Recently, one of my dear friends emailed me about something that's been bothering him. Now, you have to understand, he's a fellow writer and ofttimes we use our emotional responses to certain things to help us in our writing but he asked about something that made me realize it was something to discuss.
Was thinking, the problem I’m having now emotionally is that I seem to have residual feelings of anger that won’t go away like the big stuff has. What can you do to remove the residuals?
This actually brought to mind a few things that I've been personally working on. We all have residual feelings and influences from outside influences. Whether it be rejection, a relationship not working out or even a moment that brought us to our knees-- we are always on some level affected by what happened. How we make the event into a lesson that we take what we need and leave the emotion behind is not so easy.
I've discovered over this year since my mom's death-- I know she died. That's okay, and honestly, she was in pain- so I'm happy she's no longer in pain. But- she's gone for things she's always been around for and honestly, I'm badly missing her. I mean badly as in severely bad. It's made me pull back in relationships and other things because my health is not great right now. I'm not super sick, but I'm definitely not healthy as I could and should be. Emotionally, I'm hurting and until recently, I couldn't acknowledge or even accept how I was feeling about it.
So what can you do to get over those feelings of pain and more? There are a couple of ways and they work whether your a writer or not. What I've always done and have encouraged others to do is to write down the event as it happened-- according to your recollection. Leave nothing out, include your emotions at the time it happened. Then, I want you to write the event again, this time taking it in the opposite path- give yourself the ending you wanted to have, not the one you just wrote. Take your time, including emotions, reactions and the path to success. Once you've written both- put them away for about 2 days.
Once two days have passed, pick up the second story and reread it aloud. Remember this is the way you wish it had gone. For everything you wrote that you now realize could not have happened-- for whatever reason- death, sickness, other person needed more- mark that point down. Acknowledge that you wanted that ending because it would've been good for you alone and emotionally, it would've been easier for you to handle. Then go to the first story-- read it through, mark where the decisions made could've been handled better on your part and the other person's. Mark where you emotionally feel vulnerable and what things cause you to react emotionally in this vein. The idea here is to acknowledge your emotions and to accept it's happened. You know it happened and if still ended this way, you now know how you would've changed things or dealt with it. Then you must thank the lesson for being learned. You're always going to have residual emotions regarding it, but you'll notice that after pouring out the feelings you wanted and the feelings you got dealt-- the growth you've incurred by doing so.
Another way of handling the residual emotions is by grounding. This is both a magickal concept and a psychological one. The best way I've found when I need to reground myself and to let go over the emotions, especially the negatives ones that haunt me over certain things, I find a quiet place, usually either in my backyard or in my room. I light a couple of candles, light some incense, and sit before the candles. What does this do? It allows me a chance to sit and focus. I bring to mind the incident and the feelings inside. Then I turn the emotions into a ball, sensing myself pouring them out of me and into my hands. I mold the emotions into a ball, pushing more of them out of me and into it. Once I feel what I call emotionally neutral about the incident-- I then open my hands and turn them palms down, letting the emotional ball drop into the ground before me and between the candles. What this does is return to earth that which needs to be cleansed and sanctified. It is from the earth and returns as such. Then I concentrated on deep, even cleansing breaths bringing in powerful emotions of love, happiness, focus and more. You can't just ground and not take in something new. You've emptied that part and you must fill it with something-- and if you do not, something will find its way in there- and you might not like what it is.
Residual emotions are always part of us. But we can reduce their influence significantly by making peace with the past, making peace with our reactions to the event, and by letting the emotions go and replacing it with positive emotions because we've learned a valuable lesson. Only by doing these things, can we minimize the emotional residuals that sometimes cause us to stumble. (continue reading &aquo;)
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