Whenever there is a storm, open both doors
A character on the PBS program “Call the Midwife” was a former prisoner of war and was talking to a midwife who had been committed to an internment camp when she was nine years old and had to watch her mother and sister gradually die from various abuses. and hungry. She realized that the midwife was harboring ghosts from her past in her present, and told her that her mother always opened the front and back doors of her house when she robbed. The reasoning she had given him when he was a child was that in this way, the misery of the storm could not find a home there. It would blow.
This got me thinking about how much debris from past and current negative emotional experiences we hold onto, mainly because we are not taught to open both “doors” so the debris doesn’t find a home within us, by others who either never learned this or never. they found out for themselves. Because of this, we tend to let these squatters of negative or traumatic emotions take up residence within us. We harbor them like the criminals that they are. We feed them as if they are paying visitors rather than the intruders that they are in our joy and peace. We are the ones who pay to let them stay.
Most of us are familiar with the quote “This too will pass,” but we generally take this to mean that the experience will eventually end. We can improve on this and decide to let that also mean that we must allow our negative attachment to the experience to pass through us as well. Otherwise, the experience doesn’t end for us, right? We keep it alive. We repeat the story to ourselves and to others, perhaps over and over again. We drag it down or surface every time we get shot in a particular way, as if a thought we have rushes into a filing system to invoke supporting evidence as to why we have a right to feel the way we do, when we are in deed. In fact, what it means is that there is a wound that needs to be healed.
The way we treat ourselves as a result is that we don’t love or approve of ourselves as fully as we should. We feed low self-esteem or false arrogance and / or behaviors that do not serve us or do not bring us joy, peace or satisfaction. We feel less, so we expect less. We don’t feel complete. We wear our past as a garment, brush our teeth with it, instead of embracing our present and anticipating our future from a positive perspective, mindset, and frame of mind.
The way we treat others as a result is often against the background of anger, frustration, or fear. We react to them more often, perhaps, than we engage and establish a real connection with them. We don’t trust ourselves, what we project onto them. We don’t trust them, because they are projected onto us, whether we realize this and are uncomfortable with the reflected image or we don’t realize it and we blame them for how we continue to feel, sometimes long after a negative experience. step.
The way we respond to life as a result is that we don’t trust life. We do not believe or allow ourselves to believe that life loves and supports us, and this mindset prevents life from fully reflecting love and support as our experience. We do not take or hesitate to take calculated risks and strive so that we can learn, grow, and expand our awareness and experiences. We stray from our authenticity and wholeness.
In Dave Markowitz’s book Self-Care for the Self-Aware: A Guide for Highly Sensitive People, Empths, Intuitives, and Healers, which, by the way, is an excellent book for anyone who needs to deal with pain and negativity, includes a technique called the keyhole. It is a technique similar to the philosophy of opening both doors of the prisoner of war character. Dave realized that when we are in the midst of negative energy, or we know we will, the energy will enter us energetically (explains why energy shields are not as effective as we would like or expect). That energy then gets trapped within us.
This is not far-fetched. Just think about the last time you were with someone negative and how you felt during and after that interaction, possibly for a long time. Your negativity was absorbed and carried away by you, unless you used an effective technique to avoid or release it. Dave even states that it is important not to let negative energy touch the sides of the keyhole, meaning that it does not touch you in any way. The negative storm moves through your keyhole without touching it, with nothing in it taking over. That is an image that is valuable.
In life, “pain is inevitable; suffering is optional.” So many around us practiced holding on and allowing emotional suffering to take over that we couldn’t help but absorb this as a natural way of being and behaving. We feel bad about ourselves or we feel like we will be judged a bad person if we don’t do life this way, until, of course, we learn better.
Maybe this image can help you. Do this the next time you feel unchained, or you could deliberately choose some emotional energy that you want to get rid of now. Imagine that emotional energy as a bit or a pile of debris on the hallway floor that connects to the front and back doors of your house (your inner self). You go to the back door and open it. You go to the front door and open it, stepping to the side. You invite the Great Breath of the Source to blow every bit of that debris through the back door and into the ethers, which the Source is happy to do for you as an act of total love and support for you. Every part of that hallway is now impeccably clean and fresh. Your ideal experience, and it may require more than one such cleansing, is that what once triggered or held you back to be a mere memory that no longer holds your attention for more than a brief second, if that.
I realize this is good advice, but not necessarily easy to practice, especially if you’ve been in the habit of taking in negativity and not knowing exactly how to deal with it. It is especially difficult to remember when you are in the middle of an emotional storm. But, just as it’s a good idea to remove clutter from your living and work spaces, it’s a good idea to remove clutter from your indoor home, so that you can move there with the same ease, grace, and constructive and productive function that you desire from their physical spaces. Such openness leads to inspired ideas and an inspired life.
And when you know a storm is coming, or you are suddenly in one, if you can remember to open both doors within your energy, do so. If you do not remember this at the time, remember to use a technique as soon as you can or feels appropriate to you, to clear any residual negative energy so that your inner home can return to its true beauty, joy, and peace. It may take time, patience, and practice. But … it’s a good practice, one you’ll appreciate.
Practice progresses.
© Joyce Shafer
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