Looking back, it’s painfully obvious I was clogged with old, repressed emotions until my vault couldn’t fit anymore and it just broke. Shit got messy.
So these days I’m ultra passionate about feeling emotions as they arise, honouring them and allowing them to move through me.
Processing emotions keeps you energetically clear, mentally healthy and it keeps you free.
The reason I repressed emotions in the first place, was the same reasons so many of us do.
Trauma. Bad shit and pain that I didn’t want to feel. Humans don’t want to feel any of the hurty feelings. Why would we? We just want all the good ones.
Like most people, I was never taught how to process emotions, and I wasn’t taught why it’s so important. It’s certainly not my Mum’s fault because no one taught her either. We just pass these toxic habits down the ancestral line, just as we do with so many dysfunctional programs that cause us harm. And we think this is totally normal.
I learnt how to repress emotions when I was young. I didn’t consciously learn, I wasn’t aware I was doing any of this – it was 100% unconscious behaviour.
Like many of us, I got handed some tough situations from a young age and I repressed my emotions to cope.
I was raised in a religious sect that was isolating and controlling, and I was a super-sensitive, black sheep, problem child (I still am) who was always in trouble, just for being me. I was physically punished over the years in a way that hurt me physically, but damaged me far more emotionally.
And I didn't know what to do with these feelings.
My punishments made me feel like a wounded animal. They created a lot of trauma and confusion, because I couldn’t understand being hurt by people who are meant to love you. So I withdrew into my inner world to cope. I hid under my fringe and I learned to push my feelings away.
Years later when I left this sect I was disowned, and I pushed away all my feelings of rejection and lack of self-love. This knack for pushing away anything uncomfortable stayed with me, and it led to me developing serious long-term addictions to alcohol, methamphetamines, weed and gambling.
Repressed emotions always bite you later.
The vault seems like it serves you by keeping these split-off suffering parts of yourself away from you. Carl Jung referred to these denied parts as your “shadow-self“. But it never goes away. It continually leaks out of the vault affecting your outward life adversely.
It leaks out in triggers that arise in relationships. You can hear whispers of the repressed parts of YOU in quiet moments. You feel something is not quite right in vague feelings and there’s a chronic, unsettling inability to harmonize with yourself. This discomfort is always there.
Your wounded inner-child is always knocking from the shadows of the subconscious. It wants to be seen, acknowledged and brought home.
I know now this what happens when you don't process emotion that comes from shitty events.
Repressed emotion becomes ‘stuck’ in your cellular memory – it’s frozen in time, and triggers will taunt you as fresh as if it happened yesterday.
This is what Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is – events that are ‘stuck’ because they were too big to be processed. I’m diagnosed with PTSD from “developmental trauma” as well as Substance Abuse Disorder and Gambling Affected Disorder. Repressing emotion can grow into destructive monsters.
As I grew older, these repressed emotions and memories began to shape my ‘personality’. I avoided silence and stillness. I had no self-love which poisoned my relationships. My rejection wounds were always being triggered and as a result I was emotionally unstable.
Because these repressed emotions are trapped in the subconscious, we often have no awareness. We don't even know WHY we're like this. We think it's just normal. It's our life.
These things are not normal. They are not “just how life is’ or bad luck, or the short end of the stick, or fate, or ‘our personality’. They are dysfunctional symptoms of repressed emotions and events.
We self-sabotage because of the programs stuck in our subconscious minds. Most of us aren’t even aware of it, because the subconscious mind exists out side of the reaches of conscious awareness. It’s hidden in the shadows.
Maybe some people can live a lifetime like this, but I know many people can’t. Unhealed trauma is a massive reason for suicide, or early death from accidental overdose.
And sometimes life just piles it all on, and then pulls the rug out. I reached this breaking point after my dad’s suicide in 2014.
This was the catalyst that broke the vault that held all my repressed emotions. My mental health got worse and my addictions went through the roof. My nervous system got fried from skipping around increasingly faster to avoid my mind, my repressed emotions and my triggers. After two years of this – in 2016 – I hit my rock bottom.
A year and a half into my rock bottom, I began drawing. I didn't know it at the time, but this is where a break from my own patterns, pain and programs began.
The way I practice, is by pressing pause on my thoughts and the subconscious programs that operate in the background, and I do this, by putting my full focus on what I’m drawing. Up until this point, I’d NEVER pressed pause on my mind before. Silence make me very uncomfortable, but this was different because I had something to focus on.
Gradually my consistent practice began giving me little gifts – like a reason to get out of bed in the morning. I gradually felt a tiny spark of lifeforce ignite and I began to notice feelings like gratitude – tiny glimpses at first.
All seeds are handed to you in tiny form - it's your job to grow them.
I didn’t know it at the time, but all these benefits were raising my frequency through raising my gamma brainwaves. And soon bigger shifts began to filter in. Finally I began to grieve for my dad, and I grieved for my own life that I’d destroyed from my actions as an addict.
I had several big paradigm-shifting sessions – instant shifts in awareness, which are a sign you're in the high gamma brainwave state.
In a split second, you can see some huge issue in your life from a different perspective, and it’s big enough that it creates a significant shift.
I was able to detach from events in my past. Through self-awareness I learned that I’d stuffed a lifetime of trauma in the vault. I understood how my issues were created from my repressed emotions, and I did the work and collected all my lost, rejected, split-off parts of myself and brought them home, back into my wholeness.
This is shadow work.
This is healing.
When you're no longer unconsciously repressing emotions, they begin to move again.
It’s not weird and uncomfortable, because mindful drawing holds your attention. It acts as an anchor, and gives you something to focus on while your emotions are moving again, through you. I cried a lot of tears, and it hurts, but it feels cathartic. It feels right.
Now, when I recalled those events that I’d stuffed away – instead of triggering me like it used to – it’s different. I can observe it from a safe, detached, neutral space. I am no longer stuck in it because the emotions, are no longer stuck in me.
When you clear out your repressed emotions and traumas, you'll feel far lighter.
You’ll feel clear. You feel less cluttered. You’ll feel less weighed down.
I know my energetic body very well. What these heavy, repressed emotions are – which feel like cobwebs that cover and cling to you – is energy. Energy can be high vibration – clear, light, healthy; or it can be low vibration – slow, heavy, sticky, muddy ‘stuck’ energy.
E-motion – is energy in motion. It must move through us. Anything that does not move becomes stagnant and becomes toxic and it will make you sick. First energetically, then mentally and emotionally (through things like depression, anxiety) and eventually it will manifest physically through disease.
‘Dis-ease’ is literally being ill at ease, and out of harmonic alignment with your own energy field.
We must learn to honour ALL our emotions, not just the 'good' ones.
Not being in touch with our feeling centres is a massive problem in our society, especially with our men. This bullshit like “men don’t cry”, “man up”, “toughen up”, “don’t be such a girl” – which shuts the emotional centres down through shame – is an absolutely toxic program.
When you deny the body the freedom to feel, you deny the body the freedom to heal.
It gets passed down from one hard generation to the next, and it is killing our men. It’s resulting in mental health damage and it must stop. Either we embrace the new way (we’re beginning to), or this toxic archaic way will eventually die out.
As mental health and suicides statistics on Earth grow, more and more men are speaking up.
I salute you guys. Whether you’re a farmer, sportsman, rugby player, bikie, or other ‘strong manly’, hard, type, or anyone who was taught to shut their emotional centres off, we need to reconnect with our feeling centers – all of us. It’s the only way for a healthy society to function. And it’s ever-so-gradually changing. I love seeing it. It’s beautiful and inspirational. I want to hug them all.
Our emotions – our feeling centres – are the key to consciousness expansion. When we feel, we heal. And when we feel, we can access higher states of consciousness.
These days, I honour emotion. I grieve and cry whenever the feeling arises. Sometimes it rips my heart out and feels like it’ll end. But it always does. I can feel it move. It feels sacred and cathartic. This connects me to a deeper experience of life. And this expands my consciousness.
And emotions raise your gamma brainwaves.
When I record my brainwaves and tap into certain emotions, my gamma waves rises in peaks and troughs like a rollercoaster. It is through the feeling centre that we are able to expand our consciousness. It is a portal of sorts. An activator.
Feeling and honouring our emotions is a golden key to raising our frequency.
Feel your emotions – ALL of them. Honour them. Teach your kids, your friends and your loved ones.
Give yourself the space to express them and feel them move through you. Feel the energy in motion. If you are unsure how to do this, head over to my tutorials page and I’ll teach you the ways that I learned, through the practice of mindful drawing.
Remember, mindful drawing is not about becoming an artist – that’s just a cool side benefit. It’s a very effective vehicle to train your mind to function in an entirely new way, that creates different traits, different outcomes, and an entirely different reality.
Image credit: @thecosmicfeminist
