Over the tail end of last year, I found myself saying something inaccurate to friends, family, and clients.
You can become so good at creating reality that you become utterly bored with your life. Your soul craves mystery.
It wasn’t entirely clear to me what that meant at the time. Or why I felt so keen on saying it to everyone I spoke with.
When Control Replaces Creation
Eight months of soul searching later, I can see where the inaccuracy in my statement was. It’s not that you become so good at creating reality which leads to an empty boredom. It’s that you get too focused upon controlling reality, which removes all spontaneity from the equation.
Even spontaneity becomes a manufactured event.
That realization brought me back to life. It led to a few other key insights about what it truly means to feel your feelings.
The Masking Emotions
Worry, fear, anxiety, frustration, anger. These are masking emotions. They show up as part of our intellectual control mode.
That intellectual control mode, whether it’s racing into action, formulating an extensive plan, or visualizing a more desired outcome, is a safety mechanism. We use it to not have to feel the deeper underlying emotion that wants to be healed.
It’s scary to feel terror or anything that shows us we’re not really in control of something inside of us.
I Became a Feelings Factory
But we can become so good at controlling things that we eventually arrive at a point where feelings themselves are intellectually manufactured.
This was the sad state I found myself in at the end of last year. Intellectually able to conjure any feeling at will, but completely incapable of feeling anything organically.
Through various energetic and mental practices, I taught myself how to create feelings I preferred rather than feel what was buried deep within me. I had turned myself into a robot. “I have emotion for you, human.” But it was all mental.
An Energetic Facsimile
I wasn’t really feeling emotion. I had created an energetic system that allowed me to feel an energetic facsimile to emotion that wasn’t actually feeling at all.
In an effort to control reality, I had lost my humanity. That concerned me, as I recognized how many others were doing the exact same thing. Artificially creating emotion facsimiles and calling it living.
Unraveling all of that falsehood has meant unlearning much of what I thought I knew to be absolute fact. I’ve had to dismantle ten years worth of belief systems in exchange for something more human and real.
Back to Actually Feeling
Instead of inventing ways to avoid feeling and calling it goal setting or risk management or Plan B, I’ve been allowing myself to feel all of the emotions those strategies were designed to disguise and mask.
It’s not pretty work. I’ve been a sob face a lot lately. But I’m feeling everything again.
When a deadline comes up, or someone is getting angry at me or around me, I don’t move into tiger mode and lock up my feelings for protection anymore. Instead, I just feel vulnerable and hurt, and I maybe cry a little until I don’t need to feel that way anymore.
What Attraction Actually Teaches
The Law of Attraction, come to find out, isn’t about creating control strategies to get your dream life. That’s a false premise. It gets the order wrong.
The Law of Attraction is an intricate system that brings you life scenarios which show you what emotions within you need to be felt fully. Once those emotions are felt and cleared, then your reality responds to your soul condition, not just your mental fantasy and manufactured feelings.
Your Window Is Covered in Mud
It’s as though each life is a big room and we’re each a window on the wall. The light from outside wants to flow through us and into the room, but our windows are covered in mud: our emotional injuries.
The light tries to get through but can only find small cracks and openings, so the room remains dark.
We use all kinds of practices to try and clean the window. But if we’re not addressing the cause of the mud, our emotional injuries, every time we clean the window the mud is quick to come right back. As we clean our window of deep, muddy, emotional injuries, the entire room begins to fill with light.
Feeling Is the Real Practice
By feeling our feelings instead of inventing avoidance strategies, we clean our window of causal emotions and get rid of the mud for good. Then everyone is able to bask in the light which fills the entire room.
Anytime something shows up in my life now, I ask myself: What is this event triggering within me to feel? What emotion am I avoiding that created this event to show me my true soul condition?
And I just sit there and feel whatever comes up. I feel it fully. I feel it until it has completely moved through me. And I move into the next segment of my life, now more alive.
This is shadow work in action.
If you’re ready to process what’s been running your life, explore the Shadow Work practices.