HOW MANY TIMES HAVE WE HEARD the phrase "Body, Mind, and Spirit" bandied about? Or how about "the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost", if you prefer a more traditional way of arranging the players within the phrase? It has become a cliché, especially in alternative or New Age circles that our culture has sidestepped or looked past the feminine principle. The feminine principle, the Mother energy, is inextricably linked to emotions. She-in-us, regardless of gender, is our emotional body, among other qualities with soft, purring features like desire and receptivity and intuition. And, let's face it, this emotional side of who she is has been thoroughly denied in most of us, even in women.

As consciously growing adults, many of us have started edging towards acceptance of our emotional reality. We are starting to notice when we are feeling angry, sad, hurt, or scared. Sometimes. Other times, we just know we don't feel good, but we don't know why. And underneath our so-called negative emotional backlog of anger, fear, and grief that we so often don't even know is there until it gets triggered, lies the gold... denied joy, spontaneity, laughter, childlikeness. It seems the nature of the beast that when we deny the hard feelings, the ones we'd like to experience go away as well, to one degree or another. The spontaneous and joyful gifts of childhood are the casualties of inner and outer repression.

Denial is hereditary, passed down through generations. As our society matures, many parents are no longer swatting their children for emotionally expressing sound, as many of our parents and their parents did... still, the encouragement to deny expression is everywhere. It's there in the well-meaning parent joggling a baby to "help her stop fussing", it's there in distracting young children with TV and videos and food rewards if they would just quiet down, it's there in laws and social mores that discourage adults from being outwardly emotional, especially if it's loud.

The "why's" of our misfired lives are hidden underneath the emotions and often can't be accessed mentally until the anger, grief, hurt or fear has had its emotionally expressive say. I have found many clear understandings about what is going on with me after I've expressed emotion, but could not find that level of clarity beforehand, no matter how much I tried to get clear before expressing my feelings first.

Some suggestions: find safe ways to express that do not verbally or physically harm you or others. Hit soft things; yell into down pillows to block your sound if sound safety is an issue. Ask your higher power to fill you with loving light. Form peer healing circles, and uncover your own denial within that group. This can be a do-it-yourself process with the occasional support of those who do the same thing in their lives. A therapist is not always necessary.

Give yourself safe, proactive triggers, so that it is not always life's hardships in your face that are putting you through your paces. I've made recordings of triggering music and lit candles and prayed in order to trigger the pain I knew was lurking and impacting on my life every day. Surrender to what rises in you with as little control as possible on the expression. If triggered by another in the space, move away from them when possible, unless the two of you have a longstanding agreement to do this kind of interpersonal work together and are each willing to feel the "cascade" of back and forth triggering along with the leaking blame that spews inevitably as the sparks fly upward. Taking responsibility for your involvement in each and every controversy is important.

Fear 'or' Love
"So what're ya gonna choose: fear or love?" This is the ultimate rhetorical question, posed by smugly smiling gurus of all ilks down thru history. There is no possible answer; the two forces are not really oppositional. There's no way of "choosing" because fear is felt in a millisecond. It's already there, and it's quicker than you are.

Fear is embedded in us from the start, and when the sleeping giant of fear gets stirred by an inner or outer event, the real choice around what to do with it is love it (by acknowledging, accepting and expressing how it really feels) or fear it (denying it - pushing it away by mentally lifting out of it with affirmations or a strong intent to "overcome it").

The way to truly transform "crunchy" emotions like fear, rage, or hurt is to let the emotions vibrate by allowing the sound to come up from the place in our bodies where we feel the emotion, into our throats and out our mouths as sounds; weird sounds, loud sounds, tears. This is the only way to organically transform an emotion at its root. We have all tried cutting emotions off as a way to "get rid of them", separating ourselves from the feelings in various ways, but that kind of denial catches up with us sooner or later.

I propose the following definition of fear: a deep, non-mental mistrust that something which is perceived to have power over us might hurt us in some way. Or, an indefinable mistrust of ourselves or another. Mistrust is the keyword. Fear, or any emotion that we have labeled negative, can be born into love thru accepting its presence and allowing its expression. And, new understandings will fill us when we are done expressing about why we felt the way we did. Fear or mistrust, once within love, becomes trust.

A big part of our problem with emotional expression is, we've been taught from birth to deny the fullness of our emotional expression, and here we approach the roots of denial. Emotions if completely accepted for what they are, express themselves in sound. A baby in its first year of life is a ball of sound. Slowly but surely, inner and outer forces conspire to contain the level, breadth, and freedom of expression until expression in many adults happens rarely if ever. We feel it sometimes rise up from the inner depths still, but we routinely push down this rising inclination to make sound... which then squeezes itself out of us nonetheless, once we've magnetized a particular life experience big enough to trigger it (funny how that works). Without self-acceptance, that expression looks as twisted and feels as yucky to ourselves and others as we've judged it to be.

"So how will you approach your fear, with fear or with love?"

Fear of Fear Itself
Fear is not the problem; it is simply another emotion to be felt, like grief or anger. Fear of fear is the problem. Fear of fear is rooted in judgment and hatred for how it feels to be afraid. This isn't wrong; it's actually quite important to notice what is in the way of feeling and expressing. If you hate your fear, that's the starting place. Hate it, but let the hatred blow up big and in sound. Judge it, rage at it, spew out loud how much you hate it. Stomp around; imagine putting your fear in chair and whap the life out of it with pillows or something that won't damage the chair. Eventually, releasing those judgments of fear is going to be important - we'll talk more about this in future articles.

A friend wondered what feeling her fear was supposed to do for her. She said that what she usually did whenever fearful pictures arose in her mind, which was often, was to suppress the feelings that came with the pictures.

Acknowledging, accepting, feeling and expressing fear in wordless sound or body movement is often extremely uncomfortable, especially at first. Expressing fear safely and with as much acceptance as you can give it actually relieves the pressured feeling inside that any growing, internalized fear bubbling to the surface gives us. That's what expressing the fear can do for you.

Most people don't even recognize that emotions are a part of the self, and a part that needs healing because of routine, lifetimes-long denial patterns. We cannot successfully cut off parts of ourselves, but that's precisely what we attempt to do when we suppress. Emotions are a part of ourselves, and fear only feels bad because we have denied it for so long. Any emotion that gets routinely denied feels dark, monstrous, alien, and scary. Fear doesn't feel nearly as bad to me as it used to because I don't deny it nearly as much as I used to.

Before you feel it, the fear feels like a dragon in the closet; as you go into it and come out the other side, the dragon shrinks away, perhaps to a salamander. The judgment that comes up for everybody who considers expressing fear for the first time or first few times is, "If I dare feel or express this fear, what I'm afraid of will manifest". My experience is that the opposite occurs - if I dare to release the fear by allowing its expression it doesn't need to draw a reflection of itself in order to trigger it. It's the denial of fear while focusing on mental pictures that attracts what we fear. Often if I can release the fear ahead of any event, the event either doesn't happen or manifests much more benignly than I'd originally feared. In this context, "nothing to fear but the denial of fear itself" would be an accurate coining of the old maxim.

Worry is a more sublimated form of fear. It's the tip of the iceberg of a terror held in the subconscious parts of our being. The continuum looks like this: worry -> anxiety -> fear -> terror. They're all forms of the same emotion, depending on how much of it is consciously felt or held in a given area. Fear is an emotion, but is not universally understood, recognized or acknowledged as an emotion, like anger or grief is.

Fear can be expressed in several ways; allowing the energy of it into your jaw to make your teeth chatter, allowing spontaneous weird sounds to emerge, or by crying. Private or safe space is best for emotional expression. Expressing fear means giving in to it, allowing it up into the throat, into the voice, and then abandoning control and letting it happen. I nearly always feel better afterward I release, with more understanding of the triggering situation than before I started. This understanding doesn't always come immediately, or on the same day, but it does come.

I grew up hearing the phrase, "the less you do, the less you want to do". It applies here; the less you are in touch with your emotions, the less you want to be. It takes a conscious willingness and intentional effort to go there. Like anything else, it gets easier the more you practice.

© Peter Cloud Panjoyah, 2007

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Peter Cloud Panjoyah is a healing facilitator living in coastal BC. He has been in private practice for fifteen years as both a spiritual counselor specializing in emotional trauma recovery and as a professional bodyworker specializing in Somatics, Swedish, Shiatsu and Thai massage. While in process of completing his first book, to be entitled Healing and Dealing: Essays on Becoming Wholed, he has posted samples of his essays on healing published in various Gulf Island periodicals on his blog at http://earthmatrix.net/healinganddealing.