A key thing to keep in mind is that the events of our earlier
life are one thing, and how we have internalized those
events is something altogether different. What to one person
was a life-defining moment that has stayed with them to this
day, to another was just an incidental happening that had no
lasting impact. It is often surprising to discover how deeply we
were affected by something that now seems quite trivial, and
also how resilient we have been in the face of powerful
external forces.
Individual susceptibility, then, plays a major role in determining
whether we shake something off or ‘take it to heart’ and carry
it forward into our future life. What we have to ascertain is not
so much ‘what happened’ in a literal sense, but the degree to
which those earlier events are still ‘active’ in the body-mind.
What I mean by this is that when we recount the events of our
life, there are many things we can speak of without any
particular reaction. Yet there will be a small number of
incidents, people or places that carry a certain ‘charge’ for us,
such that the act of thinking about or describing them will
activate a flood of emotions and memories.
It is for good reason that we will often be inclined to play down
the significance of these highly-charged recollections, or to
rationalize that we have ‘dealt with’ them somehow, but the
body has a powerful way of showing us whether this is true or
not. A strong physical or emotional reaction to a piece of our
personal history is probably the single most reliable indication
of something which remains unresolved for us.
Does that mean, then, that we have to understand all of the
nuances of that event in order to be free from it? Probably not.
It is often sufficient simply to allow ourselves to experience
the feelings that the memory still carries, thereby
releasing the ‘charge’ and reclaiming all of the energy that was
tied up in that place.
I would say that a large part of our sense of feeling ‘stuck’
arises directly from a resistance to feeling what the body
needs to feel, and no amount of ‘understanding’ a
particular problem will be much help unless the bodily charge
is simultaneously released.
Next month, I’ll extend this theme a little further into the realm
of unconscious beliefs, exploring how the conclusions
we draw about what happens in our life can also keep us stuck
in old patterns.
