Emotional Wool

As I sit here, I am practicing something I often suggest to my clients. I am allowing emotions to ‘move through me without resistance’.

It’s the resistance that acts like ‘glue’ and holds the emotions in place. It gives them an attractive patina of age and they become familiar. Then we engrave our initials on their surface to claim them as ours and as if by magic, they become all that we are. So much so, that the idea of letting them go (no matter how painful and debilitating they are) would be like death itself.

The first thing to understand is that emotions are not permanent. Even those you’ve engraved with your initials… Letting them go won’t diminish you, in fact it’s not even a matter of letting them go, they left a long time ago. What you are experiencing is an echo, one that keeps bouncing of your ‘mind walls’ and with every reverberation another emotion (that is identical to the last) emerges. It feels to us like the same emotion, but it’s more like a long strand of emotional wool that keeps unwinding; there’s a connection but it’s a different part of the strand that we are experiencing. This is true for all emotions, it can be exhausting trying to stay in a state of ‘joy’ permanently, it’s not practical to maintain that level of buoyancy, we need the cycle of ups and downs as it allows us to discover who and what we are.

Visualise this ‘emotional wool’ for a moment, seek out that emotion that keeps resurfacing for you, one that blocks your progress and elicits that foreboding sense of self-doubt – (that might be mine, you choose your own), you get the idea. Immerse yourself into this visualisation – without judgement nor analysis:

·      What colour is the wool?

·      What texture?

·      How big is the ball it’s being pulled from?

·      Do you see yourself tugging at it? Forcefully? Gently?

·      Is it falling behind you or knitting a comfortable jumper around you?

Giving your subconscious a visual of the experience is the first step to changing it. Now that it’s clear in your mind, instead of a ball of emotional wool, you might see pieces of wool. Each piece is a different colour, texture, length. You can stop ‘tugging’ at the wool as you are seeing it in its entirety, it allows you to just experience that one piece in a deeper way. Let it move through your experience rather than resisting it.

Now the emotion ‘feels’ valued, understood, it needed to be heard and to be seen. That piece of emotional wool might stay for a few minutes, an hour, even a day or two. Welcome it - if it needs tears, cry, if it needs anger, yell. Eventually you’ll lay it down with love, and as you walk away from that little piece of emotional wool, send it gratitude for allowing you the space to give yourself the gift of feeling valued and understood, you needed to be heard, and to be seen – and you were the only one who could do it.