awareness may catch them or not, but our Soul’s thoughts form their own flow and continuum.

Perhaps the subconscious, the dream levels, are another level of ongoing mental flow, which we may learn to collect and channel, like the rushing stream, freeing it from its eddies and stagnant pools, to move joyfully and playfully towards the sea, towards our wholeness and Self. What is it like to live not in one stream of awareness, but in all of them? weaving these various on-going levels of Self into a coherent whole? or letting them weave you? Like the spring streams, there is more to you than meets the conscious awareness, more useful and purposeful than you know.

Feel into the truth of this for yourself. Invite this fuller awareness to come to you, sleeping, awake, or transcendent, a woven flow leading downhill to the Self.

(© 7/2013)

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Inner Communication

Posted on June 16, 2013 by mcallister

My emotional self has many different sides, as many as there are different emotions and feeling states of being. When it’s scared or stressed, it wants to watch a movie and eat chocolate chip cookies, fresh baked are best. It is happy when I’m watching a stream flow down a mountain valley, or the clouds float through a blue sky over the peaks. It reacts in the moment to what is happening, fresh present time emotions, that come and go, varying like the Colorado weather. It also carries old things, memories, patterns, unresolved feelings from all ages. These old things often shape my present experience and responses. Until they are complete and resolved they are triggered and awaken, to protect me, plague me, or simply seeking resolution and release.

We all have an emotional self, though your experience of it may vary a great deal. Often we think of it as an inner child. As young children our emotional body develops first, before the mental body. As adults we associate emotional behavior with childhood. Conversely, as the emotional body is mostly developed and patterned in childhood, those characteristics, memories and associations, predominate. It has, however, a potential to mature and come into power as a more aware and refined emotional vessel than that of a small child.

On the spiritual path this is a part of our work. Helping our emotional body to complete, contextualize, and release the old things, especially the pains and fears, reduces its interference with your daily and spiritual life. Healing your relationship with its childlike qualities, you can also develop a more aware and coherent emotional body, expressing your soul and experiencing the world as a mature adult.

Consider your relationship with your emotional body. How do you treat yourself when emotions arise? or the old feelings want a cookie or a gun? We are trained as “adults” to associate with our mental body, with our thoughts and rational discourse. Do you tend to talk down to your emotional body, to lecture or explain? Think of how effective a reasoned explanation would be to a terrified three year old.

Feel into how you communicate with your emotional self when s/he shows up. Imagine how you would react as an adult, as a young child, to that same type and quality of communication.

The balance here, as with real children, is to respect that aspect of yourself (especially if no one really has before), but also to remember that its essence and therefore its communication and understanding is emotional. You will get further using emotions, feelings, and tones, more than words. If it is fearful, before reasoning away the fear, or bribing it with a cookie, take some time to sit with it, appreciating, but not matching, the fear, and wrap it in a sense of safety, based on the emotional truth of your adult reasoning and experience. Resist any temptation to retreat out of feeling the emotion, to other levels of your being, abandoning your self. Instead, call them in to support you in creating safety.

Learn to call up compassion, to find the love that is naturally in your heart, even in the midst of grief, and invite that in. Practice a new relationship with your emotional body, using emotional communication. You will even enjoy your cookies more fully, eating them for pure pleasure, rather than as a desperate attempt to avoid an unpleasant feeling.

(© 6/2013)

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The Three of Us

Posted on June 2, 2013 by mcallister

Your spiritual, energetic, Self resides in your body, the temple of your soul. I have often thought that the stories of jinns/genies in bottles were patterned on the sense of our expanded spiritual self pouring itself into the container of our relatively smaller bodies. The reason we talk of higher selves is that not all of who we are fits in that temple or container.

How much of our Self is at home also varies a good deal over time. There are those magical peak times when we are intensely aware of our bodies, but also of nature around us, a partner making dancing or making love, a child or pet we are playing with. Present and alive, we are both finite and infinite. On the other end of the scale are concussions, anesthesia’s, severe inebriation, traumatic experiences of various sorts, or even day dreams and sleep.

Several years ago in the midst of a long period of grieving that started with specifics and opened to anything and everything, I came face to face with a young aspect of myself, strongly associated with my physical and emotional self, who had felt abandoned at times by my spiritual Self. He was angry and mistrustful due to events when, in apparent danger, my higher Self had “checked out”. When I was put under to have my tonsils removed, age five, I “knew” they were trying to kill me, having been gassed before at three months for a hernia.

How many of us have residual anxiety from times when our Spirit left under fire. As mammals we have biological mechanisms that pop us out of our body when it looks like we might die. Out of body experiences during accidents, operations, and other threatening events, are apparently an evolved survival mechanism. However this explanation is of little solace to the childlike nature of your body/emotional self, which will hold fear and resentment associated with your spiritual Self.

Consider, what happens when you as an adult, on your spiritual path, start doing work to strengthen your conscious relationship with this same higher Self. Is your adult self going to jump ship as well? A wild ruckus and self sabotage may ensue.

In our spiritual work we need to include and integrate our small self/inner child. In working with this myself and with others, it seems important to build a healthy relationship between our body oriented emotional self, and our higher Self. Our higher Self can help support, nurture and heal our emotional self, it can guide, teach and be a major resource in all our growth work. Where there is fear and mistrust though, you may need to lend a hand, or two.

The Chinese speak of Man standing between Heaven and Earth, balancing those energies to create your life. Consider your adult self as a bridge, or mediator between your emotional inner child and your expanded essential Self. Reaching up to the stars, keep one hand for your small self, inviting him to come along. It is only by including all your aspects that you truly become whole, that your Spirit can lodge peacefully in your body temple.

There is wisdom in all our aspects, not just the exalted, expanded ones. You might even set some time aside to play with your emotional self, to swim or dance, or smell the flowers, giving her space to lead. I’ll bet you wind up having fun and learning some interesting things too.

(© 6/2013)

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