True Emotional Freedom
Enjoying peace with feeling.
This is a sneak peek from our autumn 2015 issue, out now. Pick one up free in one of our stockists around the country to read the full article, or subscribe to have it delivered.
By Sandy Newbigging
Emotions are an intrinsic and inevitable part of being human. You will experience a whole host of feelings, some comfortable and others less so. When it comes to enjoying true emotional freedom and better health, you need to learn how to be at peace with how you feel. You may notice I didn’t just suggest that you ‘get rid of your negative emotions’. This is because meditation goes beyond managing and controlling emotions to give you the ability to be in harmony with however you happen to feel. With many of us having been raised by adults who were unwilling to experience the whole range of their own emotions, it is rare in my experience, to have been taught to feel emotions fully. We have learned to tone down or turn away from intense feelings that are perceived as problematic. Taught that some emotions were positive and others negative, we may have been conditioned to avoid the ‘bad’ ones at all costs. This has led to fearing certain feelings and constantly trying to control them, believing that it is somehow wrong to feel bad sometimes. Two years after I started meditating regularly I went to my spiritual teacher to tell him that I didn’t think the meditation was working. Knowing that it was only my expectations that needed some help, he enquired, “How do you know it isn’t working?” I explained that I was still feeling anxiety. His response was nothing short of mind-blowing as he declared, “Peace is not the absence of emotions.” At fi rst, my mind couldn’t even compute the statement! Peace is not the absence of emotion? How could I experience peace, if I was feeling anxious? It made no sense at all. However, these seven words became one of the biggest things I’ve learned in my meditation journey.
This is a sneak peek from our autumn 2015 issue, out now. Pick one up free in one of our stockists around the country to read the full article, or subscribe to have it delivered.
