Conscious Inner Transformation

It had to happen sooner or later.  Since I’ve changed my eating habits to include mainly fruits and vegetables and cut out stodgy, starchy and fatty foods the inevitable happened today.  Well, its been building for a few days, if I’m honest.  Some of those emotions that I’ve avoided dealing with in the past and instead ’stuffed down’ by overeating comfort foods, has started to bubble up and make themselves known, in no uncertain terms!

That’s the thing with suppressed emotions; if you take the lid off, eventually they’re going to make their way to the surface and scream to be let out!  And if you’re into Conscious Inner Transformation, you’ll welcome them.  Well, maybe not welcome them exactly because if you’ve avoided them, you’re probably scared stiff of them, or in judgment of them in some way.  So welcome may not be the right term – perhaps grudgingly acknowledge their presence as an ongoing aspect of your finding true inner freedom.  If you look at them in that way, you can at least allow them to come up, knowing that you’re on the way to releasing more emotional baggage that you don’t want weighing you down.

When I say ‘release’, I really don’t mean you have to fly off the handle in rage, or literally pull your hair out with grief or whatever – although sometimes, if you’re feeling particularly overwhelmed, there’s nothing wrong with some time out to shed a few tears or stamp your feet, if that’s what you need to do.

Release in terms of consciously transforming is more a grace-ful letting go of what has been long held within and giving it up to one’s higher/greater/divine self, or whatever term you use to describe your higher conscious awareness.  What is happening at this time (and forgive me if I’m telling you something you already know – this is for anyone who is new to this process) – is that what you have chosen to avoid in the past – an emotion that you may have judged as being ‘wrong’, or one that was simply too overwhelming to deal with – is that you are now feeling it returning after its release from your subconscious.   ‘Sub’ – in that its below your consciousness, and at the time you experienced the emotion or judgment about yourself, the way to preserve your equilibrium was to nicely suppress it where you weren’t aware of it.  Hence it ended up in your sub- (or un-) conscious.

As this section deals with eating – and experiencing transformation through changing your eating habits to healthful ones – then the most likely way these unwanted emotions were stuffed down were by the use of food.  Some people overeat to do it, some eat ice cream (although I can’t see the draw in that one myself lol), other like myself as I said above, go for starchy, fatty foods.  Whatever you may grab out of the kitchen in times of emotional crisis though isn’t really that important, its that when you decide to eat healthfully, you will find yourself facing whatever you chose to ignore the first time around.

The good news is that this time you know that rather than being in the actual situation you were in at the time, this is now an old emotion, an old memory, and in the past – although the emotions themselves will feel absolutely real as they come up.  One thing that can also happen is that your subconscious does not know the difference between the past, present and imagined and you might think these emotions are as a result of what’s going on now – or project onto the present situation, making Out There the bad guy.  If you do that, you will find yourself stuck in a loop and will keep coming back to this place again and again, a bit like Ground Hog Day.

I’ve found the best way to deal with strong emotions – and really, it doesn’t matter if they are old emotions being released or from something you’re experiencing in the present – is to simply let them go.

Easier said than done maybe, but a process that in itself is simple, and yet deeply healing and ultimately, profoundly liberating.

In the next post, I’ll describe the process.