Clearing Emotional Weather
Releasing unresolved and unprocessed emotions is heart work
Hi everyone,
Ram Dass probably said it best when he wrote: “If you think you are enlightened, go spend a week with your family.”
Indeed, ‘tis the season when unresolved and unprocessed emotions have a way of rearing their ugly little heads.
Whether it is family that triggers you, the stresses of the holiday season, or current world events, may today’s piece — excerpted from the 10th Anniversary edition of Your Spacious Self — help you navigate any bumps and emotional squalls that you may encounter.
If you wonder how I process difficult emotions as they arise, well, this is basically it in a nutshell.
Too much to process right now? You can cut to the chase by scrolling down to the slide below.
“It was a beautiful Thanksgiving Day, and my husband and I were thrilled to have our daughter home with us. With dinner plans scheduled for later on, the day was wide open to have some feel-good time as a family.
But it didn't happen.
We couldn't find our groove. We spent most of the day orbiting each other while remaining in separate worlds: my husband going for a run, our daughter writing on her laptop, me working hard to meet a deadline for an online course I was creating. When I was ready to go out for a family walk, my daughter was out running, and my husband was taking a nap.
Seems benign, until you throw in expectation, disappointment, hunger, discord, and impatience—“perfect storm” conditions for my abandonment issues to surface.
Yes, my buttons got royally pushed on that Thanksgiving Day.
However, this perfect storm was different from previous ones. Thanks to my years of practice with clearing, I was able to process the emotional weather the moment I became aware of it. Instead of letting the poor-me patterns fester like they used to in the old days, I closed my eyes and went inside to the place that hurt the most: my heart space. What I felt and saw with my mind's eye was a dark, gucky, chaotic energy swirling around an image of the three of us facing outward, completely disconnected from one another. Beneath all that was a wave of deep, amorphous [unexplainable and historical] grief.
I watched and felt and allowed my squirmy self to not like it at all. I watched my impulses to bolt and disappear and make everyone feel really bad. I witnessed the gucky energy. I felt the gucky energy. I inserted as much compassionate awareness as I could into that gucky energy. For about five minutes I observed and allowed. I became my own witnessing presence. I watched as the area around my heart space began to grow lighter, brighter, and clearer. Slowly but surely, my nervous system calmed itself. I felt restored. I felt like myself again. When I opened my eyes, I felt strangely cleansed and purified. The best part is, when my family finally did come together, my daughter and husband seemed lighter, brighter, and clearer too.
Sometimes, it isn't our home that needs clearing, as cluttered as it may be—sometimes, the space most in need of our loving awareness is ourselves.”1
One final note: This process may not be easy, and your descriptors may be less crass and more relatable than mine, but clearing in this way can be this simple. In the end it’s not the head doing the work. It’s the heart.
Ahhh 🙏🏼
In short…
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Excerpted from Chapter 9 — “Clearing Your Self,” Your Spacious Self: Clear the Clutter and Discover Who You Are - 10th Anniversary Edition, by Stephanie Bennett Vogt © Hierophant Publishing, 2023
Love the “photo” of sitting with the feelings! Thank you for sharing a real experience with the emotional gunk.
Thank you. This post is EXACTLY what i needed today. This holiday season is not meeting my self imposed expectations...Now to go sit with all this yuck swirling inside of me.