Resentment

On the path of energy medicine I have come to understand so much about life that I had not previously considered. From an outsider perspective I fell into the same line of thinking as the rest of us, that energy medicine was a spiritual practice. It was steeped in mysticism with fairy tales of esoteric beings coming to magically take away sickness. As with many other things we encounter in life, all of my assumptions turned out to be wrong.

Somewhere in my studies I encountered the work of Barbara Brennan. She was once a psychologist and a physicist working for NASA. Amidst all of the books I had read on energy healing which were hokey to say the least, I found Barbara to be of sound mind. She spoke from real experience with real people, and used her scientific mind to understand what truly was going on in her experience.

One of her theories is that all of our health problems start first with our thought patterns. These thoughts influence our emotions, and our emotions have a palpable energy about them. The energy we generate with out emotions effects every cell in our body. How they grow, whether or not they can repair themselves. Even Mikao Usui (the discoverer of Reiki) is quoted saying “Our cells are always listening to our thoughts.”

Our “suck it up and deal” attitude towards our own feelings is a real problem in our culture. We’re always holding it in, swallowing it down, burying it under food or alcohol; anything as long as we don’t have to face them. We tend to think that the longer we put off our feelings, then the better off we are. Then we eventually get to a point where we’ve put so many things on the back burner that we can’t keep track of it all. We feel the pressure of all this overwhelming emotion but we’ve been avoiding facing it for so long that we’ve forgotten why it was upsetting us. Still, the feeling persists.

So here we are living under this mountain of feelings we refuse to face, and we turn to a doctor to help us because we don’t know why we’ve been feeling so bad for so long. They gladly prescribe the appropriate medication and it numbs us to feeling all those emotions. Except the problem is still there, but it’s suppressed by the medications so we live to not have to face it for one more day.

Whether we are numb to our feelings because of medication or dissociation the energy of those emotions is still present and still having an impact on our bodies. We tend to think that we store our thoughts and our emotions in our minds, but many people who have experienced any kind of body work have experienced emotional releases while having other parts of their bodies worked on. Sometimes it’s not just emotions being released, sometimes it’s a memory or a recurring thought pattern. The whole body has the capacity to store information, and when you apply body work and release it the client experiences release because the energy of that thought or emotion is liberated.

In my years doing body work I have seen some extraordinary healings, and the most profound of those healings have come with some sort epiphany or offering up of old trauma or stuck feelings. After this happened a few times I started to pay more attention to how our stuck emotions have been affecting our health.

So now when I work with people, I have a fairly streamlined intake process that I use to help assess what these emotional blockages are that people are holding on to so that I can try to find a way to help them release those emotions so they can get on with their lives. I have seen the early stages of emotional trauma building in the body, and I’m quite familiar with that late stages and the severity of disease that coincides with it.

The most insidious of emotional holdings is resentment. Resentment is the core of any major life threatening illness that I have seen in my office to date. Resentment is like someone putting a knife made out of lead in your stomach and you hold onto it to make sure it stays there. Then over time the lead seeps from the knife, and poisons the blood, slowly but surely taking down system after system until the body can no longer function.

Why am I so certain about resentment as an underlying cause for disease? Ever since I have come to accept this as being true, I use the information I gain about my clients to hunt down and release that resentment. Just the act of freeing them from their resentment has reversed major illnesses in a matter of days after the session. I have seen such dramatic healings across various ailments and the one common denominator is the release of resentment.

Though I see resentment as the kingpin of toxic energy structures in the body, it’s not the only thing to cause disease. It just seems to be the one with the most devastating consequences. Other emotions can impede our well being too. Emotions like anger, fear, depression, anxiousness, jealousy, and many others can have a deeply negative impact on our health.

I like to think of our emotions as like water. When a stream flows naturally through it’s bed the water actually becomes purified and clean. When part of it is blocked the water starts to back up, pool, and becomes stagnate. The stagnate water encourages the growth of microbes and toxic chemicals will build up, and the entire dammed up section of the stream becomes polluted. The same thing can happen with our emotions.

I don’t want to suggest that we shouldn’t get angry, or jealous, or depressed, but we shouldn’t hold on to our feelings. When we experience a sensation of holding on, we should just find a way to focus on letting it go and restore that flow. Emotions are just information and they can teach us much about ourselves and our experience with life. We should hold them long enough to receive those messages and then let them move on.

So in the future be mindful of the nature of your thoughts and how they help to create emotional constructs in the whole of your being.  We were put on this earth to live our best lives, to be happy, and give love wherever we can. If we are living any less than that, then why even bother? Life can be so hard sometimes, I think it’s in all of our best interest to live as well as we can. If not only for ourselves then because we can inspire others to do the same.