Sores

We humans carry sores within ourselves. Sores of pain, sores of hurt, sores of fear, and many are allowed to go uncured throughout our lives. Sores on our skin heal automatically, without the need for conscious treatment, and this is enacted by our autonomous body, which has learned throughout the ages to gather its resources, and place its efforts on cleansing, reconstructing, and healing the physical injuries we acquire, all the while remaining true to its myriad other functions that keep it alive, mobile, and useful. The physical body knows how to heal itself autonomously.

With the emotional body, this is not so. When sharp words pierce it, when sudden separation from a loved one rips at the tissue that attached to them, when violent abuse crushes it with unwelcome willpower, when it is burned by another's outburst of rage, whether directed or undirected, our emotions are injured, and we feel their hurt. The damage is not visible, the leaking subtle fluids cannot be seen, but the physical body reflects the inner state, oozing out tears. To these injuries it replies too with fight or with flight, for it recognizes danger, and desires protection.

The immediate response is the same in the physical as in the emotional, but its healing is not. The response of the emotional is consistently the same: It contains the injury with a barrier of fear, of repulsive quality. This contains the hurt and keeps it isolated, allowing us to continue along life without the constant feeling of hurt. Later the fear itself is too surrounded, by scab-like guardians that mean to prevent further damage. The guardian can be a fiery wall of anger, who threatens to burn anyone that gets too close. Or it can be a hefty solid dense wall of stone, numb and unmoving, impervious to what is within and without. And more often than not, the boundary between the fear force field and the outer guardian coalesces, and congeals into a sticky, unwieldy slime of shame.

Thus is composed our sore, and thus it reaches stability, the damage no longer felt. The person can then continue to live and move and act, unhindered by its hurt. As time passes, if the person is overly drawn towards the external, the inner can be forgotten, these damages inclusive. Though unseen and evadable, these injuries remain, and they affect the shapes, patterns, and health of our overall flow, for they obstruct it. The injury location is a no-pass zone, and our inner denizens must reroute their flow in order to continue their unending chores, for the guardians are mighty, and temporary rerouting seems preferable to again feeling that hurt.

And yet we feel it, and it affects us throughout our lives. At unexpected moments, other people's innocuous actions trigger fear, shame, or anger with disproportionate strength. And we inexplicably find ourselves in situations that trigger the same sharp emotions over and over again, the manifested calls of the injury to be remembered and cured. And as we take notice of this pattern, we move gradually from thinking it a random coincidence, to realizing their frequency is too high for randomness, to blaming the universe or unknown external forces for one's misfortune, to finally realizing that the only common factor in these situations is oneself, and within oneself the cause must lie.

The emotional body does not heal itself. I don't know why. I surmise it has not evolved that capability as the physical has, and that it is learning to do so through the experience of our generations. In the meantime, we must do it ourselves. Healing only comes from within. Just as no physical bandage, disinfectant, brace, cream, surgery, powder, potion, pill, chant or ritual can replace the regenerative and self-mending abilities of our physical tissue, neither will advice, therapy, friends, lovers, family, fame, wealth, admiration, nor power over others replace the healing abilities of our emotional tissues. But because they are not yet autonomous, we must learn to do it ourselves.

To heal, an emotional wound must be recognized, accepted, felt fully, and allowed to flow. Each of these four steps follows the one before, and we guide them with our awareness. A person's awareness, most often directed outward, is turned inward, and the will is summoned powerfully to keep it so.

Sometimes a layer of humor or forgetfulness surrounds the guardian, diminishing its seeming importance, or makes it difficult to find. If one has consciously chosen to heal it, however, one has already realized this outer layer is merely a diversion, and can step through it.

To recognize the wound, one must face the guardian. The wall of raging fire will respond, and threaten to shoot out flames to burn the threat. The flames are shots of blame and intended attacks to that which hurt it, and they will try to go out and attack the one we deem responsible, and violent thoughts and urges may appear, desiring to project hurt at the offenders. It is at this junction that the will to remain inward is needed. The flames, manifestations of the congealed urge to fight, desire to shoot onto the external world, and still focus on the fight, not on the healing. At this point recognize that there is a wound inside, and that nothing in the external world - not the cause nor a savior - has the responsibility, and much less the ability to heal it, be it through an apology, a punishment, or revenge.

The stone-like guardian may be difficult to find, but its key scent is denial. The guardian is approached with curiosity, and a genuine desire to know the truth. These old incidents we regard as minor, yet keep blipping in our consciousness at unexpected moments, and that we keep dismissing with automatic reactions - these can indicate guardians of numbness. Ask yourself, "Is it true?" Does that event really not affect me anymore? Is there an emotion underneath that indifference?" And stay there, ponder. Here the will to remain inward is also necessary, for denial seeks other objects to distract the focus. Ponder on the truth of that point, until you have found genuine satisfaction of your own truth. And if you find something you didn't know was there, continue inward.

Shame is often the first deterrent to acceptance. Once past the guardian, the existence of an anomaly within is undeniable, and this can conflict with our feeling of self-worth, which often holds the ideal being as "whole, healthy, and undamaged". Just as one can be ashamed of a physical injury because it can indicate clumsiness, recklessness, weakness, or merely imperfection, so can the existence of an emotional wound stand in conflict to our feeling of self-worth.

But our self-worth is deluded unless we know our self with truth. Therefore, when shame creeps out and begs you not to proceed, see it. Do not heed its woeful cries, and do not deny it either. If it is felt, it is real, and it has its place and role. But it bars the way to the central wound, and its usefulness is past. See the shame and feel it. Know it to be part of you, and with focused awareness, feel the shame until you feel it melt away, to be processed or discarded by your emotional channels. Unpleasant or not, it is part of you.

Fear is now exposed, and the body trembles. The hurt begins to be felt, and our systems react in turn. We are trained to flee from pain, but this time we must face it. Memories of the injury, therein stored, seep into the consciousness, and bring the original pain with them. Then with an honest intent of self-exploration, step into the hurt.

The wound's memories rush through, and the pain is fresh again. The bodies may react with cries and tears - let them, allow no shame to hinder their flow. Only you and the painful memory are here, and you relive it once more. You have the opportunity to choose how to feel about what happened, and to change that feeling. It is now the time to feel.

Let the pain flow where it is led, and simply let it move. Do not diminish it, do not exacerbate it. See it for what it is. See the memory, see yourself in that memory, and explore whatever calls. Be not the victim, who diverts the pain by blaming unfairness, and pretend not that you are immune to the hurt, turning a blind eye to the wound. Shine on it bright with focused awareness, and explore all its painful corners with intent of truth.

Once felt and seen fully, the pain subsides, and its power is diminished. Its barriers have been crossed, and their power is greatly lessened. With the open channel, the fluids in the wound can now move, and exit the barriers where they were pierced. Let them flow, let them go, like old blood and pus yearning to escape. Feel as the old comes out, feel as the new seeps in, bringing help for the reconstruction. Awareness has come in and disinfected with truth. Now the body can begin to clean and restore.

Some wounds are deeper than others, and one exploration does not always fully heal a wound. It is the first such incursion that finds the defenses most powerful, however, and once seen, one already knows the way, and one can consciously choose to explore again when the moment feels right.

Also, such a wound and its barriers, if we grow with them for a long time, we grow habits and patterns around them, as we learned to evade and protect them, day after day after day. These do not vanish the moment the wound heals, and may remain present for long after. However, if their originating cause is healed, they lose their foundation, and can be gradually massaged to further balance, with no energy to push back against it. Through all this process, it is helpful to recognize that our emotional body is a highly complex system, and that each new exploration is an opportunity to know it, and ourselves as a whole, in greater truth.

Layers

We process in layers.

Body:

If you feel overwhelmed, if your sense receptors are overloaded, and you cannot process them yourself, worry not. Pass it on. Offer it to the emotions, who will process what you sense.

Allow your pleasure to evoke happiness, let those graces turn to delight.

Allow your pain to become sadness, then turn to anger, grief, or fright.

Emotions:

If you feel overwhelmed, if your feelings are blocked or stagnant or raging, and you cannot process them yourself, worry not. Pass it on. Offer it to the mind, who will process what you feel.

Allow your delight to bring curiosity, let it find fruits on the path.

Allow your grief to rise to reason, let mind understand it, and find the power that in it remains.

Mind:

If you feel overwhelmed, if thoughts are lost, reason is exhausted, or you find idle beliefs or triumphs, and you cannot process them yourself, worry not. Pass it on. Offer it to the soul, who will process what you think.

Allow your conquests to rise to the witness, surrender them to trust.

Allow your confusions to be seen by the seer, who knows them completely and remains in trust.

May we take count of the products in our storerooms, process those we have procrastinated, and let go those which have expired. May we then unclog our channels, and keep them open and ready to allow the current.

Preference

It is well known that as people, we prefer to have good things and to experience good events, and that we avoid those that are bad. What is not as widely realized is that these tendencies are not merely attributes of what is good and what is bad; they are their definitions. It is not the goodness or the badness of things that determines what we like and dislike - it is our preference towards the phenomena within the world that define the good and the bad within it, and which colors our experience with a rich spectrum, from rosy gardens of delight to the toxic trenches of misery.

It might be argued by some that this is not so, and that there are good and bad things which apply to all people, regardless of who they are and what they prefer. There is, after all, a general agreement that stealing, killing, and lying are bad actions, that sadness, fear, and pain are bad, and that happiness and pleasure are good. It is good when resources are sufficient and abundant, and it is bad when they are scarce, is it not? Isn't it good to be beautiful and intelligent, and bad to be ugly and dumb? How does personal preference play a part in these obvious, basic concepts? How can these commonalities exist between billions of people, each with their own unique preferences, if not due to the intrinsic goodness and badness of the forms, qualities, and actions themselves?

A key to this puzzle lies in the fact, often overlooked, that we share vastly much more in common than that in which we differ. Were it not for the relatively minute attributes that differ between us, which people so often emphasize so sharply, our bodies, our equipments, are virtually identical. Our bodies' shapes, their abilities to move, perceive, process, and express, their reactions to the same types of inputs, are unchanged from individual to individual. They react in similar fashions to qualities of pain and pleasure, to sadness, anger and joy, and they use the same chemicals and motions to express the same qualities and reactions. The success of our very language indicates how much in common we all share, for we have managed to incorporate abstract, intangible meaning into common sounds and symbols. In the grand space of possibilities, this accomplishment should indicate how virtually indistinguishable we must seem, from a perspective outside of the human drama. It is this ancient shared foundation that induces so much of the common good and bad that humans are familiar with.

And yet we are not identical, and in fact the amount and depth of the attributes that we express and make each of us unique seem limitless as well, and they only grow as our concepts become more complex and our discernment is refined evermore.

From both these sides; from our vast reservoir of common ancestry, forged together through eons of interplay, experimentation, and survival; and from the myriads of attributes, qualities, and choices in the spectra of countless and growing dimensions of differentiation that we humans explore and create, led on by a powerful inquiring mind, along with the exquisite thread of experience, fabricated with colors and shapes no one has ever seen, and woven upon terrains never before ventured; from these two sides of our composition, our preferences arise.

And seeing many of these preferences common and obvious, as well as the common good and bad they induce upon the world, many conclude that goodness and badness are traits inherent to the forms, and attempt to find in the forms what is "the good" and what is "the bad". In the objects, in the actions, in the habits. Then when they find in other people another set of values - when that person sees as bad what one finds good, or viceversa, a logical impasse is reached. "If I know that this object is good, and that person thinks this object is bad, then I know (s)he must be mistaken, because this thing is either good, or it is bad". This conclusion occurs in an instant, unawarely in all but rare cases. And just as unconsciously, it triggers a reaction to fix this disparity, to help the other realize that his point of view is mistaken, often resulting in arguing, friction, conflict, and violence, since the other person likely reaches a similar conclusion, and a reactionary feedback loop is created.

But their unaware reasonings are based on that specious former postulate: "Goodness and badness are part of the forms". Were we to realize this postulate is false, that our own unique preferences are what filter and tinge the world around us with the good and bad that feels so true, that they do not belong to the form and matter but to ourselves, very many would realize the futility of persuasion in many situations, and perhaps that energy now lost to argument and conflict could be repurposed to exploring the values that can be garnered from these individual differences, and in turn use these values towards further growth and unity.