Chapter 9 – Healing Emotional Wounds
Emotional pain is considered by many people to be worse than physical pain because the latter will heal in a shorter time than the former. When people experience a traumatic situation some will try to move on without having dealt with the emotional wounds at their ‘root’ level. This is the reality for many people who do not know how to release old wounds that are attached to their emotions.
The benefit that meditation can provide is to identify the root cause and then to develop enough courage to confront whatever it is that is in need of your attention. Acceptance is near impossible for some people to deal with, especially for those who have suffered in some way, either at the hands of another or by a situation that was out of their control at the time – the only way to confront the inner demons of the past is to accept what happened as a necessary experience that served some higher purpose.
Arguing with the past is not favourable, such behaviour will not allow you to learn from the lessons that were disguised as an unfair or terrifying experience. Putting up walls or barriers to block out the past-tense will keep you rooted firmly in the hole from which you’re trying to escape. Life with meditation will remove the excess thoughts that drive you deeper into a place of misery and despair.
Practiced daily, meditation will make difficult work seem easy, but at first it will seem like a tremendous struggle to sit in stillness and in silence for any length of time, long or short. Meditating offers tranquillity, calmness, it allows you to become open minded instead of closed minded all the while, new ideas will enter your thinking space and the things that you once struggled with become more simplistic and you will immediately recognise the difference in your attitude and your worldly views.
The best part of meditation is that the healing process that takes place is automatic once activated. Healing occurs whenever the mind is relaxed enough to affect the body in a relaxed way. There is no relaxation for the body without the mind being in this state first, hence the old but famous cliché – mind over matter – it all begins ‘upstairs.’
Emotional healing can afford you a life that is rich with happiness, fun, excitement, friendship, great career fulfilment, creativity and an abundance of possibilities and opportunities for a stable and a secure future which you believe in. If any real healing is to occur in your life then you need to accept the things that you dislike or even feel a sense of hatred for, as holding onto these snares will keep you from living a fruitful life like you deserve. Many people go through a lifetime of living with depression due to something which happened so long ago, yet, when the opportunity comes around to make a permanent change it is often missed because some people do not recognise it as the golden opportunity that it is, and this is due to being ‘closed minded.’
Whenever you hear people trying to motivate and inspire others you might usually hear them say something along the lines of; “keep an open mind” or “be optimistic,” and they may not know what they mean by it at the time but there is a reason why we have these clichés. Having or keeping an open mind is an essential requirement for moving on in life. Being open minded will allow you to spot the opportunities for advancement whenever they present themselves. You will be able to swiftly identify the hidden or masked potential that is nested inside opportunities that at first, may seem like an ordinary meaningless occurrence of some sort, but with your mindset being developed, you’ll know what is before you each and every time.
This is what meditation can offer to you, the ability to avoid further potentially traumatising scenarios with the gift of foresight, and enough open mindedness to know the difference between something of value and something which holds no value at all. This is healing at its best, prevention is always better than cure but if a cure is needed then meditation is a choice that you would do well to make. Too many people are suffering needlessly each year after year, unaware that there has always been a way to put the past to rest and there was always the opportunity to start again and rebuild one’s life to a satisfactory standard, only will power and perseverance are needed.
The body will respond to your demands but first it has a few demands of its own; rest and recuperation, nutrition, fitness, hygene etc. and if these requirements are all met when the body needs them then it will serve you without delay. The lifestyles that humans live is demanding to say the least, so many people make unfair demands on their bodies without providing the body with its requests, yet they expect a top performance and if this does not happen they become angry and they start with all of the self-criticism which overcomplicates matter further.
Physicality depends much on how you engage with your mind and your emotions on a daily basis. Meditation gives you control over your life, your body needs a guide as it cannot and will not guide itself without the necessary input from you, regular like clockwork. There must always be a good relationship between the mind and the body if any positive and lasting results are to be gained.
When the balance between mind and body is haphazard then illness can kick in, as the body will begin to draw on any reserves of energy that is meant for other purposes, the strain is then raised and because the body cannot cope with the imbalance it eventually shuts down. The mind needs to be nurtured with adequate care and attention, this way it is fit and able to serve you, even when your demands are high, your body will manage to cope if you’ve tended to its every need.
Meditating aids the immune system in defending the body naturally against disease and infection, meaning that the immune system must also be kept in good working order to save you the hassle of falling ill every moment that a new bug is released to cause havoc and distress among people. Well, imagine not having to draw for tablets and other drugs because you are healthy enough to ‘prevent’ disease from making its mark on you – meditate and build yourself to such levels of immunity.
Sound too good to be true? It is as true as you make it. Remember that the majority of diseases, bugs, and infections are not natural, therefore they do not already exist inside of you like how cancerous nodes do, they are not ‘triggered’ but instead they are external and this means that they have to invade the body before they can turn your life upside down for a time. However, if your immune defence is on top form because you’ve given it what it needs then it will be as though you’ve employed an army of warriors to do battle against the enemy – disease.
They’ll make an airtight defence for you and the enemy will have no option but to retreat, leaving you free to continue on with your life, even unaware of the prior attack. The body will act on autopilot with enough meditation in place to develop it to such levels of independence. Only a need to maintain your efforts at staying healthy are needed once the body has its new input from you, it will soak up the new lessons like it would with nutrients, the difference will be felt by you and it will be recognised by others who may provide feedback to you about what changes they see in and about you.
More often than not, it is other people who will come to tell you what they notice. Like a person whose goal is to build muscle, if they’ve followed correct procedure and have persevered then others will see the results sooner that the practitioner will, because they are not in the mirror looking for the increase in muscle size each day, therefore they will recognise the results before the practitioner does. Life is indeed like that, when people concentrate more than is needed it is easy to miss the point.
This happens because too much of the mind’s resources are being heavily taxed for one area of life, leaving the other important areas crying out for attention until they shut down.
You see it all the time with people who are over enthusiastic about gaining something or making something happen that they cannot see how far they’ve gone with their efforts, and before they know it, all is ruined because they put too much into their goal/desire and forgot about the rest of their life in the process.
This is another root cause of illness, neglecting other important areas of your life will mean that you spent the rest of your time trying to fix things, and that is no real way to be living life on this planet. Life needs to be experienced fully, and when people have to spend the majority of their days being bed-ridden because of their neglect or ignorance.
Healing is an opportunity to improve yourself on a level that many people are not really aware of. Chances are that you yourself have been unaware until now, still, what matters most here is that you make a conscious decision to make a conscious shift in your everyday thinking pattern.
Self-help is the preferred method of survival in this world, because the help is from yourself, therefore you know what you’ll contribute and you’ll have no trust issues like you might do with people whom you have never met before. Becoming a centred individual is about drawing on the focus that is available at the centre or the very core of your being, shutting out external noise, controlling multiple thoughts enough to aid your concentration and being open to receiving that which is good for you.
Your life depends on you, the vessel that you were given to live out this life in must be properly tended to for maximum efficiency. How far you get along your own personal road or mission depends on how well you maintain that which you’ve been given. When meditating, a person can make huge discoveries that are life changing in positive ways.
Meditation can raise your level of awareness to heights that allow the body to help itself mend and repair naturally, without the majority of input that would usually be needed from you.
The important thing is to remember that you have a responsibility just like any other person does. Life will always present you with obstacles to your health, therefore, there is no sense in stalling your bodily needs because of laziness or procrastination, it just leaves a mountain load for you to have to contend with at a later date. Why put yourself through such a needless period of stress and why put your body through the mill if you’re not going to provide the requirements that it needs to serve you better?
If you believe in mind over matter but you can clearly see that your daily actions are not aligned with these principles then you know you’ve got your work cut out for you. Make things easier on yourself by tempering the processing centre (mind) with regular meditation that will build the body’s natural resources to do battle for you whilst keeping illness and disease at bay, freeing up lots of energy for you to make use of, opening your mind to the infinite possibilities that exist. Recognise the opportunity to change and steer your life in a new, rewarding direction, fit for any eventuality, completing old projects and moving onto new ones.