12: Transforming Emotional Blocks
WHAT IS THE LESSON?
Misidentifying With Limitations
Your emotional blocks are areas where your ego personality identifies with fear and limitation. The way through limitation is to allow yourself to hold two levels of awareness at once. Your deeper awareness could be considered your soul’s view of your life. And, your more surface-level understanding could be considered your conditioned personality’s view of your life.
You do not have to fight, criticize or reject your emotional blocks. When you learn how to open up to your deeper, intuitive awareness, your emotional blocks can be transformed by a greater truth. Your deeper soul awareness will always carry more power and will be able to transform your more superficial conditioned beliefs.
So, it is helpful to remember to touch into your deeper awareness and ask for the lesson that you need to be learned whenever an emotional block seems to be stopping you from going forward.
Moving Beyond Victimhood
To move beyond the victimhood that can surround adverse circumstances, you could aim to accept that everything that happens in your life is an opportunity for growth. We are constantly learning lessons. It is helpful to consider that an adverse circumstance you are experiencing is helping you to overcome a limiting belief about yourself.
First, though, set aside all standards of perfection, unrealistic expectations, comparisons to others, or the notion that your life should always be easy. Ask your Higher Self to help you learn the lesson within a current challenge. Ask about how to overcome a current limitation or emotional block. Ask, and you will receive an intuitive answer.
When I am in the midst of a difficult situation or a recurring emotional block, I ask myself, “What do I need to learn to graduate from this ordeal? The aim is to be permanently free of a negative emotional pattern or situation. So, to overcome a limitation, I know I have to do something I currently think I cannot do.
The reason it can seem so impossible to overcome a specific limitation is that there is a lesson I have yet to learn. Whenever I look behind difficult outer circumstances, I can eventually and intuitively find a hidden learning opportunity.
What do you think you cannot do? What do you want to do? What seems impossible about what you want to do? Moving through limitations involves breaking old conditioned programming with as much determination and creativity as you can muster.
How Will You Graduate?
At certain stages in my life, I have felt the inner imperative to expand my creative capacities. I have experienced times in my life when my life structure felt too small and I needed to expand despite inner and outer barriers.
I remember longing to leave my full-time job in healthcare many years ago, so that I could move into full-time private practice as a therapist. On an outer level, my workplace was fraught with toxic workplace politics and was very stressful. I asked myself who I would have to become to change my situation.
It took many years to master the inner changes I needed to make to “graduate” from that job. There were many hidden lessons along the way that gradually emerged into my conscious awareness. I first received guidance that I needed to stand stronger in my authentic sense of self. I needed to learn discernment and define healthy boundaries.
I was also intuitively guided to create online courses to earn extra income on the side, so that I could eventually leave my job. And still, I did have to stretch, grow, and overcome many emotional blocks and immaturities within myself before I could finally “graduate” from that job.
Many of the changes I made initially seemed impossible from my level of awareness at the time. And then one day, after many inner changes, my situation changed miraculously. In quick succession, I left my job in the big city, we moved to a smaller city, and I opened my psychotherapy practice.
The online courses I had created while working full-time in healthcare bridged the move financially. I also went into a state of very deep prayer before it all changed. I had done everything I could think of to make the needed inner changes to change my outer life. Then, I asked for Higher Help.
Looking for Hidden Lessons
Before confronting all of the challenges I faced during my ten years working in healthcare, I used to quit jobs in the midst of emotional triggers, much to my financial peril. I ran away and burned bridges without confronting the lessons I needed to learn. I usually blamed it on workplace bullying instead of looking inside myself for how I need to change and become stronger.
No longer blaming outer circumstances, I realized that there were many things that I could not understand about my deeper emotional patterns that had me landing in the same kinds of circumstances over and over. I had to access my spiritual intuition to clear out my negative unconscious patterns. (See my intuitive collage practice below.)
Relinquishing Failure
My intuition has helped me see a bigger plan for my emotional healing that does not necessarily keep up with worldly success standards. Worldly expectations of success can be shallow, unrealistic and even a wrong growth path at times.
From your original soul blueprint, you probably did not design your divine growth plan according to human expectations. What might seem like a failure according to worldly expectations can be a great triumph according to your divine plan for growth.
If you look at your current life, you might see certain limiting conditions. Those conditions are not necessarily meant to be permanent, and may not be meant to last for the rest of your life. You might be meant to demonstrate the path of overcoming certain conditions, and this could be part of your divine plan.
Beyond worldly success, you might learn how to navigate complicated relationships with greater empowerment. Or, you might have an illness journey that is refining your character. You may be experiencing financial struggles that need to be overcome, step by step.
You may be meant to demonstrate that you can overcome physical limitations, or that by adopting a spiritual approach to life, you can live within limited conditions without letting them hinder you from being who you are and doing what you came here to do.
In any case, you might transcend your limitations to the point where they no longer matter; they no longer prevent you from being who you are and letting your light shine in the world. When you grow spiritually, your life has not been wasted, no matter what worldly expectations might say.
Like many empathic women, if you are overly nice, you may not yet have developed a strong sense of self. If you yearn to discover a way to self-reflect, self-recognize, and self-affirm your inner truth, this is the course for you.
In this program, I offer you a process of spontaneous collage as a way to self-mirror your repressed emotions, desires and dreams through pictures so that you can heal depression and discover who you really are.
Collage for Self-Discovery is on sale this week!
12: Intuitive Collage
Expressing my creative power is a big theme in my expressive art. It often just bursts forth in full colour, like in this intuitive collage.
Repressed power is common for empathic women. There can be a fear of showing up and shining. We learn early to put on a “nice mask” to belong.
Empaths can easily fall into the traps of hiding, sacrifice, victimization and depression to avoid their purpose and destiny.
I often think of “niceness” as expressing sameness. Confidence is an unwillingness to homogenize.
12: Shadow - Vanity
This 12th Shadow is deeply involved with issues of personal power as well as the human yearning to express the purest qualities latent within your soul. It allows you to progress to great intelligence and artistry, but at the same time prevents you from stepping into your wider heart. Vanity is afraid that if you come from your heart, you will lose your power.
All you need to know is that as long as you experience yourself as separate from life — as long as you feel the strength and wonder of your individuality — vanity will still be there, quietly keeping pace with you.
Vanity does, however, have an arch-enemy — which is love. Vanity keeps you from truly loving another because it keeps you isolated. You may be beautiful, intelligent and virtuous, but still, with vanity, you will remain defended against others. The more evolved your consciousness becomes, the subtler and therefore more powerful your vanity becomes.
Repressive (Introverted) Nature: Elitist
There are two different types of vanity: coarse vanity and refined vanity. The repressive nature of the 12th Shadow is the refined version, which emerges in certain characters as elitism. Elitism is vanity working undercover. These characters may agree with you outwardly, but inwardly feel very differently from what they say.
Often, they refrain from making any comment, preferring to remain detached. This is the domain of the spiritually evolved — those few who have done a lot of work on themselves. These people inwardly feel that they are clearer than most others around them.
Such vanity ensures that such a person cannot make the leap that their inner being most longs for — the leap into permanent higher consciousness. This only begins when the awareness of our own vanity finally dawns.
Reactive (Extroverted) Nature: Malicious
Malice stems from anger, which in turn stems from fear. The reactive nature of vanity can use the Gift of Discrimination as a means of hurting others. Whereas the elitist withdraws into silence out of fear of being seen as weak, these people openly use their substantial vocal gifts to inflict pain on others.
Like all classic victim patterns, these individuals usually feel put upon in some way and react maliciously without considering the potential harm their words or actions might cause. These people really know how to push other people’s buttons through the power of their voice. They can hurt people like no one else can. Their malice may not be premeditated, but it is usually brutal and ends in disaster for them.
12: Gift - Discrimination
Discrimination may not sound like much of a gift, but when you genuinely understand the 12th Gift, you will see that it has great power. To discriminate is to know inherently what and who is healthy for you in life. The energy of vanity is simply self-destructive unless it can be put to good use.
Discrimination is precisely that. You take your vanity — the urge to be better or somehow purer than others — and you turn it into art. The 12th Gift is deeply associated with the arts — with music, with language, with dance, with drama and above all, with Love.
11: Spiritual State - Purity
Vanity and purity are mirrors at the two ends of the spectrum of human consciousness. With vanity, your lower self falls in love with itself, and with purity, the Higher Self falls in love with itself. You might say that purity is when the Divine falls in love with You.
This can only happen when you come within the sphere of Divine love. Your behaviour, your thoughts, your feelings, the very air you breathe must resonate to one purpose — what the Sufis call falling in love with the Beloved. The Beloved is not something out there — it is the essence of your true nature, and you do fall into it because it resides deep within you.
This short Shadow Contemplation is from my studies of The Gene Keys by Richard Rudd. See the book for a more in-depth contemplation.