she returns to her job and quickly slips into severe depression. For no apparent reason, she is unable to work and her previous enjoyment of life is gone. She goes on antidepressants, yet the depression does not lift.
When her husband Rich contacts me for an appointment for Kris, he sounds desperate. It has been months since she's been off work and nothing is helping; in fact, nothing is changing the least bit.
As Kris sits with closed eyes, she senses a weird feeling in her stomach. Focusing attention on it, she describes it as a black swirling inside that is trying to suck her in and she is afraid of disappearing.
I ask Kris's imagination to call in an image of someone to be a comforting and safe traveler with her on this journey, and her mother shows up. With Mom, she feels safe to bravely move into the black vortex and ride it around and down to the source. As they swirl downward, Kris begins to feel intense dizziness and nausea. Surrendering to the feeling, she and Mom glide down until they hit bottom in an image of the first ER room where she almost died. Watching herself in the scene, she sees Kris lying on the gurney with a broken leg and eyes frozen wide in terror.
Gazing into her own eyes, she begins to cry, even sob:
I thought I was dying . . . I thought I'd never see my kids again . . . Never again to enjoy the beauty of the mountains and sunshine. I thought it was over—I thought my life was over. If I tried hard enough maybe I could hold on—but I couldn't—my chest was getting tighter and tighter and I couldn't breathe. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't force in another breath. I was dying.
Moving her attention into this image and bringing her mother with her, Kris hesitantly looks out of these terrified eyes and senses the feeling of dying. She moves into this emotional experience as if it were today, and her awareness sits in it, as it organically recedes after a few minutes. Soon there's room for remembering the reality of her physical recovery. Slowly and naturally the frozen feeling of dying melts, and her appreciation for life returns. The feeling of being stuck in a horrible memory has been brought forward, allowed, and organically released. Life has come back!
After this deeply visceral expression of terror, Kris's symptoms of severe depression disappear, and she gradually returns to her job and her life. She finally feels the gratitude for surviving the biking accident she couldn't authentically experience while she was emotionally stuck between life and death. The previously stuck memory has been integrated, and she is present again.
Kris's story demonstrates how unprocessed intense emotion goes underground and creates a subconscious block even when the original traumatic event resolves. Furthermore, her journey shows how health can be regained as soon as the original event is integrated in the mind, heart, and body.
JOHN'S STORY: WELCOMING THE HIDDEN MESSAGES IN PAIN
Rheumatoid arthritis struck John when he was in his early forties. Now fifty, his hands are misshapen, his sleeping severely interrupted, and he takes pain relievers daily as frequently as permitted. Feeling oppressed by his physical condition, John requests help. As he closes his eyes to sense his body, the first thing to attract his attention is discomfort around his neck and left ear. Instead of following his usual habit to medicate, he focuses on the pain, and there comes a subtle lessening of the physical pressure. As he moves his awareness into this painful area, the discomfort gradually dissolves, and he feels a sense of calm.
As he practices moving into the pain and listening during several monthly sessions, John notices that spontaneous insights sometimes pop up: “I need to slow down. I'm doing too much,” or “I'm angry with my wife. She hurt my feelings when she said I wasn't trying to lose weight. How can I talk with her about it and say it so she'll hear me instead of getting defensive?”
When he is not constantly trying to get rid of the pain, John begins to respect it as a message from his body. As he starts to value his true feelings, he notices a corresponding change in his medication use: he doesn't need it the same way. In fact he goes from using analgesics 24/7 to one to two times a week, primarily when he's excessively tired.
Over time, these insights cause John to change other habits as well. He begins to eat healthier foods and to communicate more honestly when there is a conflict with family members or employees. He speaks up instead of avoiding issues and thus begins to feel a sense of personal power for the first time in his life.
As John continues a collaborative relationship with the pain, he grows happier, healthier, thinner, and better able to navigate relationships. He quits trying to stop the pain and sees it as an expression of his hidden, authentic feelings. John has freed himself from the oppression of illness. Instead, he receives the symptoms as helpful feedback guiding him to live a healthier and happier life. His story demonstrates how welcoming emotions hidden in physical pain brings helpful insights and lessens physical discomfort. Our bodies naturally give a voice to those things within that need our attention. We merely have to listen and heed the messages.
NANCY'S STORY: HOW OUR FEELINGS HELP KEEP US SAFE
We've all known people who genuinely sense and authentically share their emotions without hesitation, freely expressing what they feel. Nancy is one of these people. What you see is what you get. She doesn't beat around the bush. Having known Nancy over many years, I can tell you that the outcome of her way of being is evident.
For example, when she was a young psychotherapist at a community mental health center, she volunteered for a research project that paired difficult teens with therapists to climb and rappel nearby mountains weekly for six weeks. The project was going very well, and Nancy enjoyed this unique way of interacting with her young clients. She also discovered she loved rappelling! No wallflower here, Nancy enjoyed thrill-seeking.
On one of the group's outings, she stood on the top of a cliff looking down into a narrow canyon between two steep mountains. When it was her turn to descend, she just couldn't do it, even though she had done so gleefully in the past. In her honest and natural style, she expressed her fear to the climbing guides—her body was refusing to go. They decided to check her equipment and found a disconnected rope—the rope that would have suspended her body, in fact. If she had gone over the edge, she might have fallen to her death.
Nancy is a beautiful example of how the intelligence of our organic, body-centered emotion knows more than our intellectual mind. When we pay attention and listen instead of denying, suppressing, fearing, or disliking our spontaneous feelings, we gain great access to our natural intuition (knowing something without understanding how we know it). Nancy's experience demonstrates how our inherent feelings help keep us safe in spite of what the logical mind thinks. It's wonderful to know the power we possess!
HOW IT WORKS—PRACTICALLY AND SCIENTIFICALLY
We frequently speak of our feelings as if we are them. You hear it in our patterns of speech: “I am angry,” as if to say, “I am anger.” However, feelings naturally arise as passing states of awareness and are not part of us. Rather, they give feedback and then expire. Think of it as similar to how a thermometer measures our internal body temperature at 9:00 a.m. at a healthy 98.6 and, three hours later when we are getting the flu, it registers 101.5. The feedback that we have a fever allows us to make an informed decision about whether to take fever-reducing meds, call the doctor, or go to bed and wait it out. A feverish reading is temporary and will change. In the same way, our emotional temperature fluctuates depending on external and internal events and our reaction to them. Looking back at Kris's real-life story, we see how her bike accident and life-threatening allergic reaction created intense emotions that would have been temporary if she had not gotten stuck.
The origin of the
