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In our journey toward wholeness, we have encountered some pitfalls. We've mentioned them here and there on these pages, but it seems like a good idea to mention them more plainly, all in one place.
If you're just beginning your journey toward emotional healing and wholeness, just tuck these things into your pocket for future awareness. Tread the path carefully and with as much conscious awareness as you can. That's often easier said than done, but know also that even falling headlong into the pitfalls can be part of the process. Picking yourself up out of a deep pit can be very triggering, and if you allow the feelings to cry thoroughly, it can be very healing, and can even help prevent you from falling again in future. There is no such thing as a pit-less path. We just have to do the best we can, and keep going, no matter what.
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| PROBLEMS USING TOOL 2: Crying |
- Overwhelm:
One of the key elements to healing is the presence of accepting consciousness, which reflects the loving light of spirit. We need to have Mind participating, holding space and giving acceptance to emotional expression. If you have a lot of critical Mind, or judgments about feelings, you might dive down into the deep end of your emotional pool and then find yourself in the dark depths without a tether to the light of your consciousness. You may feel overwhelmed, out of touch with reality, or fear that you won't be able to find your way through the maze of emotions.
Some of this feeling of overwhelm is mind's fear. Mind fears the chaos of old pain and fears getting lost in it. If you keep crying, you will eventually heal all the pain you have buried. It's inevitable. But mind may not know that or believe it. And without the participation and acceptance of mind/consciousness, you will not be able to understand the feelings, or see your way out of the darkness, and the emotional essence needing to heal will be afraid to open up and tell its story. To both parts, it will FEEL terrifying to even consider going in there.
If you move in slowly, you will experience a shift in both Mind and Emotions. You then give Mind a new experience -- that of watching the emotions heal by expressing, of becoming more, and better, and clearer and less chaotic. Mind will be reassured. And you also give Emotions a chance to heal and evolve and feel accepted by Mind, and then they can participate in the healing process. Control can be given over to the Soul, instead of having the reins held solely by the Mind.
But if you dive too quickly to the deeply painful stuff, Mind doesn't have a chance to adjust.
What often happens then is that Mind slingshots as far away from the big bad emotions as possible, but that slingshot effect can take mind into insanity of another kind: ungrounded mind is a dangerous thing. Mind may go spinning off into elaborate constructs, trying to understand and compensate for having touched on something so frightening, but trying to stay far from feeling it ever again. It can take a long time to come back from one of these slingshots, if you don't understand what has happened.
If you are aware of this, you can spend some time working on Mind's fears. This will make the journey inward less hazardous and frightening. For most emotional processors, this won't be necessary. But for people who primarily process with their minds, it's important to go slowly.
It may also help to have a friend sit with you while you cry (see What is Co-Counseling for tips), or find a counselor that will let you cry without having to verbalize or analyze. The presence of another person can "stand in" for your own consciousness. The other person has the job of holding the tether, and helping you come back to the present after you dive deeply.
- Spinning in Circles:
It is possible to work on the same "issue" for long periods of time, crying the same thing over and over and over again. It's possible that this is legitimate healing, and nobody can know this but you. When you are dealing with fragmented parts of yourself, each part will need to be brought in and healed of all its pain. As each part comes in, it will feel as if you're starting over from scratch. That's because the new fragmented bit wasn't with you when you cried about it before. This is legitimate process, and must be allowed, for as long as it takes. There is no set time for emotional healing. It takes as long as it takes.
However, it is also possible to spin in circles on the surface of an "issue" for a long period without getting real healing. For instance, you may find yourself crying the grief of a loss again and again and never feeling as if you're getting any better. It's possible that what will bring the issue to complete healing is something underneath the grief - rage or terror perhaps.
This happens quite frequently when
- we have judgments about some feelings as less acceptable than others
- we have fear of something we might feel or don't want to remember
- some of our feelings are outside our awareness
- we are in a situation that is still hurting us in the present, and we are only skimming off the surface of each new wound, never getting to the deeper underlying wounds
What's needed here is to get to the deeper feelings. You may find it easy - as easy as simply "sinking down" into the feelings, once you know that that's what's needed. But for some, it may not be so simple.
 Read: Techniques for Overcoming Resistance
- Unrealistic Expectations
This is a big one. All we can say here is that the emotions do not live in linear time, and they cannot be expected to heal in a set amount of time. There is another world on the other side of the door to the unconcsious. How long will it take to heal? Impossible to say. If you put a time limit on yourself, you are requiring your lost soul essence to hurry up and perform in order to please you. You are telling your soul that you only have a limited amount of patience with its pain, and it better get to it and get over it. This is the same message that has been drilled into the soul forever and a day.
The fact is, we cannot be happy and powerful, we cannot be our true (divine) selves, until we are whole. We have to bring all of our essence back into consciousness, up into the light, out of the basement.
And since we don't know ahead of time what's hiding down there, we can't predict how long it will take to heal.
It takes as long as it takes.
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| PROBLEMS USING TOOL 5: The Door of Everything |
- False Memories -- When Mind Won't Let Go:
This is a common problem when you're trying to use the Door of Everything as a listening tool. You may approach the door with intent to listen to your soul, with desire to find your lost essence and let it reveal itself to you. But at the first sign of pain, Mind jumps in and starts to interpret and analyze and pretty soon, Mind isn't listening anymore.
Mind has great fear of what is on the other side of the Door. The pain the Soul has had to bury often looks (to Mind) like a monster, and Mind has a knee-jerk response to even the hint of the presence of that monster. Mind also has a fear of not understanding something. With these things combined, Mind begins dictating, and filling in the missing pieces of things, trying to both control and understand what it is seeing.
When Mind leaves the listening role, the soul essence that needs to come forward cannot tell its story. And often, the story is fragmented and stored in separate bubbles of pain. It may take some time of crying through all the rage and terror and grief and heartbreak - before you have enough pieces to begin to make sense of the story. It's like having bits of a puzzle. But Mind doesn't like to wait for all the bits to finish. Mind wants to fill in the picture. And sometimes that means Mind fills in the story wrongly.
The danger here is that the story Mind constructs may become fuel for acts of vengeance. It is extremely important to allow as much healing of old pain before trying to make sense of the memories. Incomplete pictures can be misinterpreted.
In any case, vengeance heals nothing. Confronting your attacker will not help you heal the pain you carry. There's only one way to heal the pain, and that's to allow it full expression until it simply doesn't hurt anymore. It may seem like that's not possible. And rage will tell you it must hurt as you have been hurt. But that doesn't help you to heal.
Cry the hurt, and the rage, gather ALL the memory bits, get a clear picture of what really happened, and with Mind and Feelings working together, understanding with heart is possible, and right action always is.
- Hearing the Wrong Voices:
Opening the Door of Everything through meditation is a tricksy business. What you are doing is basically opening the portal to what is on the other side of the veil, to alternate states of being, and to non-ordinary reality.
If you are seeking your own unconscious pain, then you will find it, and you will be able to cry it through and you will know it's YOU. But often people use meditation to go through the Door of Everything with intent to reach their "higher self", or God, or angels, or ET's. It is possible to make contacts of this sort.
But do not assume that every voice you hear on the other side of the veil is good and loving.
You can encounter discarnate entities, both loving and unloving, on the other side of the veil. You may find yourself drawn into a "channeling" type situation, where you allow other energies to speak through you. But you should never assume that just because the voice speaks to you from the other realities, that it has your best intention in mind, or that it is of loving intent for the soul. Many entities speaking through channelled sources are still stuck in old programming and beliefs about the soul. They have one-sided wisdom. They are still trying to teach old ways, ways that don't work here, and they still hold a lot of sway for people who want to believe that any voice speaking from the "other side" must be more evolved, and therefore is speaking the Truth.
It ain't necessarily so.
How can you know what's true? By continuing with your own healing process, by bringing in all your own essence, by crying all your pain and retrieving all your lost parts. Your soul is the part of you that senses the truth, that FEELS what is true, regardless of what words are spoken, regardless of what form is visible to the eye. This ability to feel the truth will grow and grow within you as you heal and become whole.
So, when venturing through the Door of Everything, at least in the beginning of your healing, focus should be on becoming whole, on healing and evolving the emotional body. See also (How to Know What's True.)
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