
Hello!
In case you missed them, you can read:
Of this series before you read this part! I highly recommend that you do read all the previous posts before you read today’s, otherwise it’s very likely that today’s work won’t make much sense 😉
Today we’re going to look at what it can be like to use emotional mastery to help us break away from our conditioning. What we’ve been taught is ‘right and wrong’, ‘good and bad’ so that we can eventually find our way into REAL reality.
This is where we’ll be able to create a life for ourselves that actually feels GOOD - which is what we all want!
Remember this process of developing emotional mastery isn’t about improving ourselves or becoming something ‘better’ than what we are now. Rather it’s actually all about learning to SUPPORT who and what we are, so that we can expand into whatever natural potential we have.
It’s a shift from the self help world that tells us that there is some ideal self we are supposed to become - something that is dictated to us by culture and other ideals that have nothing to do with who WE are as individuals or as human beings in general, to working in a way where we trust that who and what we NATURALLY are is good enough, and all we have to do is learn how to SUPPORT what we are naturally in order to have a good and fulfilling life.
Let’s keep exploring and see how we go!
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The Messy Journey Of Healing The Hand
So we’ve taken our hand off the burner.
Now we’re in a situation where we have two predicaments:
- We’re different from everyone around us. We have a totally different perspective on life, what’s normal and what isn’t, what’s helpful and harmful - and this is a REALLY challenging thing given that in our culture we are trained to find safety in SAMENESS. In our childhoods we learned that fitting in and being approved of WAS the way to have safety. Our bodies are going to be freaking out. Our minds are going to be freaking out. People around us are going to be judging, rejecting, and questioning us. We will lose the security and hope that we had that if we just ‘fix ourselves’ enough the pain will go away. We will lose the comfort that we had in our coping, numbing and stimulating behaviors. We will lose the hope that there was some sort of spiritual or self improvement tool that was going to help us transcend all of this. We will be in a situation of deep unknown and being different - which is incredibly challenging on its own.
- We are in pain and we have a hand that, while removed from the source of degradation, is now revealed to us as being deeply damaged. We can now see all the burns, the scars, the tissue damage. We are looking at blisters and bleeding and all sorts of pain - and everyone else who still has their hands on the burner can’t see this in themselves. Everyone else who’s hand is still on the burner, on the surface, is going to look healthier, better and more put together than us - because the damage that is being done to them is still being hidden. We are going to ‘look’ like we are ‘worse’ than everyone else, because we’ve unearthed and revealed the damage. Along with this, we are likely going to have little to know idea what to DO about this damage - because again we’ve likely never seen anyone take their hand off the burner before. We know ALL ABOUT the tools and techniques that the world has to offer for numbing the pain, for managing the pain, for trying to change our reaction and response to the pain - but we’ve never actually seen someone HEAL from the damage.
We’ve taken our hand off the burner, and for a while, this is going to look and feel like what we’ve actually done is make everything WORSE.
We’re now weird and different. People are defensive. They look at our hand and tell us that we’ve clearly made a HUGE mistake - look how messed up you are! Look how damaged! Look at all the pain! We are all fine, none of us have that. Clearly YOU are doing the wrong thing and WE are doing the right thing.
Others will look at this messy, unknown, revealing of the damage phase as ‘proof’ that taking the hand off the burner just makes everything worse - because they can’t understand that REVEALING the damage isn’t what CAUSED the damage. They don’t see that it’s having the hand on the burner that’s CAUSING the degradation. To them it looks like everything was fine until you took the hand off.
Everyone is going to be on hyper alert, they’re going to be looking at you and seeing every moment of your suffering, confusion, pain and revelation about the pain you’re in and the damage that exists as a reason why YOU are wrong for doing what you’re doing and as justification for them to continue doing what they are doing.
You will likely become a scapegoat that everyone else uses as evidence to support their current path. You will be nit-picked and every move you make that doesn’t lead you to a PERFECT life will be seen as evidence that your radical new way is a total failure and that doing what’s always been done is a much better choice. It will be isolating and scary and painful.
Next, you will now have all this flesh damage to deal with.
You will have a hand that needs a lot of care, attention and love - and this will start to take up a lot of your time, energy and brain-space.
It will likely look like now you’re having to spend all this time trying to clean up a mess that you didn’t make, and like having to do so is getting in the way of you living your life.
It will look like everyone around you is progressing in life, going ahead, doing things and accomplishing things and living their lives while you’re stuck at home trying to figure out how to heal this hand.
There will be little support and guidance available on how to actually go about healing the hand, what that journey actually looks like and what you can expect to get on the other side - because again there won’t be many people to look to as examples because there simply hasn't been that many people who have DONE what you’re doing.
There will be many, many days and nights where you question yourself. Where healing seems impossible. Where you feel like you made a massive mistake and are at a place of no return as you navigate the complexities of healing a hand that has so much damage. There will be many times of two steps forward, one step back, and many days of having no idea how to continue progressing at all.
There’s going to be lots of vulnerability here. Vulnerability to infection. Vulnerability to more damage via seemingly harmless things - things you can easily do with your non-harmed hand can’t be done with the one that came off the burner, and this makes it look and feel like a massive hindrance to our lives.
We will fear that we are going to be in pain forever. That the hand will never heal. That it will never be functional and will always be this thing we have to be hyper protective of. It will always be the thing that makes us different and makes others fear us, judge us and see us as weak and less than. It will be the thing that keeps us from living our fullest lives for a while because we have to spend all this time healing.
It will look hopeless some days.
But on the flip side - there are going to be days where progress is made.
There will be days where the pain is less, where we have learned some tools and techniques to keep the hand safe and clean, where we start to learn how to honor this healing process - and in this we are going to start actually feeling better.
Feeling better in a way we’ve NEVER felt better before. Feeling better in a way that no one around us has ever experienced before.
We are going to start to see glimmers of hope that a whole new life is possible - and this will keep us going.
Then as we continue to follow our pain and pleasure signals - we will figure out that THIS is how we figure out how to heal the hand.
That what we need to do for the hand, the hand will actually lead us to do.
As we show up for where the hand is, what the hand needs right now, how the hand feels - what feels better and what feels worse for the hand - that in THAT we discover the steps of how to heal the hand.
We will come to a place of recognizing that just like we used our tools of pain and pleasure to help us discover that the burner was causing the problem, we can use this exact same technique for what feels good and what feels bad to help us figure out what to do for the hand while it heals.
What We Learn On The Healing Path, We Will Take Into The Rest Of Our Lives
We will journey through all of the phases of healing the hand, discovering what the hand needs in each different phase as we’re in it.
We will learn that in the beginning, it’s super vulnerable and needs to be kept clean, needs to be disinfected, needs to be covered, that it can’t be used and needs to be really protected.
Then we will navigate what it’s like to experience the shaming and guilting from people around us, the rejection and the misunderstanding, and we will learn how to support ourselves through that - because we will have our connection to the fact that having the hand off the burner still feels BETTER than having it on - even if it means looking at all the destruction and even if it means others don’t accept us.
Then we will start to navigate the uncomfortable, itchy, tight phase of healing where the hand develops scabs and scar-tissue. We will start to see that the hand is a little less vulnerable here, - but maybe looks a little worse. We may go into a state of deep self protection and isolation to keep ourselves safe. We will figure out how to nourish and support the hand in this phase by simply observing the hand, observing what tools and techniques support it best in this phase, and which ones don’t work. What tools from the last phase we need to keep, and which ones we can let go of because we no longer need them.
We will start to get to a place where the things we do in life are no longer about doing ‘the right thing’ or fitting in. They are no longer based on hypothetical ‘should’s.’
Rather, we will be starting to live from a place where we are able to observe the TRUE outcomes of our actions. What we are doing will either be making the hand better or worse. What society says is normal will either make the hand better or worse. What we have to do to get along and fit in will either make the hand better or worse. We won’t have to look for the rulebook anymore. We won’t be seeking approval or validation from others as much - because we will start to have the actual one to one interaction with LIFE that will be our new guide for what actually works and what actually doesn’t.
This journey of tending to the hand will then start to expand into the rest of our lives.
We will start to understand that ALL parts of us - not just the hurting hand - have pain and pleasure and that ALL parts of us are responding to the outcomes of our actions.
We will start to move in a new way in general - learning to trust that if something feels good and gives good results, it’s something that’s ‘right’ even if society says it’s wrong.
We will start to understand that the things we are doing or the things we’re being told we should do that hurt, that don’t actually give the results they say they should, that don’t actually WORK in real reality aren’t a sign that WE are weak and failing, but are a sign that the TECHNIQUE is wrong. We will start to use this hand healing process as a learning tool for how to connect to our WHOLE self, all parts, to see what they need, what supports them, what feels good, what doesn’t, what works in real reality and what doesn’t - and THIS will start to become our new way of navigating life - where am I right now, what am I feeling, what do I need, what works and what doesn’t? Vs. ‘what’s the right thing to do/what is everyone else doing.’
Then eventually the hand will start to genuinely heal. It will start to get to a place where it’s growing new skin. New healthy tissues. There will still be weakness and vulnerability, but we will start to feel a little stronger. A little more stable. A little less vulnerable. We will notice a decrease in our pain, and an increase in our function. This will be radical and new - this will be us starting to experience IN REAL TIME what everyone is striving to pretend that they have - actual access to BOTH HANDS.
We will start to learn more and more about what we need to feel supported, to get our needs met, to be in a state of peace as we learn to honor ourselves as a whole the way we’ve been learning to honor our hand. The more we journey with the hand in learning how to just show up for what’s there, feeling what feels good, feeling what feels bad, looking for actual outcomes of our actions the more we are going to be living a life that most people aren’t able to live.
We will start to really see how all of what we thought was ‘wrong’ with us - the ways we numbed ourselves, the ways in which we coped, the ways that we were stimulating and distracting ourselves before - these were all tools we were using to try to MANAGE the pain we were in. They were never ‘bad things’ we were doing for no reason, or just to mess up our own lives.
We were doing them to try to help ourselves survive an impossible situation. We were doing the best we could with what we had, what we’d been given, what we had been shown and with what was expected of us.
We will start to see how SO MUCH of the ‘self help’ and ‘spirituality’ that was being sold to us again was really just a distraction. It was the systems of nonsense dressed up as the solutions to the systems of nonsense. Even the most ‘atlerative’ looking paths were really just coping mechanisms that tried to help us deal with/live with the pain of being normal without ever asking WHY there was so much pain in being normal.
That so much of the spirituality and self help that was being offered were just other ways of denying our true selves, true emotions, true feelings and true reactions - labeling them as wrong and bad - instead of being paths that helped us to actually see what was happening, why it was happening, why it hurt and what to actually do about it.
We will start to find our own connection to spirituality as well as our own ability to figure out who we want to be and what we want to do as we gain the function of our hand, as we heal the pain that was distracting us, and as we start to understand what does and doesn’t work about ‘normal.’
Then one day, we will realize, we have the function of both hands.
We have the dream.
At the same time, we aren’t actually motivated to live the lives and do the things we’ve been told we ‘should do’ when we have two hands.
We won’t be following what everyone else is doing.
We won’t be living for the approval of others.
We won’t be working with two hands, now finally able to live up to society's expectations of what is good and bad, right and wrong, spiritual and not spiritual.
We will have the dream that everyone is trying to pretend that they have - function in both hands. We will likely have way less coping mechanisms, ways of sabotaging ourselves, ways of denying ourselves and pushing and forcing ourselves to be something other than what we are - and at the same time, we will have discovered SO MUCH about what we ACTUALLY want, value, what feels good and bad - that what we now want to DO with our two hands is something totally different than what society says we ‘should’ do.
We will have the dream, but it will look very different than anyone expected it to look - including ourselves.
We will have built the capacity to really know and understand ourselves, what we want and need - and at the same time we will have healed so much of the pain that was driving us before. We will have gone through a journey that has led us away from being so externally focused - looking to the world around us to tell us what to be, what’s right, what’s wrong, what’s good and bad. We will have journeyed through so much rejection and having to be alone that the reality of going our own way, being misunderstood sometimes, not being liked and being excluded and different won’t be so scary anymore. We will have experienced it enough to know it’s actually not that bad.
We will have an ability to truly connect with people in a way we’ve never been able to connect before, because we will have developed a deep connection with ourselves. We may have fewer relationships now, fewer connections - but the ones we DO have will be based in genuine humanity. We will be less defensive. We will be less hurt. We will be less needy in general - and in this we will be able to actually SEE others. For who THEY are. We will be better able to participate in community, to care for the world in a different way, to show up for the world in a different way.
Through this entire journey of healing our hand, of taking it off the burner and going through the big seeming MESS of what that looks like - we’re going to come out the other side a totally transformed human being.
We will start to understand that again, this life is about getting our needs met. We will start to see all the ways in which society and our caregivers didn’t understand us, didn’t understand our needs - and again we will see how ALL of our coping, numbing, scapegoating, self sabotage and the ways we thought we were broken, wrong, bad and shameful were actually us just trying to be safe, trying to get our needs met, trying to fit in thinking that this would lead to us being safe and getting our needs met. We will start to figure out all the ways in which we were being harmed, cut off from what we actually wanted and needed and in THIS we will start to build a WHOLE LIFE based on who we actually ARE, where we actually are, what we need, what we want, what hurts and what feels good - and we will be able to do so because we will have been through the fire of seeing that not being liked, approved of or understood by others doesn’t actually mean what we thought it meant - that we can face these things and still be ok. We can be different and be ok. We can be different and in fact be BETTER than ok.
We will start to really, be able to process what’s going on for us, and in this we will walk our paths of life, doing what we can within the confines of society to meet our needs in the best way we can - having two hands and living a life that will likely make little sense to anyone around us.
THIS is the path of emotional mastery.
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I hope this metaphor has provided some insight and guidance around what this whole path looks like.
Next week we will dive deeper into the more ‘practical’ aspects of what this looks like in REAL life - but for now let the allegory sink in and see if it helps you feel some clarity.
<3
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