Let us have a look at energy. One fact is that you cannot trap energy. It has to, and does, keep flowing. Do you really think that you - a Human Being - have the ability to trap something as powerful as the "Stuff" of the total Universe? I do not think so.
[Continued from Part 1]
So what about the mind and what really happens when we experience trauma and pain in our past?
What happens?
What happens is stagnation.
Scenario:
In the North Americas there is an animal that lives in the clean mountain streams. It is only relatively small compared to the effect its lifestyle can have on even the greatest of rivers. The animal is the beaver and there are not many little animals more industrious than the beaver. Let us look at how the beaver operates.
Imagine a clear stream, being fed by freshly melting snow from high up in the mountains. The beaver needs somewhere to live, and because of it's nature instead of living next to the river, our little beaver friend decides that it has to do it differently. It wants to live across the river, and it does this by chewing through the trunks of trees and dropping trees them down across the river until it constructs a dam.
What happens from this point is purely academic. When you dam a river the water behind the dam slows down. The water does not run as fast, and therefore towards the banks on either side you can find areas of stagnation where there is no fresh flowing water to clean and clear up the moss and debris which accumulates in stagnant areas.
There is a certain amount of flow going through the dam however. Even the beaver knows that you cannot completely stop the flow of a river. It would simply build to such a point that it would eventually cause a major catastrophe and the river would, by sheer weight of water blow the dam apart. So the beaver knows that the river cannot be completely stopped. There has to be enough water flowing through to avert disaster.
However, eventually the stagnant area collects more and more debris and the river becomes more and more clogged until the inevitable happens and the few key logs which have been holding the dam in place give way and the whole dam breaks apart.
The stagnant areas are no longer a problem as they are automatically cleaned by the fresh flow of water, the moss and debris built up behind the blockage are carried away. But by this time the beaver is long gone. It does not like living in stagnant conditions, so it has moved on and started again somewhere else.
Perhaps our minds work the same way. When there is trauma and painful events in our lives we automatically place a protection system around the hurt and trauma. I believe that this is an automatic process that we simply put in place because we do not have the insight or ability to deal with it at the time. We put things on "hold" until we are strong enough, or have the maturity and knowledge to understand and cope with the experience.
When that time of greater maturity comes we unlock the experience and allow the fresh flow of wisdom, knowledge and understanding to clean the debris out of the way for us.
The process of "Cleaning up the Past" should not be anything more than a powerful positive focussed recognition of a natural process. Why then do we take so long to get around to doing it?
Simple, it is because when something happens in our life and it hurts, we usually stop what we are doing and get into the bad habit of believing that we are bad and deserve what has happened. Or we spend years blaming someone else. Or it hurt so much that we can not find the momentum to carry on. So we stop and rest, to gain our strength to find the courage and determination to keep going. We lose focus and become trapped in the emotion of the experience until our emotions become our own worst enemy. While it was necessary to experience emotion during the experience, once the experience is over then the emotion is no longer necessary.
The natural process of the mind and its healing ability is not the slightest bit interested in emotion. It is only interested in the experience itself, and the knowledge, understanding and eventual wisdom gained from that experience. For wisdom is knowledge and understanding without emotion. It is simple fact.
But the truth of the matter is that this internal intelligence cannot fix anything, IT cannot clear anything, IT cannot heal anything until you do one simple thing. And that simple thing is to give IT permission to do what It knows how to do best.
The difficulty is that you cannot give permission to something you do not understand. You cannot give permission - and mean it - merely by having an awareness of this incredible power within your mind. Unless you understand what you are giving permission to and for, then I am afraid the outcome is going to be in direct proportion to the level of understanding you are prepared to accept.
The thing that prevents you from reaching the level of understanding required is your limited sense of who you are. Your sense of who you are is the product of a process that began back around the time when you were born. Then you learnt very quickly that almost everything outside of yourself was superior to you. That you had to, by sheer will and determination, strive to be better and better to even dream about being good enough. And when you thought you were good enough then you were - and probably still are - accused of being egotistical. Whatever way you have attempted to aspire to the heights of self-awareness and self-realisation, there is the inevitable negative attempt to discredit you.
The real problem is that the criticism usually comes from within your own mind. So let us not worry too much about external influences just yet.
We have allowed to be placed within our own Conscious Critical Analytic Process a self-bashing technique unsurpassed in any other creature on this planet. (And we are the Intelligent ones?)
Instead of entering constantly into the arena of spontaneity and newness, we constantly enter into the world of self-created past experiences and misery, perpetuated and compounded by the limited sense of our self worth and fear.
Fear of what? What is it that we are afraid of?
Mainly that we might get it wrong. Afraid that there is someone watching for us, and that their mission is to wait for us to make a mistake and then to severely jump right down our throats. We can even foolishly believe that the "someone" watching us is not even a real person, that they are "Spiritual Guides" and therefore the impact of doing something wrong is then multiplied a hundredfold.
We wait in absolute fear that this is so. To the point where we are afraid to even try to do anything. Afraid to even try and "get back up" and have another go at life.
Because when we attempt to "get back up" and have another go at life, we are inevitably told, by those 'learned' few - either Academic or New Age - that before we can carry on, we have to go back and release the blocked emotion which is trapped around certain experiences.
Fact: Emotion has absolutely no power to influence you or your life unless you deliberately choose to give it the energy to do so. And the only way your mind can provide that necessary energy is for you to direct it to do so. You alone have the power to get off the merry-go-round and step into the world of self-control, self-mastery and eventually total personal FREEDOM.
What a devastating thing this "too scared message" is to tell the beautiful Intelligence that dwells within your mind. No wonder it gets agitated and upset. It is trying to keep you moving, to keep the energy flowing. Once you generate a direction and focus in your life, the sheer weight of your desire will begin the automatic process of providing new, vital, clean energy to those areas of the mind that have been deliberately protected because of the trauma and pain of those experiences.
The mind does not get agitated because of trapped energy. It gets agitated because of the lack of energy caused by protection systems having been put in place which are now no longer necessary.
In other words it as simple as this. The Intelligence within your mind has the ability to know when it is time for you to move. IT knows when it is time for you to remove the protection systems. IT knows that you have the strength and knowledge to move forward now. And IT also knows that if you do not have the required knowledge now, that it is available to you. You simply have to be in a frame of mind to begin to accept the knowledge with an open mind and the ability to question that which you already know (because what you already know is sometimes the opposite of what you need to know).
If what you knew was sufficient, you would not be in the position you are in right now. It should be obvious that you need to discover new aspects of life and its relationship to you and your environment, both internally and externally.
As Edward DeBono put it: You can either keep digging the same hole deeper, or you can spend your energy digging a new one and uncovering new ground.
You cannot expect the mind to heal old experiences with old knowledge. IT needs - and can provide for you - new knowledge and an expanded and deeper understanding of who you are and what you are capable of, and IT can demonstrate to you abilities that you have probably only dreamed of having.
Concluded in Part 3
By Derrick Hill